No Job for a Woman

by Sallyanne Atkinson

  I often had to fight Liberal Party headquarters in matters of campaigning. I have always believed authenticity is one of the most important qualities in life, and certainly in politics, but the campaign gurus wanted me to portray myself as someone with business skills, taking part in boardroom discussions. I resisted because I had no business experience and wasn’t going to pretend I did. I felt that common sense and intelligence plus a will to learn were more honest attributes. They also complained about my wearing pearls as too bourgeois. In campaign pictures, where I was actually photographed wearing them, the pearls were removed from the image. (It has amused me in recent years that at least two prominent Labor female politicians, Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Premier Anna Bligh often wore pearls in office, which is some indication that times have changed.)

  Despite the naysayers, I did have supporters in the business community who helped with fundraising and offered advice. I have never been afraid of asking for advice and I have found it is almost always generously given; it’s something I often suggest to young people now. It was difficult to raise money from businesses in Brisbane, constrained as many were by fear of the incumbent Labor Council. I had seen this in action when a prominent town planner asked an aggressive question of Roy Harvey at a Brisbane Development Association lunch and was blacklisted by Council thereafter.

  Instead, we turned our attention to the southern states. Some of the Queensland state government’s tax reforms coupled with lower land prices and wages were making Brisbane an attractive place to do business, despite difficult dealings with a Labor Council. With Party treasurer and shoe magnate, Sir Bob Mathers, and my campaign director, Rod Samut, I went to Sydney and Melbourne and hosted lunches and dinners. I rang trucking magnate Lindsay Fox from a public phone box (no mobiles then, of course) to ask for an appointment to talk about his business in Brisbane. He would have known I wanted campaign funds and said, ‘I’ll give you money, just because you’ve had the guts to ring me yourself.’

  I wrote in my Economic Blueprint:

  Sallyanne Atkinson and her Liberal team know the economic health of Brisbane depends on a free enterprise system which encourages business to provide jobs prosperity and growth.

  We believe that it is a Council function to encourage business to expand and develop, and to attract industry to relocate here by having practical consistent policies to ensure co-operation between Council and the private sector, and by instilling attitudes of positive encouragement and helpfulness in all Council staff from top management to the most junior levels.

  I did write all our policies myself and I’m appalled at the length of that second sentence, but they were important messages. It was very radical stuff back then, because most people didn’t think that economic development was a function of local government. There was a view that Councils should stick to the three rs: roads, rates and rubbish (or what the mayor of Katherine in the Northern Territory called the three ds: drains, ditches and dunnies). Nowadays Councils see economic development as very much part of their remit.

  Political campaigning has changed over the years. When my old boss Jim Killen went into politics in the 1950s he addressed street corner meetings, often from the back of a truck. If he wasn’t actually pelted with tomatoes he was certainly heckled, and he gave back as good as he got. It made for lively entertainment, if not for actual votes. When I was growing up, every election campaign meant a car or truck with a loudspeaker on top and big placards on its sides slowly cruising the neighbourhood blaring a candidate’s message. Usually, it was the candidate himself doing the blaring, or perhaps one of his team. I say ‘him’ and ‘his’ because this was not a campaign style suited to women, even if there had been any female candidates.

  By the time I came along campaigning was a bit more genteel. We were much given to pamphlets with photographs of the candidate and the candidate’s family, and a text listing achievements and promises. We went door to door in shopping centres, and I discovered that the best places for campaigning were butchers’ and barbers’ shops. These were effectively community centres where people stopped to talk, and even wanted to: ‘I’m trying to decide between chops and mince for dinner, Mr Brown, and why do you think the government’s doing such-and-such?’ I think it was the process of deliberation that encouraged conversation, and butchers always seem such people-friendly folk. Customers waiting at their local barber shop were always up for a chat, whereas bakeries and greengrocers were not places where people lingered. I remember one Saturday morning Digby McLeay, my only paid campaign advisor, carrying an armful of purchases from the butcher and muttering, ‘This is going to be a leg-of-lamb-led election win.’

  One of my favourite campaigning ploys was to approach a line of cabs at a taxi stand and engage each of the drivers in conversation. If the driver was affable or even sympathetic I would give him a handful of pamphlets to put on the seat beside him so that he could hand them over to interested passengers. These were the days before we had so many drivers from overseas. Most of our cabbies were born and bred Brisbanites and because they drove all over the city they knew it well and were usually happy to talk about it.

  One of my least favourite campaign activities was standing on the side of the road waving at motorists, which is now common practice. Back in the 1980s we used to stand at railway stations and engage commuters. John Moore, the federal member for Ryan, said voters liked it because it was ‘an exercise in humiliation of the candidate’.

  Our Liberal team had lots of policies. There was one about making Brisbane the convention and sports capital of the Southern Hemisphere:

  For too long tourists have bypassed Brisbane in their desire to see North Queensland and the Gold and Sunshine coasts. Last year only 20 per cent of inter and intra state tourists to Queensland visited Brisbane … Pride in our city, generated by an enthusiastic City Council, will act as the catalyst for this goal.

  The purpose of Town Planning is to ensure that a city is a good place for its citizens to live, work and enjoy themselves … Town Planning aims at the guided development of the future while providing for the proper management of the present. It aims to safeguard the environment and to conserve the best of our heritage both material and man-made.

  When I first became an alderman in 1979 it was accepted that City Hall was the centre of the city and all would radiate outwards from there. But in the meantime free enterprise had taken over and significant new development was happening on the river at the other end of the CBD. Town planning had become a particular passion of mine. I had never known much about it until I went to the seminars that the University of Queensland’s Planning Department held for people in local government. They were run by Victor Plavinski, a war refugee from Poland who migrated to New Zealand, where his pre-war qualifications as a town planner were of no use. Instead, he got a job as a labourer and told me that one day a group of Council road engineers were huddled over a problem and Victor had helped solve it for them. I am not quite sure how he got from there to the university, but I’m glad he did. He ran stimulating seminars for councillors, most of whom would never have set foot in a university. The very first one was my ‘St Paul on the road to Damascus’ moment and I was to get a lot of inspiration from town planners who were not necessarily of my political persuasion. One of these was Phil Heywood, a lecturer at the Queensland Institute of Technology (QIT, now the Queensland University of Technology), who was so far to the Left he almost fell off the edge, but together we worked on some exciting projects.

  I had policies on everything – open government; bus transport; sport and recreation; a ‘Back to the Suburbs’ proposal, which included establishing regional Council centres so that people wouldn’t have to travel into the city; and another inelegantly called ‘Rates Rip-off’, where I promised to freeze general rates for ‘at least the first year after assuming office’. This was to give me grief when I did assume office and bring down my first budget because the Liberal Party advertising had omitted the word ‘general�
�� in key advertising. I was accused of breaking a promise when the other charges – water, sewerage and cleansing – rose in line with inflation. The general rates charge, the largest component of what people paid to Council, was the only area in which we had real discretion. The others were charges based on cost recovery.

  Despite the distance to be covered on the campaign trail and the number of shopping centres to be visited and babies kissed, metaphorically if not literally, we kept to a tight schedule. Ironically, it was a better campaign than those we ran later when I was seen as a winner and by then had to put up with the full gamut of Party interference.

  That first campaign did have the support and involvement of Gary Neat, the Liberal Party state director, and Digby and Narelle from my own office, but otherwise it was run by volunteers, people like Rod Samut and Lynn Everingham who were both with me for several campaigns – ‘the coalition of the willing’ someone called it. Rod, who was a former president of the Queensland division of the Building Owners and Managers Association, was to continue volunteering as the chairman of the Lord Mayor’s Economic Strategy Committee and later as chairman of the Office of Economic Development. Lynn and I had had babies at the same time in the Mater and had been young wives in Edinburgh together, so we were good friends. She organised women from all over Brisbane – some friends, some strangers – to hold morning teas and assist with fundraisers. There was a core group of about 20 friends who did everything from hosting teas for the elderly to cocktail parties for 400 guests. It was very hands-on, the women cooked for the parties, our daughters helped address the envelopes and were waitresses at the functions; we didn’t wheel in the caterers. Apart from being grateful, I was pleased to be able to prick the balloon of ‘women don’t support women’. In addition to the campaign support, I was always able to count on friends if children needed ferrying about.

  It was an interesting time. Chicago-born university lecturer, Joe Siracusa, was a political enthusiast, a great motivator and intellectual energiser on the campaign trail. He would insist on writing my biography in 1987. Thinking he meant in the distant future I had agreed during the campaign that he should write it. He wrote it quickly, and it was published far too soon to be a considered examination of my political career. The result was that he positioned himself as a self-appointed spokesman on my life. He also became involved in the Joh-for-Canberra push and disgraced Police Commissioner Terry Lewis’s travails, which did nothing for his reputation, or mine by association.

  During the election campaign advice sprang from another surprising source: Clem Jones, the long-serving Labor Lord Mayor. Word was that Clem hated current Lord Mayor Roy Harvey – they had come to blows, literally, back in the 1960s. I was willing to listen to what he had to say and we had a lot in common – we were the same age running up to election, we had both been to Anglican grammar schools and we had both studied local government in the US. Clem gave me copies of his campaign launch speeches, which were long and detailed. Then, one day he called me and said, ‘I won’t be able to help you anymore, the Labor Party has just made me a life member.’ So I think I might claim some credit for Clem’s life membership of the ALP!

  One of the good things about local government elections in Queensland was that they were always held at the same time: every three years on the last Saturday in March. This made for a very long campaign, or at least mine certainly seemed to be. I had a couple of campaign experiences that have stuck with me. One was at a Local Government Association conference in Cairns, to which I had taken myself because I was never the Council’s delegate. Roy Harvey took me to dinner one evening with the other Liberal female alderman, Dulcie Turnbull. Once we were seated he proceeded to show off, asking the waiter to bring the best wine in the house. I suddenly realised he didn’t take me seriously. I thought, ‘He has no idea what he’s up against!’

  The other experience was later in the campaign, when I was starting to feel so exhausted that I wondered whether I would last the distance to the election. I went to the tennis at Milton in December to watch Pat Cash play. A high ball came over the net from his opponent and looked as if it was going to be out, but Cash still ran to the back of the court to take the ball, which was just in. It was a light-bulb moment. I thought, ‘That’s what you have to do. You have to run for every ball.’

  I don’t remember much about election day. I think it was sunny. I would have spent all day visiting booths, but I don’t think I could have visited them all because there were so many. The owner of the Coronation Motel, Mario de Vivo, had given me a room there to rest during the day, and I did. The Coronation had the best coffee in Brisbane and I would often stop there on my way home from the city to have a coffee and assess the day before braving the domestic front.

  When the results came through that evening they were decisive. I had won with 52 per cent of the vote, a clear win without worrying about preferences. Importantly, the Liberal team had won 15 of the 26 wards, so there was no concern about having a hostile Council. (It was this concern that led Russ Hinze to amend the City of Brisbane Act again in 1986 to strengthen the powers of the Lord Mayor.)

  There was great excitement on the night and lots of shrieks from the children. They had all been involved, more or less, in the campaign. I have always let the children be as active as they want in my work. Sometimes the younger ones enjoyed going to school fetes. Stephanie, our star tennis player, has a photo of herself with Ivan Lendl. The older ones did surveys of commuters at railway stations. When they were small and I was a working journalist I would often have to cart them about with me. I’ve never thought that work was something you would hide from your children. Some years before, when I was a fairly new alderman, I had been walking through Surfers Paradise with the children when I heard Damien say to one of the younger girls, ‘Behave yourself or people will criticise Mum for having badly behaved kids.’ There are indeed sacrifices that political families have to make.

  Our house in Castile Street had been the setting for every election night party, and the next day people were still coming around to celebrate and this time even more than there had been for the Alderman for Indooroopilly. Among those celebrating the Lord Mayoralty were senior members of the Liberal Party executive who started to give me lectures on how I should be doing things, and insisting on being given access to Council books. I had to remind them that I knew exactly how Council functioned and had a very clear idea of what I intended to do.

  There was a fair deal of excitement among the city’s conservatives about the new look in City Hall and a lot of advice to be given. Senator David McGibbon, a former dentist who was one of my Indooroopilly neighbours, rang to tell me the first thing I must do was take down the ‘Nuclear Free Zone’ signs through the city. These had been erected by the Labor administration and of course were a total nonsense, and would hardly be a deterrent to a nuclear attack. I have always disliked empty gestures, so I told David they would indeed disappear, but in good time.

  I’LL TAKE CITY HALL

  Winning the Lord Mayoralty created as much of a shock as losing it six years later. There was a difference. I had thought I would win in 1985 and though I was not so confident in 1991 I didn’t think I would lose. But in l985, in the lead-up to the election, I had no idea what to expect. Knowing the polls would not be declared immediately, I had made all kinds of personal and domestic appointments for the days after and of course they were not fulfilled.

  The media calls came from all around Australia. Brisbane’s first female Lord Mayor was a big story, and there was surprise that it should have happened in Brisbane at all. I was an unusual kind of female politician – young, married and with five children. Nowadays there is discussion about work–life balance, and how both men and women juggle their careers with having a family. But in the 1980s it was still assumed that men went to work while women stayed at home or, if they didn’t, at least took responsibility for the house and children. The only real exceptions were professionals – lawyers, doctors, teac
hers.

  There was a lot of interest in the election of a new kind of political figure, and after its recent woes and poor performance on the hustings a new Liberal Party had emerged. Labor had come to power in Canberra two years earlier in 1983, vanquishing Malcolm Fraser’s Liberal government, and the Liberal–National coalition in Queensland had foundered later that year. The Liberal Party in the Queensland Parliament had been reduced to six seats. The headline of the Australian that Monday was euphoric: Sallyanne breathes new life into the Liberals. ‘By demonstrating that there is room in Queensland for a free enterprise party which is not committed to the premier’s style of government,’ the article stated, ‘the Liberal party has helped the federal Coalition parties as a whole as well as strengthening its own hopes of revival.’

  Adrian McGregor wrote in the Courier-Mail about ‘an invigorating new era in Queensland politics’, adding that, ‘Alderman Atkinson actually represents the first alternative style of government Queensland will have seen in a quarter of a century’.

  But for me, there were more immediate issues at hand. We now had 16 seats in the Council Chambers and 26 wards, thanks to Russ Hinze’s new boundaries. Unlike my three predecessors, I had been elected by all the people of Brisbane and a fair number of them had switched political allegiance. Nine of my aldermen were newly elected as were several on the Labor side, so there was need for induction and training.

  My first day in the office I came to work by bus. Well, not actually from home but from The Gap, a nearby suburb where I had arranged to meet the Council’s Transport Manager, Ken Davidson, who might well have been catching a bus for the first time and who looked uncomfortable in his formal grey suit. It was a symbolic gesture and one for the cameras, that awaited my arrival at City Hall. I was very aware of symbolic gestures.