The Wife Drought

by Annabel Crabb

  When I am home, I will be on the phone pretty much the entire time. When I’m a minister, I will be unbelievably busy. When I’m not a minister, I will be resentful and paranoid. Oh, and the odds are that at some point in my political career, Michelle Grattan will phone while we’re actually doing it.

  The political spouse’s job is a tricky one, but there always seem to be women who are up to the challenge: men have been combining political careers with family since representative democracy’s year dot, and things show no signs of slowing down.

  Tanya Plibersek has had three children while serving as a federal MP, and is generally viewed as something of a phenomenon. Christopher Pyne has had four kids during his career, and it’s barely mentioned. The difference? Pyne has a wife, Carolyn, who not only raises the children largely single-handed but also works hard to insulate their lives from the madness of their father’s job.

  ‘I don’t want their lives defined by their father,’ Carolyn Pyne says. ‘We don’t have the TV on during the week. We don’t watch Q&A. There was something on during The Project one week – Felix had turned the TV on and this guy did a parody of Christopher. Aurelia, our six-year-old, just burst into tears.

  ‘We prefer not to take Christopher anywhere! People will come up to him and say, “I see you’re with your family and probably want some privacy, but …” and then they just talk to him anyway. It’s hard on the children.’

  There’s another dimension to political families, too: what happens when a parent who has been absent all week being – say – a minister, with staff scrambling to his every instruction, comes home?

  ‘Ah, the re-entry issue.’ Carolyn Pyne laughs. ‘He’ll come home with his 1950s book of parenting, and ask “Why aren’t you doing this?” “Why aren’t you loving me?” “Why aren’t you doing more homework?” And Eleanor Pyne, who’s nearly fourteen, will roll her eyes and say “How long is he here for?”

  ‘It’s hard for him, because he comes back to re-establish his place in the family and, of course, we’ve been here all the time, getting along without him.’

  Politicians – especially the very successful ones – run to a schedule with which no normal household can practically keep pace. ‘Christopher’s up really early and he just goes all day long. He never stops. He goes at 100 miles per hour, every day, every weekend,’ says Carolyn. ‘Just the talking! Sometimes, particularly in the lead-up to an election, he’ll talk from 5 am until eleven o’clock at night. Political spouses often feel they are married part-time, but on the other hand, he’s so full-on that if he was here 24/7, we’d be in danger of going insane.’

  Carolyn’s personal sanity provisions include a return to university study, and relentless teasing of her husband, whom she describes as ‘easy to laugh with … and at’. After the 2014 Budget, amid a groundswell of student protest at her husband, she was among the first wave of students due to graduate in the newly straitened tertiary environment.

  ‘I won’t let him come to my ceremony. He said he was going to come disguised as Cyrano de Bergerac and hide in the wings, but I absolutely refused. I’m not being mean to him, but I hate being the centre of attention. I got two tickets to the ceremony and I’m taking the twins. It’s about me that day, not about him. He said “But I’ll have a police escort! I’ll be fine!” I said, “It’s not about you. I worked really hard, and now I just want something for myself.”’

  Political ‘wives’ are largely invisible, but they are indispensable to the political process, and this is something that begins long before the candidate gets anywhere near Canberra. It begins with preselection.

  The degree of difficulty involved in getting preselection as a candidate for a major party ranges from tricky to diabolically difficult, depending on which seat you’re going for. If you’re contesting a seat your party deems as unwinnable, especially in a time of rampant team despair, it can be refreshingly easy. If you’re after a safe seat in a party that is in Government or about to be, you are almost certainly in for a long and potentially bruising campaign. It’s like trying to get a seat on the ferry in a storm. Anyone can get a wet seat. But getting a dry one involves foresight, early arrival, and sharp elbows.

  Things you can do that might help you get preselection for a nice safe seat include, but are not limited to: buying a house in the electorate. Living with your mother in the electorate, at a pinch. Having a photogenic family with no obvious tattoos, unfortunate political opinions, demanding careers of their own, or substance dependencies. Going to every tedious meeting and chook raffle your branch coughs up for years on end, starting well before the incumbent has developed the faintest impulse towards either gracious retirement or career-ending indiscretion. Becoming a person of influence in the party, either by working for a union or for an existing politician and establishing yourself – via a complicated series of social exchanges involving late nights, duck pancakes and travel to obscure policy conferences – at the centre of an existing power structure. Being a famous athlete, rock star or existing public figure.

  The above-mentioned capers are not for everyone. They suit thrusting young men and women with no family commitments, or people with extremely understanding spouses who are prepared to look after things at home while the candidate is out late leafleting in deep suburbia. They often do not suit women who have working husbands and children and who are trying to do several things at once.

  Karen Andrews, the former engineer and IR consultant who won the safe conservative Queensland seat of McPherson for the Liberal National Party in the 2010 election, started her campaign for preselection several years earlier. ‘It’s like a job in itself,’ she says of the preselection process. ‘In our party, to get preselected you need to have a majority of votes from eligible members who live in the electorate. It does take time, because you need to be well-known to the members, and you need a good level of support so that when the preselection comes around they will actually come out and vote for you. Party members do not appreciate the blow-ins, so you need to do a lot of work in advance.’

  For several years, Andrews immersed herself in party work, organising party meetings and fundraisers and attending countless local events, and working the phones to party members whenever she had time. Her husband, Chris, with whom she ran an industrial relations consultancy, was happy to support her; she had carried a heavier load at home while he completed a doctorate, and they had agreed that it was her turn.

  But when the preselection happened – and it was a contested one, as you would expect in a safe seat – the couple’s three young daughters, then aged seven, ten and fifteen, did become an issue. ‘I was really surprised by the strength of some of the opinions that were put to me,’ Andrews recalls.

  ‘I only had one comment to the effect that “we really need a man for the job”, and that was out of a couple of hundred people, but then there was some other feedback about my role as a mother,’ she says. ‘There was an email, for instance, from a preselector who wrote to tell me that he would never allow his own wife to leave their children at such a young age. I didn’t reply, as I didn’t think there would be much point. But I must say I was taken aback that someone would put that in an email, and then send it. I mean, it was clearly a considered view.’

  Political career planning is necessarily a dicey affair. Winning preselection is one hurdle; winning the seat itself is the next. Much can go wrong. The funniest federal elections are the ones where fortunes change considerably between preselection season and election day, and a high electoral tide brings all sorts of strange fish flapping onto the shore. The Howard landslide of 1996 was one of those. A good chunk of the preselections had been done back when Alexander Downer was leader the previous year, and everyone was still politely assuming that Downer had a better chance of being made Pope than prime minister. When the 1996 election went resoundingly the Coalition’s way, there were some extremely surprised new MPs. Coalminer Paul Marek, for instance, having been selected by the Liberal Party to contest
a safe Labor Queensland seat, disappeared back down the mines and had to be hunted down days after the election to receive the news he had achieved a 6.9 per cent swing and was the new Member for Capricornia.

  In 1997, industrial officer Anna Burke was preselected by the Labor Party to contest the suburban Melbourne seat of Chisholm. There wasn’t much competition for the preselection; Chisholm was held by the high-profile health minister Michael Wooldridge. ‘It’s all right,’ Burke told her husband, Stephen Burgess. ‘I can’t win!’

  ‘I think it’s fair to say that her noble ambition was to knock a couple of per cent off his margin and make him really sweat for it,’ remembers Burgess. But then Wooldridge leapfrogged to the safer seat of Casey, and all of a sudden Anna Burke was a chance.

  She won the seat. The couple’s life was rapidly very different, and their plans for a family seriously compromised. Nevertheless, Burke was pregnant within a year of her election. She remembers breaking the news of her impending confinement to her leader, Kim Beazley, and Labor Whip ‘Leaping’ Leo McLeay.

  ‘They just about fell off their chairs,’ she says. ‘I’m not sure any of us realised how difficult it was going to be.’ She took no maternity leave. ‘I came back to Parliament with a six-week-old baby. There’s just so much stuff you don’t anticipate. I wanted to put a cot in my office, for example. “Sorry: OH&S. You can’t have a cot.” Trying to get a capsule into a Comcar. Going to a committee hearing in Sydney and being told: “You can just hold the baby in your lap.”’

  ‘We just sort of played the cards we were dealt,’ says Anna’s husband Stephen, who was an intensive care ambulance paramedic. He quickly realised that his shift work and her regular absences in Canberra were not going to add up to a manageable life. He applied to his employer for parental leave, and received a hostile response. ‘I was the first bloke who had ever asked for it,’ he explains. ‘We moved into a protracted … well, negotiation would be a polite way to describe it. They insisted that the reference in the agreement to “parental leave” actually meant “maternity leave” and was only available to women. Intensive care paramedics weren’t exactly thick on the ground and I guess they didn’t want to open that Pandora’s box … what if all sorts of other blokes wanted to do it too?’

  After some sustained pressure, Stephen got his year’s leave. ‘All I had to do in the end was rattle the sabre … I didn’t have to do anything formal. Just this sort of war of attrition of correspondence, and meetings where I’d pull out the Macquarie Dictionary and check the definition of the word “parental”.’

  During his leave, Stephen travelled with baby Maddie to Canberra, where Anna was ‘like the sun in the solar system, and we were sort of in her orbit’.

  ‘I got on first-name terms with the switchboard staff. They’d page her, and she’d whip back to R296 from wherever she was, she’d feed and then Maddie would sleep, or I’d take her for a walk. In some ways, it wasn’t hard at all because MPs are well looked-after in the workplace. They’re well-paid, they have an office, they’re in charge in that office and their diaries are their own to manage. It’s like being a franchisee.’

  The difficulties Burke had as a parliamentary mother are really only due to one factor: she was only the second woman to give birth while serving as a member of the House of Representatives. Only the second, in nearly a century of federation, a period in which countless men sired countless children while working as MPs and ministers.

  Ros Kelly was the first, in 1983. Because Kelly was the Member for Canberra, she didn’t have the prohibitive travel barriers that still make the whole motherhood-and-parliament deal so tricky for her successors. But she didn’t have a ‘wife’ either; her husband was former child star, footballer, senior treasury official and then super-banker David Morgan, who had a few irons in the fire himself.

  Kelly went back to work less than a week after leaving hospital. One of her parliamentary colleagues, Bruce Goodluck – the Liberal Member for Franklin, and himself the father of five daughters – opened the batting by saying publicly that she should have stayed home longer.

  ‘Her husband’s got a good job and I’m sure Parliament would be only too happy to give her maternity leave,’ he said. ‘If children are put into child-minding centres from birth, God help us. Who wants the socialisation of babies?’1

  During the treasurer’s budget speech that year, Kelly left the chamber briefly. History does not record exactly why; perhaps it was to feed her baby, or perhaps it was to do the sorts of things that MPs leave the chamber for hundreds of times a day, but Goodluck chanted ‘Where’s Ros? Where’s Ros?’ until she returned.2

  (Mr Goodluck, whose 18-year stint in the House of Representatives appears to have been complicated neither by formal paternity leave nor – indeed – higher duty of any kind, is best known for an incident in November 1994, in which he appeared briefly in the chamber wearing a chicken suit. Questioned many years later, he confirmed that he had forgotten exactly what the issue was at the time.)

  For her part, Kelly explained that she was simply trying to balance her responsibilities as a parent and a public representative. ‘… I’ve got a responsibility to my child and myself too, and I think I’ll be a much better mother through being happy with the job that I’m doing.’3

  A rash of births has since swelled the ranks of parliamentary new mothers to the point where you can no longer count them on your fingers, and now need to remove your shoes as well.

  Those who do have babies in office tend to have a very different experience from their new-father colleagues, no matter how supportive their spouses.

  For one thing, there is a lot less automatic acceptance of a mother who leaves her children for a third of the year to attend Parliament in Canberra than there is of the time-honoured formula in which it is the parliamentary dad who does the scarpering.

  The new fathers in Parliament fly under the radar; they might have a cigar with friends when the happy event occurs, but they hardly ever miss a beat at work, and the lovely little bundle generally only materialises in Canberra if there is a corresponding event at which its mother is also required. Joe Hockey was the first minister to take paternity leave when his son Xavier was born in 2005; a move of which, he recalls, Prime Minister John Howard approved because ‘it made him look modern’!

  But paternity leave for men in Parliament remains rare, and short.

  In Hockey’s case, his wife Melissa Babbage juggled three children and a demanding job as Deutsche Bank’s head of global finance during his absences, with the aid of family and a battalion of nannies.

  Carolyn Pyne, who has been married to Christopher for twenty years, doesn’t get to Canberra much to socialise with other spouses; just getting there is an endeavour.

  ‘I remember bringing the children to Canberra when Aurelia (the youngest) was a newborn,’ she says. ‘I had Aurelia strapped to me in the papoose and the other three had all had cereal with that UHT milk and, as we landed in Canberra, they all started vomiting at once. It was unbelievable. You know those cloth things velcroed on the back of the seats? I was even grabbing those to try and clean the kids up. Eventually, it turned out the father of one of our babysitters was up the back of the plane, and he came to the rescue and helped me get them all off the plane.’

  Tanya Plibersek has had three babies in Parliament and never had more than two weeks off. She also breastfed all three until they were twelve months old. Travelling back and forth between Sydney and Canberra myself, I would often see her boarding flights with baby Louis in a sling. I know the mechanics of how she probably did it, but still – my imagination blanches at the equation. One baby, two siblings, one Cabinet job. Unbelievable. Now, it’s good to have extraordinary people in Parliament; that’s the idea, and a truly extraordinary person in Parliament is an exhilarating thing to see. But surely it’s a sign of trouble that a woman can be extraordinary for doing something that wouldn’t rate so much as a footnote in the CV of any comparable man. ‘Personal:
Raised three children with the help of a loving spouse.’ Yawn.

  Plibersek’s view is that standards are different for women. ‘It’s a practical advantage for men to have children; in politics, you’re regarded as more rounded if you have kids,’ she says.

  ‘There’s more ambivalence about women with children. There’s a lot of people who regard it positively, but for every person who feels that way, there’s someone else saying, “How could you leave your children, you must be a heartless automaton”.’

  Plibersek herself has been on the receiving end of all kinds of feedback; some, from women who had been anxious about taking on extra work because of their children but view Plibersek as an inspiration, are grateful notes of thanks. But of the others – and the deputy Labor leader is clearly emotional about these, as she declines to describe them – some are very hurtful indeed. Plibersek’s husband, Michael Coutts-Trotter, is a senior state bureaucrat who has headed the departments of education and finance, for successive NSW governments, of either hue.

  Does she envy her male political colleagues, who are able to do their jobs without being accused of neglecting their children?

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Having a really equal relationship is a much greater recipe for happiness than a relationship where one person gets to pursue their professional dream and the other person gets to support that dream. We try to support each other in what we want to do professionally, and share what we do at home. One of the benefits is being able to talk to someone who actually understands exactly what’s involved – “I’m going to the Expenditure Review Committee tomorrow.” “Oh. Okay. You’ll need to be left alone with your papers tonight.” I think you understand the pressure on each other.’