I was grateful for the loyal branch members who attended the early fundraisers, and for the generous support that had flowed my way from outside the local party apparatus, including from cricketer Mike Whitney; soon-to-be state Opposition leader John Robertson; my old pal Simon Balderstone; Paul Gilding and his wife Michelle Grosvenor, who were great contributors; and Michael Ward, a long-time Labor Party member, who’d previously been CEO of Ecos Corporation, a green-energy company established by Paul, and who had rallied many of his colleagues to our cause.
Also there were my brother Matt and his partner Brett and many long-time friends, including Doddo, who by now had written a successful book, Beds Are Burning, about the Oils; comedian Angela Webber and Stuart Matchett from Double J; Pam Swain, an original Double J staffer; film producer, director and actor Jeremy Sims; Greig (H.G. Nelson) Pickhaver; artists Peter O’Doherty and his wife Sue; Stephanie Lewis, who’d worked in the Oils office in the 80s; lobbyist Gabi Trainor; musician Chris Latham, and a host of others—a diverse collection from arts and business and activism who showed up to munch on rubber chicken and buy a few raffle tickets, the staple of any Labor Party fundraiser. A smattering of new colleagues came as well, including Tanya Plibersek, the member for Sydney, whom I came to know better once we got to Canberra.
These ‘normal’ people were in stark contrast to the team of younger party apparatchiks, sharply dressed and constantly fingering their mobile phones, who had descended on us by now; their self-important air broadcast the message: ‘Don’t forget me, one day I will be a member of parliament, and not long after that, prime minister.’
Kate Pasterfield, despite having experienced the strangeness of campaigning with an ex-rocker and activist, organising how-to-vote cards and mass autograph signings at the same time, had chosen to stay on. But inside the tent, and despite all hands having been on the pump on election day, we were mostly friendless.
…
Not long in, and before I’d even given my maiden speech, I decided to have a quick early-morning swim at Maroubra. The ocean had always been a healing force; I figured a surf would help to clear away the sour lemon taste of the last few months of carry-on.
Treading water out the back, I felt my body start to go numb and my head wonky. I thought I’d been stung by something nasty and just managed to heave myself onto a wave as the shapes of the surfers around me started to smudge and go out of focus.
The wave was a long time breaking but I hung on till it surged across the shallows. With great effort, my knees by now scraping on the sand, I crawled out of the ocean and promptly blacked out. My last thought as everything faded to black was, assuming I survived, what state would my brain and body be in?
When I came to in the emergency ward at Prince of Wales Hospital, hooked up to all manner of life-saving apparatus, the cause of the blackout was still a mystery of sorts. The medical team could see what had happened, but couldn’t definitively say why it had. Still, they got me going again and by week’s end I was back at work.
Misreported as a surfing accident, the puzzle was only solved after I received an email from an Oils fan working as a specialist in rare allergies in California who’d read the media reports and wondered if I might have developed an allergy to cold water.
The professor of all things allergic at Royal North Shore Hospital confirmed the diagnosis. Her verdict was sobering: the condition could be fatal, so I needed to carry an EpiPen at all times. This implement was filled with adrenalin to kick me back into gear in the event I fell overboard or encountered cold water in my travels and my system shut down. (Keeping track of the EpiPen proved too difficult, however; I promptly lost the first one, and several others are now strewn across the country.) Medical science has, as yet, no answer as to why this reaction materialised overnight, but in the majority of cases it isn’t expected to last more than eight or nine years—at the moment it’s still going, but hopefully not forever.
…
While the work of serving a constituency could now get underway without too much fuss, adapting to life in Canberra, where the federal MPs met and internal politics was a blood sport, was going to be, to use one of the bywords of politics and political speeches . . . ‘challenging’.
It is the way of the ALP that you sit in a room full of ‘comrades’, most of whom are ensnared in a web of IOUs and silent handshakes that go back twenty or thirty years, to the deep well of young Labor or the union movement or both. As a newcomer, you are a comrade in name only, unless you have friends from the past whom you can trust to tell you what’s actually on their mind. I was lucky to have a handful of those, and over time made a few more.
This phenomenon is not confined to the Labor Party, even if it is more pronounced there. I was surprised to find myself walking out of the House of Representatives one evening with National Party leader and deputy prime minister John Anderson, departing after his valedictory speech. ‘I never really understood this place,’ he said mournfully over his shoulder to the empty chamber—a sentiment I heard expressed on a number of occasions, even from long-termers.
From the point you go in, to the day they drag or throw you out, it’s an exercise in losing skin, an apt expression that sums up the after-effects of heated contests inside the party, as people jockey for position, and outside, as you spar with your political opponents.
There were strange moments that did my head in a bit early on, such as when Coalition treasurer Peter Costello had fun mimicking my dancing style in question time. One thing that stood out in Canberra was that none of the political class had any shame or, with a few exceptions, any sense of style—or, in Costello’s case, rhythm. The press saw the performance as a funny jape, but it reminded me of private school boys’ jokes, where it doesn’t matter how stupid you look, if you’re mocking someone your gang agrees is deserving, it’s a riot. This kind of stunt might be what made Costello an effective parliamentary performer in his day, but it was low-rent stuff, one of the reasons the public saw parliament as a circus.
Foreign minister Alexander Downer made similar sport with Oils song lyrics, until his escapades in approving illicit payments to the Australian Wheat Board during the illegal war in Iraq forced him to turn his mind to more serious matters.
Two weeks after opining that I’d make a welcome addition to the front bench, and even, God forbid, a good leader, Bob Brown was telling the Senate I was a ‘sell-out’ after I campaigned vigorously in the inner-city seat of Melbourne in the state election, urging a vote for Labor—what treachery from a new Labor member! Bronwyn Pike, formerly a Uniting Church activist, ultimately won the seat for the ALP and went on to serve as education minister in the Bracks government.
For their part, various Labor colleagues pressed me to join the unofficial members’ choir, known as the Parliamentary Poets, who assemble every year for a sing-off against the press gallery choir at the annual charity event, the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery Midwinter Ball.
The journos had more time to practise and a common opponent to inspire them, and they usually performed better. Sailing above the fray, without a thought that they too might deserve the occasional brickbat, they delighted in carrying on their daily occupation of pin-pricking politicians—from prime ministers down the food chain to gaffe-prone backbenchers—into semi-witty musical putdowns.
They were beatable, but not so long as my choir mates, without a hint of self-awareness, continued to instruct their new star recruit and de facto choir leader in how we should sing. Most struggled to hold a tune, so what we needed to do was practise, plain and simple. Yet, strangely, people would rarely make themselves available for rehearsals. I eventually gave up on this harmless yet surreal extracurricular activity.
On a more serious note, the centre-left faction, balanced between dominant left and right factions, had lost some steam, and senior members sounded me out about joining. ‘The left is your natural home, but there’s a traffic jam of people,’ was the pitch—I declined.
Lik
ewise I declined South Australian premier Mike Rann’s invitation to join him and Clare Martin, chief minister of the Northern Territory, on a joint ticket for the rotating presidency of the Labor Party.
I had a lot of time for Rann; he had an eye on the future. He was trying to get on top of climate change, was driving a modern innovation agenda in his state, and he wasn’t factionally aligned. Still, it seemed premature, as I’d only just landed in parliament. I wanted to sit on the backbench, put my head down and learn the ropes, start working on policy and rise or fall on merit, not the fame factor.
Following the election, Mark Latham’s leadership had gone up in smoke and Kim Beazley was back as leader after an earlier five-year stint. I respected and liked Kim a lot, although we differed on many issues. Worryingly, as he freely admitted, he didn’t have a green bone in his body. Plenty of effort would be required to produce a solid environment policy by the time the next election came round, and given the maximum term for national governments is a ludicrously short three years, there was no time to waste.
25
MAD DANCE
BY EARLY 2005 I was finding my feet and getting used to the strange new political arena I’d entered, but more than anything I just wanted to get to know Kingsford Smith better.
At the southern end of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, the coast is the pulse point of the electorate, with its collection of surf beaches, inlets and expanses of rocky cliffs, leading from the well-heeled suburb of Clovelly on the northern perimeter down to La Perouse, where many Aboriginal people lived. Homes and apartments, many with super-sized windows and glass sliding doors to take in the sweep of ocean, crowd ever closer together on the steep hillsides that lead down to the water.
There is never a time, day or night, when someone, somewhere, isn’t diving in for a quick dip, walking, fishing, playing, socialising or misbehaving along the ocean paths and beachside promenades.
And there was never a time when the streets were free of real-estate propaganda. Sydney, including the eastern suburbs, where premium water views were dream booty, was trapped in the grip of a massive real-estate boom. Every weekend the auction signs would dot the suburbs; every week the notices of the next sale and information on the latest round of record prices would be slipped into the letterbox. Sydney’s real estate was now among the most expensive in the world, jobs were plentiful in this part of Sydney and no one was pausing for breath.
During the long-forgotten hard days of the 1930s depression, a special building program to generate employment saw scores of concrete and rock outdoor swimming pools built next to Sydney’s beaches. These were marvellous public assets and, if properly maintained, they promise to endure as long as the Roman baths and aqueducts across France and Germany—at least that was how I saw it.
One of these pools, known as Wylie’s Baths, had been built below the cliffs south of Coogee Beach and so faced directly out to the open sea. It was spectacular in any season and in its early days was a favourite haunt of some of Sydney’s best-known artists, including Arthur Streeton.
The Oils had shot a clip for ‘Surf’s Up Tonight’, from the album Breathe, there. It was typically mayhem. Every film shoot I’ve ever been involved with had run behind schedule, and so did this one. The main problem was that part of the clip featured us in Wylie’s Baths, sitting on lilos and watching surf footage with the open sea a couple of metres away, held back by the pool wall. Things were going swimmingly until the tide started coming in—a predictable event that hadn’t been factored into the schedule. Waves started spilling over and into the pool, threatening to wash us, the crew and all their gear out to sea. The shoot finished pretty quickly after that.
Wylie’s features quaint timber walkways, and with the rock embankment of the pool now restored—thanks to the foresight of one-time mayor Chris Bastic—is a haven for locals and in-the-know tourists alike. It was here that one of Kingsford Smith’s most enduring eccentrics, academic and sculptor Eileen Slarke, had singlehandedly raised funds to create a bronze work featuring painters from the thirties, which now sits overlooking the azure Pacific from atop the cliffs.
Eileen was a regular visitor to my office. Although approaching her mid-seventies, she usually dressed like a sharp, mall-prowling teenager, in long track pants, state-of-the-art runners, some modest bling and up-to-the minute hairstyling. She quivered with the mad energy of a creative soul and was impossible to ignore, in contrast to the morose, mousy hordes of retirees, bussed in free by the South Sydney Junior Rugby League Club to feed money into the gaping maws of the club’s ranks of brightly coloured poker machines. There were some livewire characters among these crowds, as I came to appreciate, but from a distance they resembled lemmings at a state-sanctioned picnic.
I hadn’t experienced a moment of uncertainty about the move to this area. In fact, I felt very much at home. Selina’s—pub rock central—was close by; so too was the University of New South Wales, where I’d scrambled to finish my law studies. Even the Regent Hotel, where the Oils, venturing over to the south side of town, played one of our first-ever gigs, was in my new electorate.
And much of my life had been spent in the orbit of politics, thinking about it, breathing it and acting on it. This was about being Australian faithful, with a lengthy list of things I wanted to work on jotted in the diary, including: ‘rejuvenating democracy’, ‘true sustainability’, ‘empowering and educating Australia’ and ‘a real settlement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’. In retrospect it looked ridiculously ambitious but these were the issues I felt needed attention. I agreed that history’s clues were clear: the centre must hold and the spread of wealth needs to be wise or strife will follow. This was Labor’s true course and I was willing to join.
I spent much of my first month as Kingsford Smith’s new member visiting party loyalists and explaining my position to them. My message was simple: I would try to do my utmost for Labor, and I wasn’t going to play games or abuse the position. By the time I’d put in a few years of attending branch meetings and doing the rounds, quite a few had come around, and I ended up with a coterie of solid supporters. This meant a lot to me, for they were the true believers—a hackneyed phrase, maybe, but it still evokes those who are the heart and soul of the Labor Party. I cherished these diehards who could be relied on to staff election booths when the opinion polls looked bad and the weather even worse, who would turn up to fundraising events with their wallets open and even volunteer to come doorknocking on the few occasions I took this route to meet electors. They cared about politics, had no time for the Coalition parties they contemptuously referred to as ‘the Tories’ and felt that Labor was the only viable outfit to mount a reform agenda. They were both faithful and fatalistic, living in hope that things would improve. By the time I arrived, they were, tragically, a diminishing force, but they never wavered in their commitment to the Labor cause.
One of my early tasks had been to get down to La Perouse, on the shores of Botany Bay, to make contact with the Aboriginal community living there.
‘La Pa’, as it is commonly called, is a site of rupture and sadness, still torn from earlier times, with long-standing unresolved grievances and the community divided along family lines. It is on the slow road to health but the shadow of the past hangs heavy over its dilapidated bungalows.
In my judgement the best help we could give was simply to be there for people where possible, and support those trying to make a difference in trying circumstances—as is the case in many Indigenous communities.
Europeans had been bumping into Australia—the Great South Land—since the 1600s. Other seafarers from the north, of whom there are no written accounts, doubtless came even earlier.
The Dutch mariners tracking across the Indian Ocean to the East Indies (the Indonesian Archipelago) had sighted landfall off Cape York in 1606 in the Little Dove. One quick look and they, like others who followed, decided the continent was too inhospitable, impassable and incomprehensible to justify explorin
g further.
Captain James Cook’s arrival at Botany Bay in 1770, followed by Frenchman La Perouse eighteen years later—hence the name of the suburb—is one of the earliest written accounts of first contact.
As we approached the shore they [the natives] all made off, except 2 Men who seemed resolved to oppose our landing . . . We then threw them some nails and beads, etc., a shore [sic] which they took up, and seem’d not ill pleased with, in so much as I thought that they beckon’d to us to come ashore; but in this we were mistaken, for as soon as we put the boat in they again came to oppose us, upon which I fir’d a musquet between the 2, which had no Effect than to make them retire back, where bundles of their darts lay, and one of them took up a stone and threw at us . . .
This was how it began.
As the tentacles of the real-estate boom spread ever outward, even long neglected La Pa was under siege, as newcomers, taking advantage of the relatively cheap houses and bedazzled by the water views, bought in.
The makeover of the first permanent settlement of Aboriginal people in modern Australia was underway.
…
I’d often get up early on a Saturday morning, do some shopping (a good way to rub shoulders with voters), grab the papers, then drift past the beaches: Clovelly, Coogee, North and South Maroubra, to see the hundreds of nippers—kids getting their junior lifesaving qualifications—clustered, like swarms of stick insects, on the sand. The lifesaving movement, with women and people from different cultural backgrounds increasingly included in its ranks, glues young and old together. It is uniquely Australian in expression and provides a service to the community no government could easily replace.
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