It was an interesting time in Australian politics because young Australians were starting to question politicians in a way that had not happened before. The Vietnam War had polarised Australia’s youth, and Gough Whitlam was an inspiring Labor leader. But in the end, for me at least, it was the hold the trade unions had over the Labor Party that was a giant turn-off. The more I thought about Liberal philosophy the more I felt it was the right one. I have always believed, in the bringing up of my children and in all the organisations I’ve been involved with, that the best way to support people is to help them to be self-reliant and independent. At the same time, it’s important to recognise that there are people who will always need the help of others and to them any civil society has a duty. I find phrases like ‘social justice and equity’ quite meaningless platitudes without thought for individuals.
After joining the Central Branch of the Liberal Party, Leigh quickly became branch president. He also became chairman of the Party’s health committee and I was on the education and arts committees. We threw ourselves into every campaign for state and federal candidates in the Central Brisbane area, which was strong Labor territory. Our greatest triumph was the state election of 1974 when the conservative parties, Liberal and National, won all but 11 seats and our man Harold Lowes won the Labor-held seat of Brisbane. It came as quite a shock to poor Harold, a solicitor, who proceeded to run his electorate out of his legal office in Brisbane’s T&G building. Sarina Russo, who later started one of the country’s most successful training and employment companies, was his secretary. Harold rang me up one day soon after the election and said, ‘Sallyanne, they tell me I have to go to school P and C meetings!’
I said, ‘Yes, Harold, you’re the state member now.’
My first involvement in professional politics came about, like so much else in my life, by accident. In 1975, the Liberal Party health committee had an important motion coming before the state Council in Townsville. Leigh couldn’t go because he was on call, and sent me up instead. I must have been supposed to lobby delegates. The Party leader, Gordon Chalk, invited me to a small lunch, and I sat next to Jim Killen.
Killen, later Sir James, the federal member for Moreton, knew about my role as Queensland editor of the Australian Liberal. He asked me if I’d like to be his research assistant. The Whitlam government had recently decided that each federal member should have one as well as a secretary. I pointed out that I had a young family and wasn’t looking for a job. Jim was the kind of man who having got hold of an idea was not going to let go, and afterwards he kept ringing me up to try to persuade me to take the job. I finally said that I could only do it part-time and Jim’s immortal words were, ‘Give it what you can, dear lady, give it what you can.’ And so I did.
They were rough and earthy years in politics. Party conferences were not the bland and choreographed gatherings they are now. Year after year, a motion of no confidence was moved against Gordon Chalk, later Sir Gordon, state treasurer and the Party leader. It was always defeated but only after loud and noisy debate. There was a trade union element in the Party in the person of Noel Wilson, and he always had a lot to say on the floor of the conference.
At the Townsville lunch, I was both shocked and amused when Gordon Chalk said to Norman Lee, Minister for Transport, ‘Of course, Norm, the only reason I made you a Cabinet minister was so I could look down your wife’s dress.’ His glamorous wife, Dorothy, who was also at the lunch, just laughed. In those days, women usually smiled sweetly at sexist remarks. Nor did Norm think it was casting any aspersions on his capability as a minister, and a good one at that.
I spent three years working with Jim Killen who was always known by his surname. It was a very useful apprenticeship in practical politics, although at the time that was not my intention. At first he was in Opposition, but after the 1975 election that followed the tumultuous dismissal of Gough Whitlam and his government, Killen became Minister for Defence under Malcolm Fraser. My role was vague and varied. Killen was a great parliamentarian, one of the few who spoke without notes and he despised others who spoke with them, and a great orator whenever he gave a speech. I would research and write speeches that he never gave; it was very frustrating. I remember once going to great lengths to prepare a speech to the motor industry, crammed full of facts and figures, not a single one of which he used. Nonetheless, the audience rose to its feet to cheer the speech he did give.
Part of my job was sorting out Killen’s filing cabinets, which were stuffed with all kinds of interesting letters and documents. There were the notes he received across the floor of Parliament from men like Gough Whitlam and Fred Daly, friendships that cut across Party lines. He often used to quote Prime Minister Sir Arthur Fadden – ‘All the best bowlers are not on the one team.’ As a man who loved to go to the races on a Saturday afternoon, Killen had a wide circle of friends from all walks of life. He had a column in the Australian newspaper, which after he became Minister for Defence I would write for him. I knew his language and style. One day he rang me from Canberra and said, ‘Are you sure I didn’t write this? It’s very good.’
To my surprise, what I most enjoyed was the social work aspect of every federal member’s role: the constituents who came with a variety of problems. After Killen was in the ministry, a lot of these would be family problems brought by wives of service personnel and so I had my first taste of the frustration of dealing with government bureaucracy. I was also Killen’s de facto press secretary in Brisbane, although media queries, even from a local paper, were supposed to go through Canberra. It was maddening to explain that the Brisbane Telegraph needed an answer before the lunch deadline, not the day after tomorrow. We had a call one day that the security arrangements needed to be assessed for the minister’s home. This was a concerning proposition. Killen lived in an old wooden Queenslander in Yeronga and his office under the house was hardly the safest place for the defence secrets of the nation. I was able to explain that the guard dog was very fierce.
Actually, I had been checked out myself by national security when Killen became a minister. I was asked to give three character references. Among them I gave Sister Mary St Gabriel of the Mater Hospital, a formidable woman whose brother was a federal member of Parliament and whom I had first met on the day of my engagement. The man from ASIO was invited to tea in the convent, an event of great excitement for the nuns. He asked, ‘Is Mrs Atkinson of good character?’
Apparently Sister Mary St Gabriel drew herself up and said, ‘Sir, she is married to one of our doctors.’
Unexpectedly, one day in 1978 my local alderman, Lex Ord, announced he was not going to stand at the next election, and freinds suggested I should try. The ward was Indooroopilly, such a safe Liberal seat that years before when Clem Jones’s Labor team had swept to victory in Brisbane, it was the only ward that did not vote Labor. I had never thought of running for office, or of local government. When I discussed it with Jim Killen he said, ‘Oh, my dear, looking at life through a municipal drainpipe.’ But I was involved in the local branch of the Liberal Party and people were urging me to have a go. Interestingly, although Lex Ord was one of the no-job-for-a-woman brigade, years later his daughter, Lecki Ord, was to become Lord Mayor of Melbourne.
Even though I hadn’t considered it before, so many threads seemed to be drawing together. There was my newfound passion for Brisbane because of my book, and the discovery that helping people in the minister’s office was very satisfying. The truth was, I knew about municipal drainpipes, too. When the pipe at the top of our hilly street had burst three times I had successfully campaigned to have it fixed. This had given me a sense of real power and achievement, but it also showed me how badly something as simple as a burst pipe could affect daily life.
There was one major snag: I was a woman. At this stage, there were no women sitting in the House of Representatives in Canberra (Elaine Darling, elected in 1980, was to be the first woman from Queensland). There had in fact only been four women elected to the House of
Representatives since Federation and three of them had been one-termers. One, Dame Enid Lyons, had been the widow of a prime minister. So people said, ‘They’ll never give that seat to a woman. It’s too safe.’ One of the arguments used against me was that I was keeping a man out of a job.
Brisbane City Council (BCC) wards were roughly the same size as state government seats. In fact, BCC was like a small state government. It was one of the largest local authorities in the world and it had a unique place in Australian political life. Queensland had done away with its Upper House in 1921, making it the only unicameral state in the Commonwealth, so BCC was the only political entity of sufficient size to act in any way as a check or balance.
Unlike other local authorities in Queensland, Brisbane has always been political. The BCC was established in 1925 as an amalgamation of twenty-odd towns, shires and boards, by a Labor government that naturally assumed it would win the majority on the new Council. But the first mayor, William Jolly, had been a conservative businessman who brought his team with him. Since then the Labor Party has frequently won in Council elections and there has always been a conservative group against them. Until 2012, there had not been an Independent elected to BCC for 60 years. I had a good chuckle when, at my first Local Government Association conference, one of the elderly gentlemen from rural Esk Shire harrumphed, ‘There are no politics in Esk Shire. We’re all National Party.’
In 1975 the Liberal Party had decided to come out of the closet and officially contest the Brisbane Council elections. This move was not without controversy within the Party, some of which lingers still, but it was thought opportune to consolidate its place in the capital city. This was the year when its coalition partner changed its name from the Country Party to the National Party.
I decided to run, and I did it as a man would. I had learned that most women who had stood for local councils, albeit much smaller ones, had done so on a platform of community involvement such as fighting for a local swimming pool. But Brisbane was different. So I did the hard grind of contacting the branch members who would be delegates to the preselection and asking for their votes. I wrote letters and canvassed local issues. I sought the active support of influential Party members, and Ian Prentice, later to be the state member for Toowong and his wife, Jane, who was later elected to the Council and then to federal Parliament – they helped me write my speech for the preselection. There were nine hopefuls on that night in 1978, and in the end it came down to three of us. One was Margaret Hollingsworth, showing that women could indeed make it and the other, whom I only just beat, was Bob Mills. When I was declared the winner Bob immediately offered to be my campaign manager, which I thought was a very generous gesture. And he was to get his turn later, for when I stood down from Indooroopilly to run for the mayoralty I supported Bob as my successor.
Leigh had been supportive of my running, saying I would be focusing on one job rather than several. He was also very involved in the Party as vice-president and chairman of the Brisbane area. Having full-time help in the house meant I could concentrate on running for office. When babysitters were no longer necessary I had a daily housekeeper to do the cooking and housework. (That, by the way, is the second breakthrough moment in parenting – when babysitters are no longer necessary. The first is when your child is out of nappies, the third when your children can drive themselves.)
We ran a very serious campaign in spite of Indooroopilly being a safe seat. I was never one to take anything for granted, and we did everything that had to be done, such as producing brochures and putting up signs and raising money. Friends were wonderfully enthusiastic and supportive. Former journalist colleague Gary Stubbs was in charge of the brochures and even allowed himself and his family to be photographed for them. Female friends rallied around, giving lie to the old saying that women don’t support each other. Lynn Everingham, who was to lead a group of friends through all my campaigns, organised all sorts of functions.
Indooroopilly was a huge ward in area, just under 150 square kilometres and the largest in the Council. There were 23,400 electors on the roll, taking in the populated suburbs of Taringa, Indooroopilly and Kenmore, and the less well settled, like Fig Tree Pocket and farming areas of Brookfield, Moggill and Pullenvale, which were just beginning to be gobbled up by developers.
I’ve always had an aversion to doorknocking, both as the giver and the receiver. To have a political candidate knocking on my door and wanting to have a chat has seemed just plain intrusive, and knocking on the door and trying to have the chat just as embarrassing. I used to carry a stash of cards on which I’d written, ‘Sorry I missed you’ or, ‘Sorry you weren’t at home’ which I’d drop in the letterbox or under the door on which I had knocked, praying that it wouldn’t be answered.
The BCC elections are always held in March, which means a long hot summer of campaigning. In the outer suburbs of Indooroopilly ward, Pullenvale and Brookfield the houses were isolated and the driveways long. If the householder was home one was more likely to have a slow cool drink or a cup of tea rather than a quick chat. So in that very first local campaign through January and February I was a doorknocking backslider and had moments of panic when my opponent used to boast he’d knocked on every door in the electorate. Later, when the results came in, the Labor vote hadn’t budged an inch. So all that doorknocking, or my lack of it, hadn’t made any difference.
My Labor opponent was a nice man called Denis Jackson, a bachelor. His marital status is significant because one of the Labor mantras was, ‘How could a woman with five children represent us in the Council?’ to which I was able to reply, ‘How could a man who doesn’t have any possibly know?’
On election night I won with 55 per cent of the vote. The next day I asked Denis, in a tactful way, if he had thought he could win. He said yes, because everyone whose door he had knocked on had said they were going to vote for him. In the matter of doorknocking, my case rests.
A win is a win and I was very excited. But I did have a moment of terror when it suddenly dawned on me that I’d made an enormous commitment and I was going to have to honour it for the next three years. But my panic did only last a moment.
My first day in the Council Chambers was unnerving, although not for the reasons I had expected. The only time I had been there before had been once when Clem Jones was Lord Mayor: with his 20 to one majority he didn’t encourage debate and that Council meeting had lasted 15 minutes. With that in mind I went to my first Council meeting expecting that it would finish, perhaps not in 15 minutes, but certainly in a couple of hours. At 4.15 pm I went over to the Leader, Alderman Syd McDonald and said, ‘I have to go, George the butcher shuts at five.’ He was not pleased.
Council Chambers had been installed when City Hall was built in 1930 and hadn’t changed much since. The benches were still darkly panelled though the picture of the King had been replaced by that of the Queen. Later, I was under pressure to put in air conditioning, which I resisted on the grounds of cost and interference to heritage, but also – although I didn’t say so – because it would lengthen the time aldermen would talk by making them too comfortable. The room could be stiflingly hot in summer.
The early photos of the Chambers in the 1930s show the same desks and chairs as in my time and the aldermen are all male. The atmosphere was masculine and heavy. There was one other woman in Council, Dulcie Turnbull, a Liberal, and in the past half-century there had been at least three, but still no female toilet. The ladies’ room was down the corridor towards the administration building and quite a sprint if you didn’t want to miss anything. The gents, of course, was just outside the Chambers entrance. I would get one of the blokes to check there was no one in there, then guard the door when I went in. It was my first experience of what a urinal looked like.
Being an alderman is a cross between being a social worker and a community activist. I have a clipping of the front page of the local paper, the Westside News, which illustrates this. The main story is about my fighting Council’s
plans to establish a sewage treatment plant in a semi-rural area in my ward. Next to it, taking up the rest of the front page is a photo of me looking very young as I pinned badges on the captains of a local primary school. The reason I have the clipping is because of what became a common occurrence in Brisbane – people telling me about their school-age memories of me. I was to work years later with one of the school captains, Melinda Duncan, in Queensland State Development, and her mother had kept the newspaper in which little Melinda featured. One morning a man rang me to complain that his neighbour had the lawn sprinkler on and water was coming through his window. ‘Why don’t you just talk to him and ask him to turn it off?’ said I.
He sounded affronted. ‘Talk to him? I haven’t talked to him in ten years!’
It was a steep learning curve, even though my years with Jim Killen had prepared me for much of it, particularly dealing with constituents. My background as a journalist had trained me to ask questions and process the answers. It had also given me the confidence to go and see people I might ordinarily think too important, and to seek their advice. Because I was pretty sure that having won the preselection I was going to win the ward, I could prepare myself as well as campaign even before the election. So I went to see Town Clerk Peter Thorley to get in-depth briefings and the Minister for Local Government, Russ Hinze, who had himself been a member of the Albert Shire Council and its chairman for nine years. This established a useful relationship in years ahead. During school holidays at the Gold Coast I also went in to see Sir Jack Egerton, the Labor renegade who would become Deputy Mayor of that Council.
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