ALSO BY MARGARET SIMONS
Six Square Metres: Reflections from a Small Garden (2015)
Kerry Stokes: Self-Made Man (2013)
Journalism at the Crossroads: Crisis and Opportunity for the Press (2012)
Malcolm Fraser: The Political Memoirs (2010)
The Content Makers: Understanding the Media in Australia (2007)
Faith, Money and Power: What the Religious Revival Means for Politics (2007)
Latham’s World: The New Politics of the Outsiders (2004)
Resurrection in a Bucket: The Rich and Fertile Story of Compost (2004)
The Meeting of the Waters: The Hindmarsh Island Affair (2003)
Fit to Print: Inside the Canberra Press Gallery (1999)
Wheelbarrows, Chooks and Children (1999)
The Truth Teller (1996)
The Ruthless Garden (1993)
Published by Black Inc.,
an imprint of Schwartz Books Pty Ltd
Level 1, 221 Drummond Street
Carlton VIC 3053, Australia
[email protected]
www.blackincbooks.com
Copyright © Margaret Simons 2019
Margaret Simons asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.
9781760640859 (paperback)
9781743821145 (ebook)
Cover design by Akiko Chan
Cover photograph by Kristoffer Paulsen
Author photograph by Dave Tacon
Text design and typesetting by Tristan Main
Index by Kerry Anderson
Internal images reproduced courtesy of: Penny as a child; Francis, Jane, Penny and Toby; Penny Wong class photo, all Penny Wong; Penny Wong and Peter Ker, Scotch College; Penny Wong and family, Sabah Archives; maiden speech, Mark Graham / AAP; Penny Wong and Quentin Bryce; Penny Wong and Kevin Rudd, both Alan Porritt / AAP; Wong in Bali, Glen McCurtayne / Fairfax; Penny, Sophie and Alexandra, Penny Wong / AAP; Julia Gillard and Alexandra, David Mariuz / AAP; Wong in Senate Estimates, Lukas Coch / AAP; Penny Wong and Mathias Cormann, Mick Tsikas / AAP; Wong at Parliament House, South Australia, Morgan Sette / AAP; Wong after postal survey results, Andrew Meares / Fairfax; Penny and Hannah, Russell Millard / AAP; Penny Wong, Anthony Albanese and Bill Shorten, Lukas Coch / AAP; Wong portrait, Tim Bauer.
To Aidan and Willow,
and their generation
CONTENTS
Preface
1Kindred Offspring
2Butterflies and Bullies
3Becoming Labor
4Bolkus Left
5Into the Woods
6Chosen
7A New Voice
8Staying in the Room
9Penny Wong Fails to Save the World (Part 1: Water)
10Penny Wong Fails to Save the World (Part 2: Climate Change)
11A Woman of Government
12Arrival
13A Dangerous Place
Picture section
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
Preface
Penny Wong did not want this book to be written.
I first asked her office if she would cooperate with a biography in 2016. The reply came back firmly in the negative, and the idea was dropped.
I tried again, at the urging of Aviva Tuffield of Black Inc., in late 2017, after the positive result of the same-sex marriage national survey. Again, Penny Wong’s office said that she would not cooperate.
This time, the publisher requested that I go ahead in any case. Partly this was because of the enormous interest in Penny Wong, one of our most fascinating but also most guarded politicians. As well, there was her activism on same-sex marriage – a fundamental social reform. She was increasingly important within Labor – the intellectual leader of the Left faction, and arguably the intellectual leader of the parliamentary party. She was shadow minister for foreign affairs and seemed likely to become minister, at a time of unprecedented difficulty and danger for Australia. There were good reasons to attempt a biography, whether or not she would cooperate.
For almost a year I researched the book without Penny Wong’s cooperation, although many people I approached for interview asked her permission to speak to me, and she did not stand in their way. Penny Wong is private, they told me. She is shy.
There were some exchanges with her staff in which I gave assurances that I would not pursue anyone in her private life who indicated that they did not wish to speak with me. I also made it clear that while there would be some information on her private life in this book, that was not its focus. These discussions continued intermittently throughout the year.
In September 2018, with a large part of the book already drafted, I was invited to her Adelaide office for a meeting to discuss further cooperation. She began by telling me that her hostility to this project might make our dealings difficult. She said she had felt me as ‘a shadow in the corner of my life’ through the previous year. She made it clear that in her view I had done something reprehensible in signing a contract to write this book when I knew she did not want it written. I told her the book was the publisher’s idea, but that I was a willing recruit. I was doing it because I thought she was an important and interesting figure. In response I got the trademark Wong raised eyebrow, and a sceptical half-smile.
She gave me a hard time, while never raising her voice. Nevertheless, that first meeting did turn into a rushed kind of interview, in which I attempted – unsure if we would ever meet again – to pick the eyes out of the many things I wanted to ask her. At the end, she agreed to see me again.
In all, we had six interviews, each of about an hour and a half, between November 2018 and July 2019. Each but the last was in the sterile meeting room of her Adelaide office. The final interview was in an even more sterile meeting room in the Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices in Sydney. Penny Wong is far too smart to allow an unwelcome biographer the gift of an insight into her personal space – what she keeps on her office desk or in her home.
When each interview concluded, it was uncertain whether there would be another. It kept me on my toes. Once we were underway, though, things were easier. For the most part, we got on well. She spoke freely on most matters, and reluctantly and sparingly on her personal life. She declined to answer some questions – for example, on cabinet and shadow cabinet dealings, and actions by her fellow ministers in the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd governments. Any suggestion that I was straying too far into the personal was greeted with the Wong stare and what felt like a drop in the temperature of the room. She was usually in complete control, but at times became tearful or angry. At points, things felt like they were getting bogged down. She would give monosyllabic answers and start asking me questions – trademark characteristics of the media-trained politician. Then, suddenly, there would be a mini-speech: layered, complex and convincing, with not a word misplaced. It was clear she had used the previous moments to compose her thoughts. At those times, it was easy to see why she is renowned for her intellect. Her policy thinking was, at these moments, awesome in the true sense of the word, and of a calibre rarely encountered in political journalism.
The interviews were on the understanding that anything to be attributed to her would be cleared with her office before publication. This did not go entirely smoothly, largely because of delays in the post-election period. However, in the end the changes she requested were few and minor.
Requests to interview her parents and partner, Sophie Allouache, were firmly declined.
There are probably no
advantages politically for Penny Wong in having a biography written now – and potentially some disadvantages. If she is to be foreign minister in a future Labor government, she will be under scrutiny both in Australia and overseas. As Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, she manages relationships between Labor and the minor parties and crossbenchers. Arming others with a detailed biography must be an alarming prospect.
Her reluctance to cooperate, she said to me at that first meeting in 2018, was mainly due to an inherent dislike of the spotlight. She told me she was an introvert. She spoke about how people such as her, who have suffered from prejudice, develop a closely guarded internal life.
In February 2019, there was a partial shift in attitude. She said that shortly before, she had been in a North Adelaide café with one of her daughters, six-year-old Alexandra. They had been on a shoe-buying expedition. Several people had approached her to wish her well, wanting to chat. ‘I guess it’s the demographic that likes me,’ she remarked. After she had talked to her constituents, she apologised to her daughter for the intrusion on their private time. Alexandra responded that Penny should be glad and proud that people wanted to know her.
After that, just a few months before the publisher’s already renegotiated deadline, Penny Wong began to suggest people I should interview. For the first time, her reluctant cooperation became something less grudging.
Earlier, she had given some insight into her deep-seated objections to this project. When the book came out, she said, it would give a version of her that she would have to deal with and live with and which would be accepted as true – and it would not be how she saw herself.
I replied that there was always a gap between public image – how journalists saw people – and self-image. She replied that it would not be only a public image but ‘your version of me’.
That, of course, is entirely correct. I don’t apologise to Penny Wong for this book, but I acknowledge the weight of her objections.
Historian and biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook has remarked that for biographers all choices made in writing are autobiographical. So it might be relevant that I, too, arrived in Adelaide at the age of eight and was bullied at school – though in my case for an English accent rather than because of racism. I went to the University of Adelaide, as a contemporary of Julia Gillard, ten years before Penny Wong. I have Jewish ancestry. While I am not in any real sense Jewish, I was raised with a strong awareness of the great evil of racism.
Wiesen Cook also says that biographers must necessarily believe that it is possible for individuals to influence the political and social forces in society. Otherwise, why devote time and effort to writing a life story?
That belief is another thing shared between this biographer and her subject.
1
KINDRED OFFSPRING
When Penny Wong was twelve, she wrote a poem about a shark. She was a good poet for her age: that year she had two verses in the magazine of Adelaide’s Scotch College – the wealthy private school that she attended on a scholarship.
Wong had arrived in Adelaide from Sabah, Malaysia, in spring 1976, when she was eight. The reason for the move – the break-up of the marriage between her Adelaide-born mother and Chinese-Malaysian father – was traumatic enough. But coming to Australia, it was as though she had moved to another planet – from the embracing, humid warmth of the city of Kota Kinabala, the capital of the state of Sabah, to an ordinary suburban house in Coromandel Valley, in the Adelaide Hills. Even though it was coming on summer, in the driest city in the driest state on the driest continent in the world, Wong often felt cold. ‘Australia smelled dusty. It just looked different and smelled different, and the light was different,’ she has recalled. ‘I remember the first time I jumped into the sea here, and how cold it was … and me thinking, what’s wrong with the sea?’1
In the new year, Penny and her younger brother, Toby, were enrolled at Coromandel Valley Primary School. As they followed their mother across the asphalt to the office to fill out the paperwork, students formed a crowd around them. ‘They were saying “What is she?” and someone said, “She’s Hong Kong-ese” … I realised for the first time that my race was something that other people would notice. That it was an issue.’
Today she is spare of speech when talking about the bullying she experienced at primary school. Partly it is because she doesn’t like to remember how it felt. Partly it’s because ‘I don’t like to repeat words of hate’.
By the time she moved to Scotch College, she had adopted a mantle of toughness. She had navigated the difference between Adelaide and Kota Kinabala, between who she was – a clever, quiet girl with a fiercely guarded internal life – and who she had to be. ‘I did it by trying to be better than the people who were teasing me, so I have no doubt I became much more focused on studying, getting good marks, doing well on the sporting field, those sorts of things. I decided I was going to be better than them, and achieve in this field, and this field, and this field. I was trying to prove that I could succeed no matter what they said to me, and no matter what they thought of me. That I could do well no matter what they threw at me. It wasn’t so much to get people to like me, to become my friend; it was that I wasn’t going to allow them to keep me down.
‘I didn’t become insular. I’ve seen that happen with kids, but that wasn’t my response. I just pretended to be confident, even when I wasn’t. I learned to be steady and still, even when it felt very messy and difficult. You know, to hold yourself steady, even if your reactions are really strong and your emotions confused.’2
And so she wrote about the shark.
Beginning a biography of a politician with an evocation of a shark may seem provocative. The cliché demands we think of predators. That is not the intended implication here. What makes Penny Wong’s childhood poem significant in retrospect is not that her subject is at the top of the food chain, but her admiration for the creature’s strength, its sleekness, the way it is adapted to and moves cleanly through its environment – the way it inspires both fear and respect.
These are the words applied again and again to Wong, both by friends and enemies. She is clever. She can be politically aggressive, and ruthless, though it is rarely, if ever, personal. She is forensic, but also emotional – relatively easily moved to tears and to anger. She is hypervigilant for prejudice, for attempts to demean her, and more generally for persecution of the powerless. She is ‘different’.
The nature of that difference – the nature of the woman behind the carefully curated public image – is one of the questions motivating this biography. Indeed, it is the justification for pursuing the book despite her objections. Penny Wong is now the undisputed intellectual leader of the Left faction of Australia’s alternative government. She is an important friend and ally of the leader, Anthony Albanese. Other contenders for that title are seen as less politically adroit.
She may yet become our foreign minister at the most challenging time in recent decades – arguably in Australia’s history. Until then, she will be shadow foreign minister and leader of Labor in the Senate – the latter role chiefly responsible for managing Labor’s relationships with the Greens and the crossbench when the government doesn’t have the numbers to pass legislation in its own right. Navigating all this is more than a management job. It demands both policy detail and a ‘big picture’, to adapt Paul Keating’s phrase. It requires political aggression, yet also restraint when the national interest demands it. It requires leadership and people skills.
One of Penny Wong’s strongest supporters, Labor factional chief and shadow minister for energy and climate change Mark Butler, says there is ‘nothing Penny cannot do’ – from deep, detailed policy work to the ‘unappealing’ business of machine politics. Hardly anyone doubts her competence.
Some accuse Wong of being overly politically cautious. Her former principal adviser John Olenich counters that given the composition of parliament in 2002, and even now, her very presence is radical. When she was elected a
South Australian senator in 2001, she was the only person of Asian ancestry in parliament other than Senator Tsebin Tchen from Victoria, who was born in China, and Queensland MP Michael Johnson, whose mother was from Hong Kong. There was also a woman who worked in the library, and there were the cleaners. That was it for Asian faces. The newcomer was able to cope, she says, because of her school experiences: ‘The hardest part of it is how you think about it internally, how you manage it inside you. I know I started to learn how to do that at school. In the end, politics isn’t that different from the schoolyard.’3 Olenich, when deciding whether he wanted to devote years of his life to being on her staff, considered that she was one of the first Asians and the first openly gay woman in a representative body, the Parliament of Australia, that in terms of gender and ethnicity was not representative at all. To him and to a generation of other young Labor members, it seemed that she represented a way forward – a reflection of a more modern, inclusive party and nation.
During the research for this biography, it was notable that Wong’s political opponents – members of the Liberal Party interviewed on background – had only positive comments. ‘The smartest person in the parliament,’ said one. ‘Someone you can deal with. She has integrity,’ said another. There was also rueful respect for her savaging of government ministers appearing before Senate committees. Political journalists, too, spoke of her with respect. They saw her as principled, in politics for the ‘right reasons’, and as having exercised good judgement at key moments – for example, in advocating for Kevin Rudd to take Labor to a double-dissolution election over climate-change policy in 2009, advice he did not heed. As one put it, with conscious irony, she satisfies Kipling’s description of ‘a man’: she has the ability to keep her head when all around are losing theirs. Notably, she emerges well from the memoirs of both Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, despite the poison between the two. Perhaps equally telling, the cleaner in charge of ministerial offices at Parliament House remembers Minister Wong always taking the time to talk and ask after her welfare.4
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