by Anne Summers
I had a very grand plan and I knew exactly who could help me bring it off: the team who had delivered the Arts for Labor concert at the State Theatre in Sydney, less than a month earlier. Most of them were showbiz people, and not only did they know exactly what was needed, but they were very motivated: Keating’s victory had invigorated the whole sector. They knew now that they had a future and they were more than happy to help pay tribute to the man who would deliver it. Roger Foley agreed to dress and light the room, and someone persuaded Yothu Yindi, the Indigenous band led by Mandawuy Yunupingu, that was the hottest group in Australia at the time, to perform for free.
With the physical arrangements in these capable hands, there was nothing for me to do on the day, which was just as well because Keating was finalising the new cabinet that afternoon and I was determined to have my say about what happened with the women’s portfolio. It had to be in cabinet, I argued forcefully to Don Russell, to avoid the absurd and humiliating current situation where OSW staff members had access to cabinet documents—such as the budget—they could not show their minister because she was not in cabinet. There was currently just one woman in cabinet, Ros Kelly, and I was dead-set against her getting the job for the simple reason she had never shown any interest in women’s issues. I could not see her as the kind of advocate who would ensure the extraordinary election promises became policy and were faithfully implemented. Keating agreed, according to Don Watson’s account of what happened, that Kelly lacked the ‘gravitas’ for the job.20 The solution was unusual but, to me, obvious. Keating was considering promoting the talented Bob McMullan, a former ALP National Secretary who was now a senator from the ACT. McMullan was unaligned which meant he missed out on promotion in a factional deal. The only way to do it would be to expand the cabinet to nineteen members, something which both Keating and Don Russell were reluctant to do, but nor were they willing to remove an existing cabinet minister, so they had to give way. McMullan was summonsed, and Don Watson and I had the job of telling him he was being promoted and would have the portfolios of Administrative Services, Arts and Women. To my absolutely astonishment, and then rage, he said he’d take Arts and Admin Services, but not Women.
‘This is not a smorgasbord, mate,’ I barely stopped myself from saying.
McMullan argued it would be ‘a political mistake’ to put a man in charge of women’s policy. I countered by saying there were respected precedents: Bob Ellicott and Tom McVeigh had both held the portfolio, which was then located in Home Affairs, during the Fraser years. But while I was trying to make the political argument that the portfolio needed the status someone credible like McMullan would bring to it, I was called to the phone where disastrous news awaited me.
The unions in Parliament House were demanding they be paid for the evening’s event. They would not actually be working because Roger Foley’s team of volunteers was doing all the big electrical and other jobs involved in lighting the room, and the band’s roadies would manage the instruments on stage. The in-house catering and wait staff were, of course, on the job and would be paid their usual rates, but I was being held hostage by union rules that insisted the electricians and some other technicians be paid for work being done on their site.
That evening Paul and Annita walked into the candle-lit room, packed with more than 600 people from all around the country, to the music of ‘The Jupiter Suite’ from Gustav Holst’s The Planets. It was exactly what I’d hoped for: stirring and emotional, glamorous and celebratory. The Great Hall had never looked so magical, but I was in no mood to party. McMullan had held his ground. He was in cabinet, but women’s policy was not. I had the Parliament House unions’ bill to contend with and now, I was discovering, although the Yothu Yindi band members were ‘free’, their roadies and other crew were not. I’d spent an awful hour on the phone to the ALP that afternoon, begging for money. They had been against the dinner from the outset, and even though Bob Hogg was seated at the top table, next to the Prime Minister, he was far from happy. Some MPs present attacked the event, from the safety of several decades worth of hindsight, as ‘too much self-glorification’.21 Most of those present, however, laughed and revelled, drank and danced. Keating spoke of ‘the great Australian democracy’ his party would deliver, and especially thanked the Arts community ‘who stood up and were counted’. He reached out to Hogg and to Bob Hawke, acknowledging the previous election victories that had allowed his own. Hawke stood and waved as he absorbed the adulation of the crowd. Later, a Sunday Telegraph gossip item commented that Paul Keating ‘stole the show … dancing to “Achy Breaky Heart”’.22 While the True Believers partied into the night, I sat on the floor at the back of the room, sobbing with humiliation and rage. Every so often, someone would tap me on the shoulder and ask me to approve ‘another bottle of Bundy for the band’. The final bill for the evening was $35,000, which the ALP had to pick up. Every account of that evening blames me for hubris and for overspending. Even 23 years later, in 2016, a new book about Keating felt it necessary to point to my ‘misjudgement’ for thinking the ALP was entitled to celebrate an astonishing and unexpected victory.23
In late April I finally left the office. I had been there for eleven months. Despite the awfulness of the victory dinner, I was in something like a state of euphoria. Keating had been re-elected and we had achieved the promise of some important and, I was sure, lasting policy changes for women. I was still angry about McMullan’s cowardice, meaning women’s policy was not in cabinet, but I was confident that Keating, with the support of Mary Ann O’Loughlin, would steer them through. Keating, the economic hardhead, the man who held the Press Gallery in the palm of his hand, who influenced, even dictated, the thinking of the major chroniclers of the age, had now signed-off on what he would later call ‘a landmark change’.24 Using childcare policy to encourage women into the workforce was ‘something which we’d never had before, even though the Government extended childcare opportunities with childcare places’ and it signalled that, finally, women’s policy was at the big table.
My farewell dinner was at the National Gallery, in a private room with Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles looking over us. Or so I thought. It turned out to be a copy of the famous and controversial painting that had been acquired by the Whitlam government, and which was still a forceful reminder that it was Labor governments and Labor Prime Ministers who understood how essential the arts were to a society’s soul and its confidence in itself. In my farewell speech I thanked Paul Keating for allowing us to ‘kick a few goals’ by ‘taking policy to a new level’, with the childcare rebate, and the cashing out of the DSR and I announced that although I was leaving the PMO, I was staying in the country. Three events had influenced my decision, I told my about-to-be-former colleagues: the Arts for Labor event at the State Theatre; the election-eve arts auction at the Bellevue Hotel, where the generosity and optimism of Sydney’s arts world was once again on display; and the staff dinner later that night where I’d realised that, if Keating won, the country was in for an exhilarating time.
With Keating returned to power, we had a leader who understood our country’s past and present, and how we needed to fit into the region. He knew that in order to mature, Australia had to come to terms with its past, and he believed fervently that the artistic soul of a country was as much a part of who we were as our economy and our politics. It was going to be a dramatic time in Australian history, perhaps the most significant era since white settlement. We were going to become a Republic. It was going to be bigger than even the Whitlam era had been, and I wanted to be part of it. It had not been easy to sell Chip on the idea of Keating’s Australia versus Bill Clinton’s USA. After twelve years of Republican rule, the Democrats were finally back in the White House. Bill Clinton was a young modern President whose wife, Hillary, was his equal, and whose administration was going to restore fairness to the country. As a student, Chip had campaigned for Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro; in 1988 he had hoped for a Dukakis victory to wipe away the me
mory of the Reagan years; now, in 1993, he most definitely did not want to miss out on the Clinton era. But, in an act of tremendous love and generosity, he eventually allowed himself to be persuaded and began the far-from-easy process of demonstrating that he met the various requirements to become an Australian resident. Another benefit of the Sex Discrimination Act, I realised gratefully. No discrimination on the basis of marital status meant that the fact we were not married did not prevent Chip from getting a visa. In future years, several of our same-sex couple friends would also be able to become residents and, eventually, citizens because of this far-sighted provision of Australia’s national anti-discrimination laws.
‘An even greater achievement than winning the election is not just the promise of the sort of country that could lure me back,’ I said to Paul Keating that night. ‘Your greatest achievement, as far as I’m concerned, is that you’ve been able to get Chip to come back!’
My farewell present was a framed front cover of the Sydney Morning Herald, signed by the Prime Minister, where a story by Jenna Price reported the pollster AGB McNair as saying 1993 was the first election where the overall female vote for the ALP equalled the male vote.25 Much of the analysis after the election had attributed the victory, at least in part, to Labor’s pitch to women—particularly the childcare policy, the cashing out of the DSR into a home carers’ payment, the extension of Medicare and other health initiatives—and it felt good to have this acknowledged by my colleagues.
Eight months later, Keating launched a new edition of my book Damned Whores and God’s Police. A lot had changed since 1975 when it was first published, and my publishers agreed it was time for a fresh appraisal. I had written a very long new introduction that tried to chronicle and make sense of the changed landscape for women, drawing especially on the differences between Australia and the United States, which I judged to be far less progressive than the country I was once again calling home. I also included what was to become quite a controversial ‘Letter to the Next Generation’, in which I urged young women to pick up the feminist torch. In his speech, Keating praised me for deciding I was now ‘a fervent pragmatist’.
‘Pragmatism is not cynicism,’ he said. ‘It is about learning the lessons of things and seeing how one can advance visions and objectives.’
His entire speech was a master class from the man who had done so much to transform Australia, but his final words totally blew me away, and convinced me that, thanks to him, Australia was set to become a different, better place:
‘We have had a lot of talk in this country in the last year or so about reconciliation between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginal Australians,’ Keating said. ‘The word reconciliation has been used a lot and used with all the meaning that it deserves to be used with. But one of the great reconciliations which is underway now is a reconciliation between men and women and the lives they now lead, with the changed role of women, the changed opportunities of women … and I think men understand that and they are adjusting their view of life and society and opportunity, in terms of the changes which have taken place, and the new reconciliation which is required of it.’
I left the launch for a literary lunch where I was to talk about the book and where, with faltering voice, I told the audience that the Prime Minister of Australia had just made the profound observation that what was now needed in this country was reconciliation between women and men.
It was 1994 and it felt to me as if, finally, we were on our way.
CHAPTER TEN
THE GETTING OF ANGER
In May 1993 I was back at Fairfax. This time as editor of Good Weekend, the magazine inserted in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age each Saturday and reaching around one million readers. The call had come from David Hickie, my partner in crime-writing from the National Times, who had just been appointed editor of the Herald. Conrad Black, the Canadian newspaper publisher, had acquired a controlling stake in Fairfax after it went into receivership following Young Warwick’s disastrous takeover bid back in the late 1980s. The new editorial director was Michael Hoy, who’d been brought in from News Ltd, and he had agreed to a reporting structure where I would answer directly to him rather than, as previous editors had, to the editor of the Herald. Both Hickie and Alan Kohler, editor of the Age, signed-off on my appointment. But I started the job to something less than the widespread approval of my peers. Newspaper journalists still looked down on magazines as being lightweight, serving up entertainment, not news, and therefore not to be taken seriously. It was an argument that was fast losing validity as newspapers began using more colour in their news pages and magazines such as Good Weekend published articles and, especially, well-observed profiles of a depth and quality of writing that harried daily journalists seldom had time to deliver. I was determined to draw on my New York magazine experience to further improve the range and quality of our journalism, accompanied by great art direction. But few people cared about my lofty ambitions. Most did not take Good Weekend seriously. It wasn’t news, it wasn’t ‘real’ journalism; it was derisively described as a ‘supplement’. Our offices, a few blocks away from the Jones Street headquarters of Fairfax, were mockingly referred to as Palm Beach. This was a reference to the leisurely hours supposedly worked by the six staff writers, whose deadlines admittedly were less stressful than those of daily journalists. Hardly anyone took my appointment at face value. People searched for ploys or hidden agendas. There was speculation that I was being ‘warehoused’ to take over the Herald or some other ‘real’ job. Although I suppose these were meant to be compliments of a kind, I found them pretty insulting. But it was true Good Weekend had not been my first choice. As I was finishing up at the PMO, Paul Keating had offered me the job of Australian Consul-General in New York.
‘Go back to New York and be with Chip,’ he’d said to me.
When I told Chip about Keating’s offer, he was emphatic that I should take it.
‘Imagine,’ he said, only half-joking, ‘living in that Beekman Place apartment.’
The job came with a splendid piece of real estate. We had been there many times, to dinners and receptions hosted both by Chris Hurford, who had been a minister in the Hawke government before his appointment to New York which had just recently ended, and his urbane predecessor John Taylor, who had previously been Secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in Canberra. The Australian government had two apartments in a classic 1930s building in ritzy Beekman Place in New York’s midtown, off 57th Street. Australia’s Ambassador to the United Nations occupied the other, somewhat larger, one. I had never thought of myself as a diplomat but I was very alive to the possibilities of being able to promote Australia in a new and more interesting way. I admired the way Annie Cohen-Solal did the job for France. She had written an acclaimed biography of Jean-Paul Sartre and was now Cultural attaché at the French Consul-General’s office. She was constantly written-up in the New York media for her chic events. Why couldn’t Australia have a similarly alluring presence in New York? Did our representation have to be confined to investment and trade? What if Australia’s rich cultural and artistic offerings were integrated into our story, into the way we sold ourselves? Australian companies such as the Sydney Dance Theatre, Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Circus Oz, and Midnight Oil had all performed while I was living in New York. There was usually a reception afterwards, with a few ‘Aussie-friendly’ local media people invited, but there did not seem to be an aggressive attempt to showcase our art, music and dance. The astounding and enduring success of Australian actors and directors in Hollywood was a tantalising clue that there was more to the country than the lazy stereotypes we used to promote ourselves. I was under no illusion that Australia could hope to match France when it came to cultural offerings, but there was a lot more to us than Paul Hogan’s ‘I’ll slip an extra shrimp on the barbie …’ tourism television advertisement implied. This, like The Thornbirds a decade earlier, projected a country that bore no relation to the lives of most Australians. In fact, i
t was quite misleading. Americans had no idea of the country that had shown itself off to the Prime Minister in March 1993 at the State Theatre. I was excited at the prospect of being able to introduce that Australia, to show that creativity and a thriving economy were not in conflict, in fact could feed off each other. I am sure this was part of Keating’s thinking in suggesting I take on the job.
But it did not happen. I was worried about what would happen at the end of the four years. There was no chance I would be able to stay in the diplomatic world, and it was unlikely that I could go back to journalism after such a political appointment. I look back today sadly, and with amazement, at my decision. Why did I turn down an opportunity that would have been so interesting, and such fun? I know how I rationalised it: at the end of the four years I would be 53, with no job and no prospects. In reality, I think I was fearful that I would be seen as not up to the job, as a token appointment, as not being worthy or capable. It was a stupid and self-loathing way to look at it. Instead, I took the other job on offer, and determined to turn Good Weekend into a must-read powerhouse of Australian journalism. It was a great opportunity, I told myself.