by Anne Summers
It was understandable that the bureaucracy might be nervous about someone joining its ranks who had so recently worked as a journalist. The upgrading of the Office to a division meant its head would have a Top Secret security clearance. Would she be tempted to share cabinet documents with her old mates in the Press Gallery? That thought had not occurred to me. I was there to fight for women’s policy, not to play risky games with former colleagues back in the Gallery. But the public service clearly had a problem with me and whatever its reasoning—I was never told—I did not get the job.
It was not yet public but the panel had decided to give the position to Deborah McCulloch who, on paper at least, was far more qualified than me. In 1976 Deborah had been appointed the first women’s adviser to the South Australian Premier, Don Dunstan. I was surprised to learn she had applied for the Canberra job, because she had retreated to a very radical feminism and not been involved in government for some years now, but it was hard to argue with her selection. Despite Susan Ryan’s encouragement, there was absolutely no guarantee that I would get the job. It was a public service appointment after all, and a high-level one. But I had expected that if I were passed over, it would be for a safer candidate, someone with current public service credentials. Who would have thought that this selection committee would opt for a radical feminist with no background in Canberra or the public service?
It was going to be profoundly embarrassing for me because the fact I had applied had been leaked to a newspaper. There was also a rather excruciating personal connection: Deborah had lived, and had a child, with John Summers from whom I had separated in 1970 but to whom I was technically still married. Deborah’s appointment would be awkward for me, but she and John were no longer living together so it would have no bearing on the ongoing casual friendship I maintained with him. But there was nothing I could do. Or so I thought. It turned out, however, that Susan Ryan was not happy with the outcome. She had wanted someone with a thorough understanding of how Canberra worked, someone who, in her judgement, was enough of a pragmatist to deal with what was likely to be a complicated relationship between the women’s movement and the bureaucracy. She also wanted someone who would have the confidence of the Prime Minister. Before I applied, I had sought a meeting with Bob Hawke and asked him if he saw any impediments to my going for the job. I was trying to find out if he had a preferred candidate. No, it turned out. Peter Barron, one of his political advisers, from the muscular NSW Right of the ALP, had had a robust conversation with me about whether I intended to cause any problems for the government if I got the job. Good practice for what lay ahead if I was successful, I told myself at the time.
Ryan decided to push back. I don’t know exactly what she did, but I do know this: someone spoke to Yeend, the all-powerful Secretary of PM&C and the nation’s most renowned mandarin, and he spoke to Peter Wilenski, the former Whitlam staffer who went on to have a distinguished public service, academic and diplomatic career and who had been recently installed as the head of the Public Service Board (now the Public Service Commission). In early November I got a call: I had the job.
I was relieved. I was pleased. But I was also nervous. Would I have zero credibility with the department now that my appointment was clearly the result of political interference? I did not feel guilty about Deborah because I sincerely believed that I could do a better job and, to her immense credit, she was very gracious about it all. She did not appear to bear me any grudge and subsequently generously gave me public support a couple of times. Although there was a small item about what happened in The Bulletin, the rest of the media did not pick it up. It was a good political story, the kind of item the Press Gallery would usually pounce on: political interference in the appointment of a senior public servant. I soon came to understand, with some anger and a great deal of bitterness, that the press had zero interest in anything to do with women’s policy. It was true then and it is still true today. The media exhibits an extraordinary myopia in its failure to recognise, and understand, the key role women play in the economy, and how policy to expand women’s opportunities is essentially economic policy and of key relevance to all other arms of policy. But the media do not get that. And they are not the only ones. This was to be my key challenge as I took over running OSW.
The media was interested in my appointment—not the political story behind it, but the fact that one of its own had defected to such a high level in the bureaucracy. Every newspaper reported it, some of them interviewed me and there were some profiles, including in some unexpected places. Perhaps it was not surprising for Woman’s Day to be interested in the new public face of women’s advice to the Prime Minister, but I was astonished when Vogue magazine did a comprehensive and very friendly profile, written by Marion von Adlerstein, and accompanied by several stunningly glamorous photos. I had professional hair and makeup for the first time, and the magazine obtained a series of outfits by Australian designers for me to wear during the photo-shoot. That was probably the moment when I realised that fashion and feminism could be friends. I needed to look good in my job. I was the public face of women and I was representing the government, sometimes the Prime Minister himself. I could not look like a dag. I was also now able to feel more confident in my clothes because I had a brand new body. The year before I had had surgery to reduce the size of my breasts. I had always been embarrassed by how big they were. I could never look elegant: my blouses were always busting open, the tops of outfits strained unfashionably across my chest and, perhaps worst of all, it was uncomfortable. My shoulders were always sore from the permanent groove marks of my bra struggling to hold up its weighty burden. I could not run. Two weeks in Melbourne changed that. The surgery transformed me to a size 36C. It was unbelievably painful and the recovery was longer than I had expected but when I was finally able to remove the bandages and raise my arms above my head, I saw in the mirror breasts that sat up—not quite perkily, I was almost 40 after all—and no longer drooped down towards my waist. They seemed normal in size in relation to the rest of my body, which itself was trimmer too because the surgeon had insisted I lose 10 kilograms before he would undertake the operation. I smiled at the new me. I liked her. I could not wait to chuck out all my sensible old heavy-duty bras and fill my drawers with seriously lacy underwear. For work I mostly wore what would become known as the standard ‘femocrat’ uniform of beige suit, silk blouse and low-heeled pumps. But my suit was by Robert Burton and I also had an array of—for me—unusually elegant frocks by the likes of Weiss and other leading designers, as a result of the introductions from Vogue. I paid for these clothes, of course, but was given discounts, which meant I could afford to buy quite a few outfits. I knew I looked good and this gave me added confidence for the battles that I knew would become part of my daily life, and which I would not have the luxury of losing.
I had had to leave the Fairfax house in Forrest and I’d already given up the company car, so it was urgent that I find a place to live and means of getting around. My house in Yarralumla had tenants, so I looked for something close to work that was low maintenance. The garden at the Fairfax house had been a lot of work. I doubted I’d have time for more than a few pot plants in this new job. I was soon settling into a three-bedroom, two-level apartment in Kingston, overlooking Telopea Park; it had a nice big living area and a small modern kitchen. Perfect. It was just a few blocks from Kings Avenue. I could easily have walked to work, except in Canberra nobody ever walked anywhere. Some people, it was rumoured, even drove their rubbish bins from their back door to the front gate on garbage night. Between living without a car in the US and driving the aged Fairfax Ford Falcon for five years, I had not had to think about cars for a very long time. I am totally uninterested in cars as status symbols; I just wanted something functional and reliable, and I needed it quickly. I’d heard Hondas were good. I asked around, did a bit of research and decided that I wanted a Honda Accord, automatic, four doors, colour silver. I went to the Honda showroom in Braddon and there, on th
e showroom floor, was exactly what I wanted.
‘I’ll take that one,’ I said to the salesman.
He looked at me with utter disgust.
‘I bet you’d take more time choosing a hat.’
Late on the evening of 25 November 1983, I was driving my new car home after a dinner at Charlies restaurant when, just metres from my new home, I was pulled over by the police.
‘Blow into this bag,’ said the officer.
I had already left the Financial Review but had not yet officially started at PM&C although the dinner had been with two women I was thinking of hiring as my deputies. I did not think I had had that much to drink, but I knew the Canberra Times each day published the names of people who had been before the courts for DUI, together with their blood alcohol reading. I could not bear the embarrassment. What would that do to my carefully planned strategy for engaging the department? For keeping the government onside? My reputation would be shredded, I would be a joke and my chances of effecting significant change for women would be over. No, I could not let that happen. I refused.
I did not know then that Refuse Breath Test was a far more serious offence than actually being over the limit. I was immediately arrested, placed in the police car and driven to the main police headquarters in Civic, with another officer following in my car. I was taken into a room where there was a serious-looking apparatus. It was, I was told, the real breathalyser. Still I refused. I also told them I did not want to call a lawyer. It was too late. I spent the night in the cells.
The next morning Peter Crowley, a friend, a senior lawyer at Gallens Crowley and a brother of Mez O’Neill’s, bailed me and I began trying to limit the damage. ‘There but for the grace of God go any of us …’ was Geoff Yeend’s soothing response. In fact, the only nastiness was from the media. The Melbourne Truth ran a story under the headline: ‘Breath test charge for govt libber’ and a journalist rang and said if I didn’t want him to write about my arrest and likely conviction, I had better give him a cabinet submission. ‘Make it a good one he said, ‘preferably Defence’.
I reported this to Yeend. In the end, with the aid of bi-partisan character references from Susan Ryan, my new boss, and John Howard, the former Treasurer, who I had to assure that this was in no way usual behaviour on my part, no conviction was recorded and, thanks to the gracious way Yeend responded, no lasting consequences for me or the Office.
I went into OSW determined to be effective, and that meant being pragmatic. I was going to make them—the government, the department, the rest of the public service—take women’s policy seriously. One way to set ourselves up as winners, I instinctively knew, was to unsettle the preconceptions everyone had about us. Surprise them. Do the unexpected.
So my first hire was a man. Michael Roche was on the staff of John Dawkins, the Minister for Finance, and had been economics advisor to Bill Hayden when he was Leader of the Opposition. Michael brought economics heft and, coming from Parliament House, he knew the political game. Getting him was a great coup for me and his appointment was a signal, to the Office and to the department, especially to Ed Visbord, that I intended to build-up our skills in economics, taxation and social policy. The government was working on an Accord with the trade unions to contain wages via a boost to non-wage benefits, which meant that targeted social policy was going to be a key area. My second hire was Mary Ann O’Loughlin from the Social Policy Research Unit at the University of New South Wales. We had known each other for some years and I knew she was an effective player as well as having top-rate policy credentials. Mary Ann was also fun to be around. She bubbled over with energy, had a wicked sense of humour, and was utterly fearless when it came to doing what we agreed was needed to advance the status of women. I hoped to recruit more like her. OSW tended to be a dour place and I wanted to lift the mood, make it an exciting place, a policy hub, a place that attracted talent from inside and beyond the bureaucracy.
OSW was coming in from the welfare policy ghetto where too many people thought we belonged. With these two highly qualified experts in place, the Office was superbly equipped to design a range of social and economic policies. We were going to be part of the main game. It was no secret that PM&C was less than thrilled at being required to house a women’s policy unit alongside its central (and, in its view, far more important) policy coordination responsibilities. They did not want to have to take the ‘women’s view’ into account when advising the Prime Minister. But I intended to shake up their—and everyone else’s—preconceptions of what the ‘women’s view’ was. And it worked. Within a year we were transferred from the Justice area, presided over by Alan Rose, to Ed Visbord’s economic domain.
I signalled to PM&C that I intended to work with, not against, them by asking Yeend to assign me a senior person to guide me through the job. I knew nothing about how the bureaucracy worked, and rather than fake it or rely on advice from OSW staff who themselves were newcomers to the department, I decided to ask for help. Paula Rush, a senior officer and a PM&C native who understood the place better than most, was given the job. She was able and energetic and did not share the general PM&C view that we were intruders. She very quickly showed me the essentials and guided me through all kinds of minefields, including an early intervention that saved me some embarrassment.
After cabinet meetings, the submissions we had had any involvement in drafting would be returned to us. A couple of times in the early days, Bob Hawke had written little notes to me in the margins of these official documents.
Nice, I’d thought. I put them in my filing cabinet, in a folder that I intended to take home to place with my personal papers.
‘Do you have any returned Cabsubs?’ Paula asked me one day. I told her where they were. She gave me one of her looks.
‘Those are not personal papers, Anne. They have to go to the National Archives.’
‘Can I make a photocopy of the pages with the PM’s notes to me?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘They are highly confidential documents and all copies are numbered and have to be accounted for.’
That was how Paula had known where to look for the missing subs. And, rather than use it against me, as some people might have, she saved me from an innocent but very serious mistake.
The work of OSW was astonishingly broad in scope. We had to be across almost every area of policy in order to evaluate submissions to cabinet from other departments. We felt we need not worry too much about employment policy which was in the capable hands of Jenni Neary, who headed the Women’s Bureau, the body established by Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies in 1963 to monitor trends in women’s employment and, especially, equal pay. But we had to keep an eye on virtually everything else. All ministers, which in practice meant their departments, were required to fill in the box on the front of cabinet submissions that asked for the ‘Impact on Women’ of the policy being proposed. Many departments, either from ignorance, laziness or just sheer recalcitrance, opted to write ‘Nil’. Our job at OSW was to get around the bureaucracy and persuade them, in the nicest possible way, that there were very few government policies that did not impact one way or another, negatively or positively, on at least some groups of women. The government wanted this information to take into consideration when making decisions. Women’s desks were being established in most departments to help inform senior officers and policy makers to figure these things out for themselves, rather than rely on the OSW ‘scolds’—as I worried we were becoming known as—to be always having to state what we thought was the bleeding obvious. But of course, to most people, it wasn’t.
We had some successes: getting the Department of Transport to create separate baby change rooms at airports, rather than locate these in the women’s toilets. We got the Department of Capital Territory to recognise that the proximity of car parks to shopping centres was an issue for women with prams or heavy shopping. But other departments viewed us as an irritating intrusion into what they regarded as their business. We asked Defence if they planned
to have married quarters at their proposed new Air Force base in the remote location of Tindall, near Katherine in the Northern Territory? No, they did not. So are you planning brothels? They were affronted. We pointed out the obvious. The ‘impact on women’ comment required a feminist framing of the issues, and entailed having both information and perspective. This did not come naturally to most departments and some, like the Department of Defence, saw absolutely no reason why it should even try. I learned this in my role as chair of an IDC—which I quickly learned stood for Interdepartmental Committee—that had the job of reviewing some 17,000 job categories in the military and deciding which were ‘combat’ or ‘combat-related’. The recently enacted Sex Discrimination Act (SDA) exempted Defence from having to employ women in jobs in either category. The Defence officials turned up to meetings in full military uniforms, no doubt designed both to impress and intimidate me, and they fought for every single designation to be exempt from having to employ women. I found myself fighting for the right of women to be cooks in the army but that was disallowed, because such jobs were—or could be—‘combat-related’. By the time we had finished, I was convinced that women would now be eligible for fewer jobs than they had had in the separate women’s services that were abolished as a result of the SDA, and women integrated into the mainstream military. I was on other IDCs—on Nurse Education, the Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) Task Force, and the Child Care Steering Group—and I found them hard going. I was not used to the aggression and the competitiveness that seemed to be the bureaucracy’s modus operandi, and too often I felt the burr of hostility from those around the table who made it clear that what we were doing was taking them away from more important work.