PAUL KEATING AND THE LAMINAR FLOW
In May 1992, I returned to Canberra to take up a short-term job as a political adviser to Paul Keating, who in December the year before had become Prime Minister. A few months earlier I had received a late-night phone call from Don Watson, the writer and former academic; he, along with Hilary McPhee, his wife at the time, were friends of mine and he had recently joined Keating’s office as The Speechwriter. ‘Paul’s got a bit of a problem with women,’ Don told me. ‘We want you to come and help out.’
It had been Hilary’s idea to ask me to come back and advise on how to improve the gender gap in Keating’s support, he said, and while I was tantalised, I took a fair bit of persuading. Not that I did not think I could do it, despite having been away from Australia for seven years, but I just didn’t see how Paul Keating would want me anywhere near his office. I was too closely identified with his mortal enemy, my previous Prime Ministerial boss, Bob Hawke, whom I’d publicly supported during the leadership stoush. I’d even written, in a cover story for Max Suich’s the Independent Monthly a year earlier, that Keating was ‘despised by about a third of the population’ and had quoted trade union sources describing him as ‘unfocused and undisciplined’. I’d described how Keating punished journalists who displeased him by denying them access. In my Press Gallery days, I had myself been on the receiving end of a couple of Keating telephone ‘sprays’, and he had once handwritten a vitriolic letter denouncing one of my articles, so I presumed he would be unforgiving for my criticisms the previous year.
‘If he wants me to work for him, he is going to have to ask me himself,’ I told Don.
Leaving New York could be risky for me. I was finally starting to find a niche for myself post Ms. magazine. I had a Green Card which meant I could stay in the US and I could work, and I had three Rolodexes full of great contacts, not all of whom had dropped me when I lost the editorship of Ms. I had a literary agent, Gloria Loomis, who was helping me develop a book proposal and I was getting newspaper op-eds published. I hadn’t yet cracked the New York Times, my measure of ‘making it’, but I was getting encouraging notes from editors in response to my submissions, so I hoped it would not be long now. Leaving, even for just three months, might mean I’d never recover the momentum. I had a year left on my Matilda contract, which Dale Lang had picked up, so I could pay my mortgage and other expenses. My prospects were good, I liked to think. Would I be throwing it all away? But my strongest tie to New York was Chip. We had been together for almost three years now, and both of us felt that we’d found our life’s partner. I was not willing to jeopardise that. But what if Chip agreed to come too?
Keating eventually called me and we agreed I would come for three months. Most of my New York friends were mightily impressed that I had received a phone call from my country’s leader, and I was influenced by the American view that it was a public duty to agree if a political leader asks you to serve. Although it would temporarily throw me off my chosen course, I saw it as a chance to put into practice some of my ideas about how to integrate women’s issues into the mainstream political agenda. ‘To put my mouth where my money was,’ as I said to friends. How could I not do it? Especially as Chip had agreed to accompany me.
Although I fully expected to return to New York, I took the opportunity of this break from my usual patterns to give up smoking. I had tried many times but could never break a habit I’d had since I was fourteen, and which I associated so closely with writing. I feared I would never produce another sentence without a cigarette burning in the ashtray beside my computer. It was not just the physical addiction; it was who I was. I was a smoker. I lit up when I picked up the phone, or when I sat down to my desk, at parties where I knew no one, after a satisfying meal, whenever I had a drink, or after sex. But I knew that it would undermine my credibility in Canberra if I was one of those people who had to leave not just their desk, but the very building, to huddle outside in the frigid weather to drag on their cigarettes. If I expected to command respect in this job, I had to get rid of the awful habit. I was recommended a hypnotherapist who, I was told, had helped Linda Ronstadt quit. I took a train to Connecticut and spent an hour with a man who got me to tell him why I wanted to stop smoking. He then put me into some kind of hypnotic state, recited these reasons back to me, and sent me on my way. I never smoked again.
I’d known Paul Keating and got on well with him when I ran the Canberra bureau of the Financial Review and he was Labor’s Minerals and Energy spokesman. He was a frequent visitor to the only bureau in the Press Gallery that properly covered mining and related issues. He was always elegantly dressed himself and he noticed what other people wore. One day, as I walked with him and Max Walsh over to the Lobby Restaurant for lunch, Paul had commented on my new Weiss suit:
‘You always were a snappy dresser, Annie.’
He was the only parliamentarian—probably the only man—I knew who could say something like that without it sounding like a come-on.
It was apparent then that Paul Keating was an unusual Labor man. He was an independent thinker and even though he was from the notoriously muscular New South Wales Labor right faction, he maintained a close friendship with Tom Uren, the much older leader of the left. He was open to ideas, and to people, from outside his formative experiences. He was married to a beautiful Dutch woman, who had piercing brown eyes and a tangle of long, dark-blonde curly hair. She had been an air hostess (as they were called then) on KLM and they had met on one of her flights. His marriage to Annita was another thing that distinguished Paul Keating from his Labor colleagues, who mostly married girls they had grown up with. And, unlike many of his parliamentary colleagues, he did not have a wandering eye. It was an article of faith in Canberra when I worked in the Press Gallery that Paul Keating was a one-woman man, and that woman was his wife Annita. They had four children and, as I was to learn when I worked for him, Paul was intensely devoted to his kids.
On my first day in Parliament House, I was taken into the Prime Minister’s office, through the front door, to meet him. The last time I’d seen Paul Keating had been in New York in 1988 at a function for the visiting Treasurer. We’d posed for a photograph, both of us grinning toothily, me holding the latest issue of Ms. with Oprah Winfrey on the cover. Four years later and he had changed. The weight of office and the hard years of getting there showed in the tired lines on his face. His tall, lean frame was encased in the trademark dark Zegna suit, the shirt was white and spotless. His hooded eyes gave him a look of great solemnity. Those eyes would appear expressionless or even cold as he surveyed the room while he talked. It was as if he was scoping for possible pitfalls but then he could, in a second, break into an impish grin that showed too much gum, but which gave him an irresistible and instant charisma. The man who had said he could, if necessary, ‘throw the switch to vaudeville’ once he became Prime Minister, was in fact something of a performer. He could ham it up for the office or crack a joke (which he often found funnier than his audience) or display a lighter side that would have astonished those who knew him only from his combative Question Time performances. My expected three-months in Canberra would turn into eleven months, and I would be part of the team that delivered Keating his unexpected election victory in March 1993. I got caught up in what became a thrilling and rewarding political journey, one where I developed a deeper appreciation for Paul Keating, and where I gained new insights into what is needed for women to achieve the supposedly simple goal of equality within a democracy. But there were some unanticipated high personal costs and my life would change far more radically than I’d expected when I agreed to do that short-term stint.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, not everyone welcomed me back as Keating and most of his team in the PMO, as the Prime Minister’s Office was called, did. Some of my new colleagues were worried that I was too much in the limelight, committing the cardinal crime of a staffer taking attention away from her boss. I gave no interviews but that did not diminish the non-stop media interest, at times verging on obsession, in my presence on Keating’s staff. There were constant stories, including a lengthy profile in Good Weekend, that described me as responding to ‘a Prime Ministerial SOS’. It was accompanied by a lurid illustration that depicted Keating and me on a small boat using a fish hook to catch women.1 None of this helped me, or the job I had been asked to do. The national ALP, which already had a poor relationship with the PMO, was affronted. The team at OSW was nervous about what it meant for them to have a former head of the Office at the centre of power. I soon learned that relations were severely fractured after OSW had made disparaging comments about a PMO-drafted, and very poorly received, speech Keating had delivered on International Women’s Day in Brisbane. Peter Walsh, who had been Minister for Finance in the Hawke government, and an old foe from my days at OSW, later wrote that Keating had ‘recycled Anne Summers … [who] quickly set about inflicting policy damage on the government.’2
As I understood it, my job was to help improve Paul Keating’s standing with women, but I was given no specific brief or guidance about how to do that. That was fine with me as it meant I was not curbed by a rulebook or precedents, but first I needed to understand why women did not like the Prime Minister. Perhaps then we could set about persuading them to look at him differently, maybe even vote for him. ALP National Secretary Bob Hogg had briefed the advisers that there was a 3 to 4 per cent gender gap against the government. In the 1980 election, Labor had closed what had been big gender gaps in the previous two elections—setting them up for victory in 1983—he said, and in 1983 and 1984 more women than men had voted Labor. In the previous three elections—1984, 1987 and 1990—women had started out being anti-Labor but that gap had closed during the campaign. Now, Hogg told us, the polls were suggesting an entrenched resistance. The ALP’s private polls were more encouraging than the published polls that had a gender gap of 7 per cent in women’s approval, which was better than the 10 per cent it had been earlier in the year, but still not enough to put Keating in a winning position. I had come to the job thinking that it would not be any kind of gimmickry, but rather sound policy, that would be most likely to persuade women to rethink their views on Keating. But I was keen to know what my new colleagues thought.
The PMO was a large, busy set of offices located on the ground floor at the rear of what I could not stop myself calling the ‘new’ Parliament House. (It was four years now since the Parliament and the several thousand people who worked in it had decamped from the ‘old’, and supposedly temporary, building it had occupied further down the hill towards Lake Burley Griffin since 1927, and where I had worked ten years earlier in the Press Gallery.) The PMO was remarkably quiet for a place where 30 or more people worked, usually on deadlines, always with urgency and often with a fair amount of friction among us. And that was before you took into account the disputes and, at times, outright brawls, that walked through the door in the form of the Prime Minister’s cabinet colleagues. The PMO was the centre of gravity of the government, where the power resided, the deals were done, and the future course of the nation decided. But being there did not feel as exciting as I’d imagined. Everyone was calm, and supercool. Unless, as sometimes happened, tempers broke through, shouts replaced the usual murmurs and, once or twice, someone even threw something. But there was laughter. Lots of it. That, more than tension, was our lubricant.
Each of the advisers had their own office. Even me, the latecomer for whom there was initially no space. In a surprisingly generous gesture, the drivers gave up their sitting room. They decamped to an area just outside, where there were couches and a television and where those staff who did not go into the House with Paul would gather on sitting days to watch Question Time. My room was large and windowless, but I found that I could rent paintings from Art Bank and soon my walls were covered with large dramatic works, all of them by women. Might as well advertise what I’m here for, I thought.
I already knew several of the advisers. Apart from Don Watson, whose office was close to mine so that we were constantly running in to each other; there was John Edwards, now an economics adviser but whom I’d known for many years through his several incarnations as a journalist in Sydney and Washington, ministerial adviser to Clyde Cameron in the Whitlam government and author of a book on the MX missile; and Simon Balderstone, the amiable environmental adviser who had previously worked for Graham Richardson and my old friend Mary Ann O’Loughlin who, I was surprised and delighted to discover, was social policy adviser. I soon got to know the others. Anne de Salis, who had been the first woman to be appointed to the senior executive service in Treasury and was now in charge of administering the PMO as well as advising on immigration; Ric Simes, another economist; and political advisers Stephen Smith, a former ALP State Secretary from WA, and Mark Ryan, who’d moved from running media for Premier John Cain in Victoria initially to become Keating’s press secretary. Smith would leave soon to become a candidate for a federal seat back in his home state. Ashton Calvert was the foreign policy adviser, a calm and quintessential bureaucrat on the surface, but when a few months later Keating decided to overturn the ban on allowing gays to serve in the military and he and I were the unlikely duo given carriage of the issue, I saw his steely core and his deft strategic mind. He left the PMO to become Ambassador to Japan and, later, served for seven years as Secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. I had less to do with the Press Office, where there were five or six people in a separate suite of rooms that were connected to the PMO, but not accessible to the journalists, although Greg Turnbull, the press secretary, was always around.
The secretaries and assistants were a tireless and talented lot, without exception all women, whose job was to answer non-stop ringing phones, take dictation and produce letters, speeches, memos or whatever other documents the Prime Minister or his advisers needed, and to generally ensure the place ran efficiently. Gina Bozinovski was assigned to me; she already had two other advisers to look after but she took on the extra burden without complaining, and was always cheerfully competent in the midst of the chaos that invariably accompanied the producing of a major speech or policy announcement. She later went to law school and is now a successful corporate counsel in Queensland. There were other staffers: the person in charge of the diary, and someone who tried to coordinate all movements, and Guy Nelligan who was officially called a butler and whose job was to ensure Paul had his constant cup of tea or whatever other sustenance he required. Deborah Hope, who I’d known from her days as a Fairfax journalist, was an adviser to Annita Keating. She and husband John Edwards used to arrive in the office each morning with hair still wet from their morning swim and were known—behind their backs—as ‘John and Ilsa’, after the champion teenage swimmers Jon and Ilsa Konrads, who during the 1950s and 60s had broken virtually every world swimming record. Presiding over all of us was Don Russell, the former Treasury official who had been with Paul since his days as Treasurer and was now Chief of Staff. His tall, sinewy frame, topped by a totally bald pate, was a calm and unifying presence seemingly able to absorb any amount of bad news without appearing ruffled.
Although I kept my head down while I surveyed the scene, assessing how I would do the job, I was soon receiving a never-ending stream of visitors, most of them women. They were lobbying, putting their case for or against measures the government was, or was rumoured to be, about to implement. And there was the massive volume of phone calls, letters and faxes. There was tremendous excitement about my presence in Canberra, and a lot of gratitude that there was now access in the PMO of a kind that had not existed since Elizabeth Reid had been women’s adviser to Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s. I saw, or talked to, as many people as possible. I wanted to reconnect. I wanted to hear what was on women’s minds. I felt humbled to receive a visit from Edna Ryan, the lifelong fighter for women’s rights who was then aged 89 and who was upset about the government’s proposed changes to superannuation that, she argued, would disadvantage women. My visitors also included backbenchers and even ministers, who calculated that mine was yet another voice that could get to the Prime Minister and help them with whatever their case was.
It was an article of faith in the PMO that women were antagonised by Keating’s aggressive behaviour in Parliament, principally during Question Time, but I was not convinced that it was such a problem. I knew plenty of women who admired Keating for precisely this reason. They, along with the rest of the country, roared when Keating responded to Opposition Leader John Hewson asking during Question Time on 15 September 1992, why he would not call an early election: ‘The answer is, mate, because I want to do you slowly.’ There was a similar reaction on 2 November, when he referred to the Senate as ‘unrepresentative swill’.
Keating was a superb parliamentary performer, able to home in on his opponents’ weaknesses, always finding the right phrase, with perfectly timed delivery. It was essential to who he was and I thought people liked this about him. There was, I discovered, widespread admiration of Keating among some lesbians, mainly academics, for his style and wit. There were other women who’d despised Hawke and who felt Keating was a man who, despite his old-fashioned attitudes towards women, had passions and a vision that the country sorely needed. But my friends were hardly a representative sample; we needed to know what the wider population of women thought.
I was surprised to find that there was no qualitative research. Karen Luscombe, the ALP’s Perth-based researcher, did only quantitative, telephone polling, intended to track voting intentions. I felt we needed research that probed what was influencing women’s views on the government. We needed someone like Barbara Riley, the expert facilitator of focus groups whose report on what we needed to do to fix Ms. had been so devastatingly accurate. Barbara had since married and was now Riley-Smith; she did a lot of work for the NSW ALP, so her credentials were acceptable to the PMO. The only problem was we did not have any money and the ALP was not prepared to pay for it. In the end, Mike Keating, the head of PM&C, said that so long as the research was not party-political it could come from the OSW budget. This would not be a problem. I firmly believed we needed policy solutions, not political gimmicks, to address whatever the research revealed, so it was perfectly legitimate to use taxpayer funds. Even the Opposition, when it found out about the research, was not able to mount a credible case against it. The project had to go to tender and fortunately Barbara’s proposal won. When she had completed the research, we had a report that contained the most thorough exploration of the views of Australian women that had ever been conducted for non-commercial purposes. And it was the first time an Australian government had ever asked women what they wanted.
The twenty focus groups were conducted in every capital city and two regional centres, Geelong and Mackay. In each place there were two groups that were, on Barbara’s recommendation, divided according to age, either under or over 40. Participants were selected on the basis of income; they had to be eligible for some form of government assistance, which in those days was all income-tested, and which cut out at a combined family income of $55,000. There was a mixture of employed and stay-at-home mothers but there were no professionals, no so-called yuppies, and no one who was not struggling financially. Every woman who was in receipt of family allowances (the money for each child paid directly to mothers) knew down to the last cent exactly what her payment was, and most of them said they needed that money for food and other essentials.
The overarching question asked of these women was: what do you think about your own lives and about what the government is doing for women? We were attempting to probe their knowledge of, and satisfaction with, existing policies and services, but we also wanted to tap into how they felt about their lives. Maybe not the government’s business, perhaps, but to me it was impossible to separate the two because, in Australia at least, government programs such as childcare (and, back then, the lack of a government-paid maternity leave scheme) were such big factors in determining whether women could participate in the economy after they had had children.
Mary Ann O’Loughlin and I observed each of the groups, sitting behind the two-way mirror (so that we could not be seen), and listened to these women speaking with remarkable frankness about their lives. In the smaller centres, where there were no professional research rooms, we listened on a loudspeaker strung under the door of an adjoining motel room. It meant we could not see them but their voices came through clearly enough. We listened as Barbara asked the women to describe their lives, to talk about the things that mattered and the things that worried them. They needed little encouragement. It was obvious that many of them rarely got to talk about themselves. The focus groups gave them a chance, especially as they could open up in front of people they knew they would never see again. It turned out to be a great lubricant for honesty and some startling findings.
Inevitably, although Barbara was scrupulous about not asking, many of the women volunteered opinions of the Prime Minister and his wife. We were surprised at how big an issue it was that he wore Italian suits. Some of the women blamed Annita, saying she must have insisted that he wear European, not Australian, clothes. One woman in Brisbane said,
‘Remember when he was Treasurer, he told us to buy Australian but he doesn’t himself.’
The women tended to think that Keating was ‘arrogant’ and ‘cold’ and ‘not interested in ordinary people’. Several expressed distaste for the way he had come to power (by ‘stabbing Bob Hawke in the back’—a sentiment that would also haunt Julia Gillard almost twenty years later). Others liked the way that Keating was so clearly devoted to his family, but they wanted him to engage them more.
‘Smile!’ was the advice many of them gratuitously offered. ‘Lighten up.’
Some time later, I was travelling with the Prime Minister in suburban Perth. We pulled up at traffic lights, and people in the car beside us noticed him. They started pointing and gesticulating, and not in a friendly way. Paul ignored them.
‘Smile!’ I urged him. I was sitting directly behind Paul and had a clear view of the people in the next car.
‘Why?’ he said. He was impatient with such trite political gestures.
‘Please,’ I begged him. ‘Just do it.’
He turned his face, gave them a wave, and one of his big, beautiful and infectious grins. The transformation was remarkable. The people in the car broke into huge smiles, and their hands, which a moment earlier had been giving him the finger, returned the wave. Then the lights changed. We zoomed off and Paul went back to muttering into his mobile. Persuading Paul that he needed to engage with the public was a frustrating and mostly futile job. It wasn’t who he was. Which, of course, was what made him special. But there was an election to be won.
The focus group findings were utterly unambiguous and remarkably uniform across the entire country; there were no discernible state or regional differences. Australian women valued the independence and choices their lives provided, even when those choices were accompanied by the stress of the double load of housework and raising children with outside employment. They did, however, feel their work was undervalued and that men did not do enough to share the load. When asked what issues were important to the country, they nominated employment (including unemployment), and education and training. But when asked what was important to them as women, the answers were unanimous. They had three overwhelming concerns: childcare, women’s health and violence against women. Stark and simple and, for a federal government, extremely challenging.
Childcare was of course a federal responsibility, but as I knew from my time in OSW a decade earlier, one that was contentious—and expensive. But clearly we had to do something. Barbara interpreted the ‘women’s health’ response in two ways. It was women caring for their family’s well-being—and thus wanting to preserve Medicare, which was under threat from the Coalition—but it was also a way of expressing their need for ‘me’ time, some respite from always having to be on duty as mothers or wives or employees. They wanted to be seen as individuals, as the women and girls they once were, before all these responsibilities enveloped their lives. Not a lot we could do about that except by having the Prime Minister respectfully acknowledge the contribution women were making to the country. To let them know they were appreciated. But we needed to look at health and see what we might do—apart from assuring Australians that Medicare would be safe under a Keating government.
But it was the response on violence that staggered us. Almost every woman mentioned it. In order to get rankings of what the women viewed as the most important issues, Barbara asked them to imagine they had a budget of $100 and to allocate the money according to their priorities. In Mackay, Queensland only one of the nine women in the group did not include violence on her list, and two of them allocated 40 per cent of their entire budget to dealing with violence. I found this outcome extremely confronting. I had no idea violence against women was so extensive, and I did not have a clue how to respond to it. Domestic and sexual violence were state responsibilities, covered by state laws. The federal government had no role—but perhaps it needed to find one. Mary Ann and I briefed the two Dons on the findings and said we would come back with recommendations on what we could do in response to these issues that so clearly troubled Australian women. We had uncovered some very serious problems, issues that had previously not been paid sufficient attention by government. That would have to change, and not just because there was an election looming. Campaign and policy material coming from the state and federal Liberal and National parties was highlighting the same three issues. The budget of the NSW Liberal Fahey government, delivered in early September 1993, emphasised women’s health, childcare and violence against women. All the political parties were uncovering the same discontent and, I was pleasantly surprised to discover, they all felt the need to respond. Maybe, finally, women were about to get the political attention they deserved. What they wanted was clear enough. We just had to work out how to deliver.
Figuring that out, and then doing my best to get it delivered, would occupy most of the time I spent in the PMO. I spent a lot of time consulting widely with women’s groups and key individuals, and I worked closely with Mary Ann on policy ideas. But while we worked on the big policy items—‘kicking goals’ as it was referred to in the office—we also had day-to-day decisions, crises and the occasional opportunity to deal with. For instance, in mid-1992 a vacancy loomed on the board of the Reserve Bank, Australia’s central bank, and arguably the most important board in the country. It had never had a woman member, so I suggested to Keating that he could make history. He was amenable and asked his Treasurer, John Dawkins, to recommend someone. I remember a meeting with a Dawkins staffer who explained that he’d asked Treasury for the names of some suitable women but ‘they couldn’t find any’. They still ‘couldn’t find any’ after several prompts, so Mary Ann and I realised we’d have to find someone ourselves. We consulted OSW’s Register of Women. I was not optimistic, remembering from my days at OSW that this list of women who were nominally suitable for board appointments was not very comprehensive. But, I hoped, maybe it had been upgraded. In fact, almost the very first name the coordinates produced was ideal. We ran it past the Prime Minister and then went back to Dawkins’ office. We’ve ‘found one’, we said, trying not to smirk. They couldn’t argue with Janet Holmes à Court, who was one of Australia’s leading businesswomen, head of the largest construction company as well as helming a number of other companies that had been part of the empire of her late husband, Robert. In fact, they should have been able to find her themselves. The government appointed her to the Reserve Bank Board in August 1992 and she served for five years. Sadly, when her term expired in 1997, Prime Minister John Howard defied usual practice and did not reappoint her, despite her meeting with him and saying she’d like to stay on.3 Instead, a few months later, he appointed Jillian Broadbent, a banker. This helped cement the tradition we had created of appointing women. Fortunately, it has continued and expanded. In 2017, three of the nine Reserve Bank Board members are women. It seems they are no longer so hard to find.
I’d arrived in the office one morning to discover workmen crawling all over my desk.
‘Someone must like you, love,’ I was told when I asked what they were doing.
They were hooking me up to the PM’s communications system, I learned. This meant that Keating could ‘buzz’ me as he could the other advisers. It meant I was no longer just a transient blow-in, but part of the team. Shortly afterwards, I was asked to stay on until the election—whenever that would be. Chip decided to return to New York. He’d spent the three months of our expected stay in Canberra and was bored out of his brain. I was in the office for long hours, he did not have a job, and there were only so many times he could run around Lake Burley Griffin to increase his already peak fitness. More than anything, though, he needed to return to deal with the financial catastrophe that was unfolding back in New York.
Dale Lang had peremptorily cancelled my employment contract, meaning we had no money to pay the mortgage on my apartment. There were no grounds for the cancellation; my contract allowed me to return to Australia for short-term work assignments, and I had done this in the past, but Lang apparently calculated that I would not have the resources to sue for restitution of the payments. And he was right. I learned from the Australian Consulate in New York that someone from the Ms. offices had called, wanting to know how long I would be in Canberra. They made no attempt to ask me. I presumed the $200,000 Lang saved went straight to the Ms. editorial budget. Great for them, if true, but a very nasty problem for me. We could rent out the apartment, although that income would not cover the mortgage and Chip would need to find somewhere cheap to live. My PMO salary was $86,882 per year, pro-rated to my tenure. Starting in July, when Chip returned to New York, I began to send him almost the entire amount each pay period to meet our mortgage payments. With an exchange rate hovering around 50 cents, it was a brutal experience. I moved out of our Yarralumla rental and began to rely on the hospitality of friends.
I was under no illusions that I was an office insider. I was not, and did not expect to be, party to the big political decisions. I could not contribute to discussions about economic settings or foreign policy—although I was gratified when Paul asked me to be the note-taker for his meeting with Irish President Mary Robinson. He spent the first ten minutes or so trying to get her to comprehend the size and complexity of Indonesia. Unlike her tiny island homeland, which you could drive across in a day, Paul demonstrated—with lots of hand gestures—that it took seven hours to fly from one end of the Indonesian archipelago to the other.
I was thrilled that I could now be buzzed, but I also knew that it would never happen. If Paul wanted you, he’d come to you. I’d heard from a former staffer that Malcolm Fraser, when he was impatient, would angrily sweep his hand across the entire console, buzzing every single person in the PMO, to ensure he got the attention of whoever it was he needed to talk to. Paul was not at all like that. I’d be on the phone and look up and see the familiar figure in my doorway.
‘When you’ve got a moment, love,’ he’d say and sit himself down in front of my desk.
‘I have to go,’ I’d say into the phone. No hurry, the Prime Minister would gesture.
Those who saw only the brutality of Keating against his political enemies in Question Time would be amazed at how kind and considerate he could be with people. He knew all the personal stories of his staff and was always ready with advice or practical help. When a staff member had a miscarriage, Keating wanted her to try some of the Chinese remedies that he and Annita used to maintain their health. Whenever you went to The Lodge, the pungent smell of whatever concoction of roots and powders was boiling away on the stove would waft through the rooms. On election night, in March 1993, amid the euphoria and exultation of his unexpected win, and before he had made his victory speech, Keating had taken me aside and said, ‘On Monday, get yourself a ticket to New York and see Chip for a couple of weeks, and then come back and we’ll talk.’
Some in the office thought Keating was too much of a softie. He would take someone into his private office to give them the bad news that they had to be let go. The longer the meeting went, we’d learned from previous experience, the less likely it was to achieve its mission. Yes, there they were emerging from Paul’s office, laughing and shaking hands. Not only not sacked, but now the best of buddies. Very few people ever left the office and almost everyone who has ever worked for Paul Keating is still in touch with him. No other Prime Minister has an annual get-together with his staff as Keating and his PMO still do, more than two decades after he left office. To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of his becoming Prime Minister, in December 2012, there was a really big party at the Bellevue Hotel in Sydney that brought together almost everyone who had ever worked for Paul Keating, including all the federal police and the drivers. The loyalty and affection former staffers have for him is a remarkable commentary on the man, although it is not easy to explain. Perhaps we want to be part of his aura because we all admire his continuing boldness and creativity. He is never short of a killer aphorism to capture the essence of a problem, or a person. (‘All tip and no ice-berg’, to describe former federal Treasurer Peter Costello, showed he has turned this aptitude into an art form.) But more than all that, I think we are dazzled by the breadth and depth of this boy from Bankstown. He had shaped himself into a person who understood in profound detail how the world worked, from economics to geopolitics to aesthetics and beyond, and he was constantly seeking to make it work better. And although he had made it to the very top of the political tree, first as Treasurer and then Prime Minister, he had never left anyone behind. If you were part of any of his story, you remained there. Unless you chose to leave or behaved in such a way that earned his enmity. Once that happened, it was hard to come back.
The first time I flew on the VIP aircraft with Keating was to Perth. As soon as we’d boarded, Paul delved into his battered leather attaché case and, grabbing a handful of CDs, handed them to the steward.
‘He’ll put them on as soon as we’re up,’ he told me, indicating I should sit next to him.
I assumed this was a privilege accorded to first-time flyers. As we taxied to takeoff, Paul retrieved a blue clothbound volume from the attaché case that, he soon revealed to me, was a set of maps of Georgian Sydney. As the music—I think it was Mahler—filled the cabin, he leafed through the book, jabbing with his forefinger to show me the few buildings that still remained. If your only knowledge of Keating’s aesthetic was from the media you would know about his love for French clocks, but you would scarcely be aware of how broadly his taste ranged, and the extent of his expertise. I later learned about an official trip to the UK during which the Prime Minister took a late-night detour to a county somewhere, to the impressive Georgian residence of an Englishman who wanted Keating’s advice on some of the finer points of the restoration he was undertaking.
We were running early for our event so Paul took us to the shop at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, which was near the venue where he was due to speak.
‘Hi, Paul,’ said the women behind the counter.
They were totally unfazed by the sight of the Prime Minister and his entourage filling-up their tiny space; it turned out he was a frequent visitor. While the rest of us pretended to browse, Paul went straight to the section containing books on architecture.
‘Have you read this one?’ he asked Mark Ryan, showing him a slim volume. ‘I’ll buy it for you.’
But when he put his hand in his pocket, there was no money so Ryan ended up paying for his gift. It was not the first time this had happened, Ryan told me as we trooped out, farewells from the shop women ringing in our ears.
‘I’ve got quite a collection of art books Paul thinks I should read,’ he said.
I remembered how in May 1980 I’d run into Keating, then an Opposition frontbencher, just outside the new High Court building which had been officially opened by the Queen the night before.
‘What a shocking waste of public money that building is,’ I’d said to him, echoing the cynicism that was popular among journalists and some Labor politicians.
‘You can never invest too much in the public,’ he’d said with an intensity I found surprising.
It was unexpected to have my complacent disparagement challenged. Exciting even. Who else in cosy, self-reinforcing Canberra ever did that? I realised then that there was a lot more to Paul Keating than politics and self-promotion. He proceeded to treat me to a passionate defence of public buildings, arguing that such investment was integral to civic pride. ‘That place up there,’ he said gesturing up the hill towards where construction of the new Parliament House had just begun, ‘will ensure that local manufactures and crafts are maintained. Every element of that building will be a tribute to the Australian people, including the skills of the carpenters and stonemasons and all the craftsmen who will make that place.’
Back then I did not know about Keating’s appreciation of music, architecture and the decorative arts, or that he was in the process of becoming a world-renowned collector of furniture and other objects from 1795 to 1799, the Directoire period, the final five years of the French Revolution that was succeeded by Napoleon’s military rule. For those few years an executive of five men (the Directory) and a bi-cameral legislature governed France. Keating has been known to talk in almost reverential terms about this period, not just as the apogee of classicism, which he considers was reached in 1800, but as a time when many of the political values and freedoms we enjoy today were both established and confirmed. All I knew back in 1980 was that this young Labor politician from the western suburbs of Sydney knew enough to tell me, when he heard I was going to Paris for a holiday, not to worry too much about the Louvre, but to spend every moment I could at the Jeu de Paume.
There were many sides to Paul Keating, I learned during the eleven months I spent working for him. I thought I’d known him well enough, that I’d understood this man to be a unique combination of hard and soft, as well-versed in the finer points of Georgian architecture as in the robust requirements of politics and government. But I came to appreciate that these various strands were not just seemingly conflicting elements that he somehow managed to reconcile; each of them was essential to who he was. He is a complicated and arresting man, capable of moving in the one conversation from the complexities of the design of his beloved superannuation scheme to the unique elements of a pair of American girandoles and then returning to the subject in hand which, if it was me sitting patiently through this exposition, might be how we were going to design a new childcare scheme.
One afternoon as we advisers watched Question Time on the television set outside my office, we heard the Prime Minister refer in one of his answers to ‘the laminar flow’. We looked at each other. Nope. No one had a clue. We knew better than to ask him when he returned from the chamber because we knew how draining Question Time was. He always needed some time to recover because, as he told the singer Tom Jones over dinner in Canberra one night in April 1993, it left him exhausted. I was lucky enough to be at that small dinner, and in fact had helped arrange it. The promoter of Jones’ 1993 Australian tour, John Hanson, was a childhood friend of mine; he’d got front row tickets at the Royal Theatre in Canberra for Paul and Annita—and me—and then set up the dinner at Belluci’s Trattoria in the Canberra suburb of Dickson. Annita and I were very much on the sidelines as the two great performers, who took to each other instantly, compared notes on what it was like to put on a show.4 Paul admired Jones’s voice but, he told him, he thought it was wasted on popular music.
‘You should sing opera,’ Keating urged the Welshman.
Jones laughed it off, but after this tremendous compliment from the Prime Minister, the two men could not stop talking.
After Question Time that day it took us some time, in those pre-Google days, to learn that the laminar flow is a scientific term that refers to the flow of viscous fluid, in which the various elements—or laminates—remain separate and unique as they move. Keating used the term again when talking with Laurie Oakes on the Sunday television program in March 1994. He referred to ‘that laminar flow from various parts of the community into employment, one of those laminations has to be from the long term unemployed’.5 It was a somewhat arcane form of political communication, as not many people would be familiar with the term, but when I thought about it, I realised that it was the perfect language with which to describe Paul Keating himself. He exemplified the laminar flow. Many laminates, or layers, made up his character, his skills and his panoply of expertise and interests. There was no one else like him in politics, and the only person I could think of who had come even close in complexity, erudition and range was Gough Whitlam. The difference between Whitlam and Keating was that Keating was self-taught. Whitlam could converse in Latin but Keating had something else. In delivering the eulogy for an old friend, Keating said: ‘With his own eyes and his own taste, and without any specific education in the arts, he developed an acute sense of shape and form both of decoration and of architecture …’6 He was referring to the antiques dealer Bill Bradshaw, but he could just as easily have been talking about himself.
There was also, of course, the Paul Keating who was the familiar tough political operator, who took no prisoners and who often used crude language to bludgeon opponents into shocked submission. This was another essential layer of the whole man. I’d witnessed that side of him plenty of times, but no more spectacularly than in late October 1992, when he summonsed the heads of the television networks to Canberra to demand they ‘do something’ about screening violent movies. A week earlier, his youngest daughter Alexandra, who was aged seven, had a nightmare after watching on television a movie based on a Stephen King horror story. Keating was outraged that such fare was on early enough in the evening for young children to be exposed—and he said so, very publicly. Some of us in the office felt that parents ought to be supervising their children’s television-watching and did not think it was an issue for government, so we were totally unprepared for what followed. There were hundreds of phone calls, letters, and faxes from parents, overwhelmingly from women, and all of them with the same message: Please do something about violence on television. A large number of women wrote: ‘I’ve always hated you, but if you get rid of violence from our television, I will vote for you.’ That certainly got our attention. It was quickly decided that the Prime Minister should invite the TV network chiefs to an emergency meeting, to sort out what to do. Because it was judged to be a ‘women’s issue’, I was put in charge—which is how, a few days later, I came to be sitting with the four network chiefs and the head of their industry association, while we waited for the Prime Minister to join us. Unlike today’s confected confrontations between Prime Ministers and industry bosses, there were no cameras present and no press release afterwards.
Keating strode in and without handshakes or any other niceties, pointed out to the five men—in extremely crude and forceful terms—that the current licensing arrangements provided extraordinarily profitable protection from competition, and suggested they see it in their interest to do something about this issue of overwhelming public concern. The meeting lasted less than half-an-hour, and ended with the television stations proposing a new category of program rating, the MA, which would denote that a film contained violence and which could only be screened after 9 p.m. It was one of the fastest policy developments I had ever witnessed. Although it might have seemed liked a small change, it did Keating an enormous amount of good because he was seen to have responded to parents’ worries—and to have done something about it. The MA rating and 9 p.m. screening time for violent programs is still in force today.
‘She came back to Australia, to join my staff, and then set about feminising me, which she knew was basically a hopeless task,’ Keating said in 1994, a year after I’d left his office.7 In fact, he was not ‘hopeless’ at all. Mostly, he was willing to listen to what I put to him and to grapple with issues that had not previously been on his radar. But it was always easier when he could make a connection from someone or something he already knew. I organised a small roundtable in his office with Susan Ryan, Labor’s first female cabinet minister and a former Minister assisting the Prime Minister on the Status of Women; Jennie George who was President of the ACTU; Mary Ann O’Loughlin, and me to talk about women and the economy. It was a good and easy meeting. Keating got on well with all of us. It was a background session, designed to introduce him to current issues in the area rather than ask for specific policy changes, and of course it was closely related to a subject he knew backwards: the economy. I was frustrated that Treasury and the other economic policy analysts never thought to include women’s labour-market participation, and the policy tools such as childcare needed to support it, in their analyses or forecasts. It was as if they were oblivious to this major force that helped shape outcomes. Not only that, as I’d found at OSW, they often actively resisted even wanting to consider the impact of millions of women becoming economically active. Keating was not like that. He understood the points we were making and, as he’d tell me many years later, having three daughters in a world where women’s fortunes were changing rapidly made him think about the opportunities he wanted them to enjoy—and what might be necessary for governments to do to facilitate that.
Several of the girls Keating had been to school with were now single mothers, struggling after their husbands had walked-out on them. He responded with both anger and sympathy, and understood the government had a role in supporting them. Similarly with carers. He met regularly with his mother, Mim, and a group of her elderly friends. Several of them had ill or disabled husbands to care for, and he could see at first-hand how debilitating and exhausting it was to have to care full-time for another adult human being.
‘Let’s give the old darlings something,’ he’d said during preparation of the 1992/93 budget, one that all current polling suggested was going to be his last. There had been no departmental submission seeking extra money.
But domestic violence was utterly beyond his personal experience. He knew no one who had been a victim, or at least no one who had talked about it. I had to find a way for him to understand what it was like for women who had been subjected to such violence. I also needed to convey to him, and to his office, how big and how terrifying an issue this was for so many Australian women. Not all of them were convinced, despite the results of the research. In his biography of Keating, John Edwards recounts a staff meeting in August where we all argued about the best way for Paul to improve his sagging popularity. Don Watson, Mark Ryan and I—the so-called ‘bleeding hearts’ of the office—all argued that he needed to talk about subjects other than the economy. I reminded them of the research about violence. But Edwards, Don Russell and the other economists—who Watson had labelled ‘the pointy heads’—would have none of it.
‘As an economic adviser, I disagreed,’ Edwards wrote. ‘I said we had not talked nearly enough about the economy, that we had a good story to tell, and that Keating should go after Hewson day after day on economic issues.’8
I was exasperated that the economic advisers could not seem to understand that a Prime Minister had to talk about a whole lot of different things. Keating was no longer Treasurer. He could not just talk about the economy. I argued whenever I saw an opportunity that Keating should include references to women in his speeches, and I became quite creative at devising plausible excuses for him to do this. But I often found myself nagging, because without my interventions, it never happened. It was not something the speechwriters did without prompting. I got worried I would wear out my welcome, but I was also annoyed that it was so hard just to do what I thought was the job they had brought me in to do.
At the same time, I was worried about what to propose in response to the research. Childcare and health were relatively straightforward, although probably expensive, but Mary Ann and I were less certain how to achieve something immediate, tangible, credible and effective on violence. We decided to make it an agenda item for the Premiers’ Conference in October. The premiers had never discussed violence against women, so this was at least a gesture of our intention to take it seriously. There was, I discovered, a Violence Against Women Strategy document that had been tortuously developed by a group of Commonwealth and state bureaucrats. OSW wanted the Prime Minister to launch it. Getting him to launch a dry bureaucratic ‘strategy’ seemed inadequate, insulting almost, given the passion with which the women in the focus groups had talked about violence. We had to do something big. This would do for now but it was not enough.
I thought the best way to introduce Keating to the issue would be for him to meet some ordinary women who could tell him their stories about suffering domestic abuse. That would be more effective than any amount of briefing I could give him. I decided we would arrange for him to visit a women’s refuge. Something very low-key, no media, no publicity of any kind. The best place to do it, I figured, would be in his electorate.
I rang the area coordinating group (few individual refuges were in the phone book, for security reasons) and explained what I hoped to do. The woman who took my call was suspicious; she did not want to get caught up in any publicity stunt. I did my best to reassure her; just three or four people, I said, and no pressure at all on the residents of the refuge if they did not want to meet the Prime Minister. She said she’d have to take it to her committee.
‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘When does it next meet?’
‘In three months’ time.’
I explained we could not wait that long, but thanks anyway.
Next I tried a Catholic refuge, run by St Vincent de Paul in Sydney’s Arncliffe. Again, I thought Paul might feel more comfortable if he could identify with the religion of the people who ran the place. But when I visited I found that not a single resident spoke English. There were Vietnamese women, Turkish women, Chinese women, dozens of them with their children, most of them recently arrived in the country. I was stunned by the appalling realisation that for so many women, their first experience of Australia was brutality at the hands of their husbands. These men were no doubt angry, bitter and frustrated at how they were being treated by their new country, but it was their wives and kids who were bearing the brunt. But this was not the right place for what I had in mind. There were just too many other issues involved and, besides, the women would need interpreters. This was not the way for Keating to hear women telling their own stories.
In the end, I found a place in suburban Perth. It was a modest dwelling and the residents were all young working-class women; Keating would be able to talk easily with them, I thought. I explained to the very accommodating woman who ran the place that they need not do anything special, that we would be there for an hour at the most. The federal police would come the day before to check the place out—that was a routine security requirement—but on the day it would just be Paul and me, with possibly one of the advisers and a federal policeman, who would stay in the car with the driver.
‘Offer him a cup of tea, if you like,’ I said. ‘But don’t go to any trouble.’
‘There was just one thing,’ the refuge manager said. ‘We’ve got an application for funding in. Do you think you can help with that?’
I promised her I’d do what I could.
It turned out Keating was going to be in Perth in just a few weeks. We’d go to the refuge on 8 December 1992. The day before, I went there with federal police officer Peter Holder, a friendly relaxed guy with a wide smiling face, who immediately put the women at their ease.
‘You see,’ I said to them as we left, ‘there’s nothing to be nervous about.’
As it turned out, I was the one who should have been anxious.
As we drove into the street the next day I had trouble recognising the house. Then I saw a huddle of people and a couple of cameras.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said to Paul. ‘This was supposed to be a totally private visit.’
Instead, we had a reception committee. The mayor was there, and the local state member of Parliament and Stephen Smith, who had been on Paul’s staff when I’d first arrived but was now a full-time candidate for the federal seat of Perth. (He would win the seat and go on to be Minister for Foreign Affairs and Defence Minister during the Rudd and Gillard governments.) And, being politicians, these people could not go anywhere without the media.
‘It’s just local stuff,’ Smith assured me. ‘You can’t expect us to ignore that the Prime Minister is visiting our area.’
It got worse. The house had been freshly painted, inside and out, and did not even remotely resemble the run-down place I’d described to Paul. The bedraggled backyard had been transformed into a gaily decorated party scene: umbrellas provided shade to brand-new wooden tables that were stacked with party pies and cupcakes and glasses of orange cordial. There were balloons everywhere. The children who a few days earlier had been sullen or aggressive, now tore around with the excitement that all kids bring to parties. As for their mothers, they were all in their best party frocks, most had had their hair done, they wore makeup. They looked nothing like the defeated women I’d met just the day before. Most of them had cameras.
‘I told you there was no need to go to any trouble,’ I said weakly.
‘Do you think I wanted to meet him looking the way I did the other day?’ one of them said to me. ‘I’ve never met a Prime Minister before.’
She had a point. Paul was soon posing with them, cup of tea in hand. Later I was able to get him to one side with a couple of the women.
‘Just tell him your stories,’ I encouraged them. ‘He wants to understand domestic violence.’
But these women did not want to sully their meeting with the country’s leader by sharing their painful stories. The festive atmosphere was totally at odds with the private terrors they had experienced. How to convey on a sunny afternoon against the laughter of, at least momentarily, happy children the sickening sound of a fist to a face, the screams, the bruises and broken bones, the despair?
The whole exercise was a total failure, I thought. I had not enabled Paul to hear the stories that I thought would aid his understanding of what was happening with so many Australian women and why it was so urgent that we do something.
Developing a childcare policy was almost simple, by comparison. Mary Ann and I began brainstorming. We asked OSW for policy options and informed PM&C and Treasury that we were looking for ideas to reduce the cost of care for families on moderate incomes, who did not qualify for fee relief. We were not attracted to the idea of tax deductibility of fees which was being pushed by the Women Lawyers’ Association and other high-earning professional women. Heather Carmody, from the Business Council of Australia’s Council for Equal Opportunity, told me that everyone she talked to in private industry wanted tax deductibility. I was sympathetic to their argument that childcare was an essential expense in earning an income, and to the double standard whereby men could claim professional expenses on their taxes. Nevertheless, Mary Ann and I felt equity principles took precedence. This issue had long been debated within the women’s movement and the lines were clearly drawn. Full deductibility was hugely expensive and would divert too much of the childcare dollar into the purses of high-earning women. At the same time, we both thought that if we could somehow use the tax system to recompense at least part of the cost of childcare, that would be some acknowledgement that it was a work-related expense. We were determined that childcare should no longer be seen—by the government or the community—as a welfare issue. Childcare was an economic issue, a necessary cost to women’s ability to earn an income, either through employment or preparing for work through study. We also wanted to take away from childcare the inevitable stigma that attached to welfare programs.
Early in September at a meeting with Don Russell, Mark Ryan and Ric Simes, Mary Ann and I put on the table the bones of a possible package. I loved working with Mary Ann. Not just because she had such an acute social policy brain and could always figure out a solution to what we wanted to do, but she was always so exuberant. With her, doing wonky policy was never boring. It was fun. Our proposed package would include a major expansion of supply—that is, more places, a rebate for childcare spending above the level of current fee relief, an accreditation package, and the possibility of a fee-relief credit card. We had figures that showed that of the 1.8 million families with children under twelve, only 230,000 were in the government childcare system, and there was an estimated unmet demand for 540,000 places. The Tax Office had provided an estimate that as many as 200,000 people would be likely to benefit from the tax rebate. At the same time, I raised the possibility of cashing out the Dependent Spouse Rebate (DSR), converting the tax rebate men received for their stay-at-home wives to a cash payment for the women. The DSR was loathed by feminists, because it was a deterrent to women working; it gave high-earning husbands a tax benefit (in addition to the benefits they received from having a full-time wife doing housework, childcare, shopping, etc.). We also included a proposal for a $1000 one-off payment to new mothers; ‘the baby grand’, Mary Ann called it. That one did not survive the cut, but the meeting did agree we would have departments look at the cost of providing total coverage: childcare for all who needed it by 2000. We were going to do something very big.
But it had to be kept secret. There was enormous opposition within the Labor Party to the notion of a tax rebate because it was seen, erroneously in my view, as the thin end of the wedge towards tax deductibility. In fact, it was the opposite. A rebate was a flat amount and thus of greater benefit to lower-income earners, whereas tax deductibility, especially for the total costs of childcare, could significantly reduce the overall tax burden of higher-earners. I hoped the rebate would come to be seen as a more equitable alternative that would take the heat out of the push for full deductibility. Some purists thought that the only policy solution was to simply directly fund more centres. I had lunch with Neal Blewett, an old friend and a former political scientist—he had taught me politics at the University of Adelaide in the 1960s—who had been given the big ministry of Social Security by Keating. He reminded me of how toxic childcare politics still were within the Labor Party: ‘I suggested there is some hangover from ferocious Walshian attitudes,’ Blewett wrote of our meeting in his political memoir, ‘but pointed out also that childcare is an expensive program and in these tight budgetary times restrictive attitudes still predominate.’9 I told him that, given the views of women across Australia that affordable childcare was needed, the government had to do something substantial. When I mentioned we were thinking of a rebate, Blewett responded that his ‘worry’ was that a rebate would benefit the better off and leave no funds to expand fee-relief. I explained this was not the case but Blewett’s reaction was salutary. If someone of his progressive views, whose portfolio required him to support disadvantaged groups, had qualms about our proposal, how would we fare with the full cabinet? Contrary to the myth invented by some on the right of the ALP, that Labor governments were putty in the hands of feminists, when it came to childcare policy, almost the reverse was true. We were portrayed as ‘special interests’, on a par with lobbyists for business or mining, annoying intrusions into the political conversation. Anyone would have thought that the evil feminists wanted to put those childcare billions in their own pockets. In fact, we were trying to make women’s lives easier as they contributed to the economy—and kept the population going and the home fires burning. Our only leverage was the need to attract votes from women, and we had to make that case to the PMO and, of course, the Prime Minister. If he was on board, everyone else would fall into line.
We had the support of the ACTU which, without knowing the details of what we were planning, argued strongly for more support for childcare. The ALP was another matter. There was no love lost between the National Secretariat and the PMO. Bob Hogg, the National Secretary, was concerned that no one in the PMO had any campaign experience. The PMO felt Hogg was too negative and not willing to cut Keating any slack. Nor did the ALP see any need to conduct a special campaign for women; there was not a single woman on the ALP Campaign Committee. My activities were dismissed with derision. But, the government was seeing some light. Wayne Swan, the Queensland State Secretary of the ALP, who would successfully contest the federal seat of Lilley in the next election, reported to the PMO that the Goods and Services Tax (GST) was turning out to be a major negative for the Liberals. Keating’s image was seen as softening somewhat (I liked to take a little credit for that), and he was benefiting from a ‘devil you know’ feeling, as voters contemplated the unknown terrors of John Hewson’s GST.
I consulted widely, while not being able to say exactly what we were considering. The word had got out, though, so while I would not confirm that a tax rebate was on the table, I was willing to canvass the views of key constituencies. In late September I met with Eva Cox and Helen Leonard from the Women’s Electoral Lobby. Eva was very opposed to a rebate. Instead, she suggested, why not have a tax credit that could either be added to a woman’s Family Allowances or deducted from her tax liability. I could not see a significant difference between a credit and a rebate, especially as we were hoping to be able to offer it as a fortnightly cash payment (perhaps able to be collected from Medicare offices) for women who did not want to wait until tax time to claim the benefit. But I was encouraged that there might be scope to reach an accommodation with the women’s movement.
On 9 February, just two days after he’d called an election for 13 March, Keating launched his economic policy at the National Press Club in Canberra. It was a major set-piece speech of the campaign, as important in many ways as the formal campaign launch that would come a fortnight later. The central announcements were a total surprise, even to some of his cabinet colleagues. There was a dramatic cut in company tax, development assistance for business—and a major boost for childcare. The Prime Minister announced a tax rebate of 30 per cent of the costs of childcare, up to a maximum of $28 a week for one child in work-related childcare. Commenting in his diary, Neal Blewett described the policy as ‘not a particularly egalitarian proposal’ but ‘electorally smart’.10 I thought he was flat-out wrong in not seeing that it was an egalitarian response to how to reimburse women for their childcare costs. There were other elements to the package, including a cashing out of the dependent spouse rebate (which was never to happen; the DSR was one of those policies so beloved by senior bureaucrats, many of whom were beneficiaries, that no matter what governments promised, it never went away). Mary Ann and I were ecstatic. We had got what we thought was a fair and sensible policy and it had been announced as economic policy. This was in some ways as significant as the policy itself.
In his book about Keating, Don Watson writes that the Prime Minister complained that I ‘forced’ him to do things he did not want to do. I’m still deciding whether to be offended or complimented by the notion that I could ‘force’ Paul Keating to do anything, but perhaps what he had in mind when he said this was the speech to launch the National Agenda for Women on 10 February 1993. What had been intended as a routine speech had taken on a new significance once the election was called; it was now a major campaign event. I had written a speech that made several announcements we hoped would appeal to the women in the focus groups, including one that tangentially addressed the issue of violence. The night before, Mark Ryan, Don Watson and I had gone over the speech and decided what the ‘grab’ should be. This is the section of the speech that would be highlighted for the television cameras. There was no guarantee they would follow our advice or, if they did, whether their news directors would put it to air, but it was usually a safe bet that the television-watching population that night would see on the news the ‘grab’ we had selected.
Mark wanted us to go very hard on some remarks made in January 1993 by Judge Derek Bollen, of the South Australian Supreme Court, who when instructing the jury in a rape in marriage trial had said: ‘There is, of course, nothing wrong with a husband faced with his wife’s refusal to have intercourse, in attempting in an acceptable way, to persuade her to change her mind, and that might involve a measure of rougher than usual handling.’11
‘I was shocked,’ I had written into the speech, ‘to hear …’ and I’d quoted the latter few words and then put in our announcement about gender training for members of the judiciary.
When Paul read the speech at Kirribilli House, just a couple of hours before he was due to deliver it, he baulked at this section. He did not want to discuss it with me, but he told Mark in extremely colourful language that he would not say it. After some to-ing and fro-ing, Paul said to me:
‘I don’t want to say “shocked”. That sounds too strong. Can’t I say “surprised”, or something like that?’
‘Say what you like,’ I said.
I was angry that he had not read the speech sooner, giving me no time to rewrite it. I was also angry that he was unwilling to strongly condemn the judge’s atrocious comments. I did not tell him that the speech had already been distributed to the media. That would have meant another fight as we were supposed to have the PM’s clearance before release, but when he was late reading them we often had no choice. All speeches were marked ‘To Be Checked Against Delivery’. I just had to hope the media would not make a big deal out of the Prime Minister watering down his comments on the subject of rape.
We arrived at Bankstown where the place was absolutely packed, and the goodwill towards Paul was palpable. Quentin Bryce, the Sex Discrimination Commissioner and Elizabeth Evatt, who was President of the Australian Law Reform Commission, as well as a group of Labor women MPs and senators greeted him. I hung back at the rear of the hall as he was guided to the stage. I began to tense up as he got to the key part of the speech:
‘I was shocked,’ he said.
I relaxed. He’d said it. Thank goodness, I thought to myself, no chance the media can make anything of this now. But then I realised that the room had erupted and it was quickly apparent that Paul really was shocked: by the cheers and wild applause that greeted his comment. He went on to read the lines about gender-based training for judges and magistrates and the room went crazy again. He looked out at the sea of yelling, clapping women and said it again, only this time with the kind of pizzaz that only Paul Keating can produce:
‘It’s back to school for judges and magistrates.’
I wish I could have written a line like that. It got the crowd on its feet again. Paul smiled, repeated the line—and went on with the speech. The ‘grab’ was all over television that night, and women columnists and opinion makers responded positively to Paul’s comments on the recalcitrant judge.
When Keating went on to say that while he could have made his major childcare announcement today, rather than in his economic statement, he had decided ‘it is time childcare was included amongst our mainstream issues’, there was further wild applause. Then a standing ovation at the words: ‘The time is long past, as far as I am concerned, where childcare was tagged as “a women’s issue” or a “welfare issue” and only attracted the crumbs from the table where the budget banquet was enjoyed.’ I felt hugely vindicated. Not only had Keating agreed to the massive childcare announcement being included in the economic speech, but now he was getting almost hysterical applause from a crowd of 600 women. It was a big moment. We had succeeded in wrestling women’s policy away from welfare and into the economic mainstream, where of course it belonged, and the significance of this was certainly not lost on the audience.
Today, when talk about childcare and paid parental leave is mostly couched within the debate about women’s workforce participation, this does not sound like a big deal. In the early 1990s, there was still far from a consensus that mothers even be in the workforce, let alone that policy could boost economic activity by facilitating this. The Australian editorialised in response to Keating’s announcement that encouraging women into employment, as this policy was designed to do, was ‘a strange argument to make at a time of record unemployment’.12 Nor was there support from the media for treating childcare as an economic policy lever. I’d travelled on the press bus a few days later and was challenged by the Sydney Morning Herald’s Tom Burton. He first berated me for including childcare in the economic statement, and then he got stuck into me for steering Keating towards ‘middle-class welfare’. This would not be the last time I would have this argument with journalists, but that day while I tried to maintain a sunny exterior, inside I seethed with anger and frustration. What was behind this savage opposition to including women’s work, and its necessary supports, in a mainstream economic policy? Why were these journalists so obtuse that they could not see the broad economic benefits of supporting mothers returning to work? How come they never denounced benefits such as tax-deductible conferences in places like Venice, or barristers being able to depreciate their libraries as ‘middle-class welfare’? Why was it only policies that benefited women that were disparaged in this way? I could not answer these questions—and neither could they—because there were no rational answers. It was prejudice, pure and simple.
I’d also included a couple of other announcements in the women’s speech. The most important, to my mind, was the establishment of a longitudinal study of women’s health. I’d heard about a similar study in the United States and it seemed to me that gathering vital data about women’s health and well-being, over time, would provide an invaluable tool for informing policy for decades to come. I worked closely with Jenny Macklin who was the senior adviser to Brian Howe, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Health, to ensure the project had the backing of all the right people in the health field. Jenny, of course, went on to become a distinguished federal member of Parliament, a senior member of the Rudd and Gillard cabinets, and the first woman deputy leader of the ALP. This was not an announcement that would bring an audience to its feet, or even be reported in the press, but it was a solid and important initiative and a further response to women’s expressed concerns about health issues. It is one of the things I accomplished during my time in the PMO of which I am still the most proud. The Australian Longitudinal Study of Women’s Health (ALSWH) is now run as a collaboration between the federal Department of Health and the Universities of Newcastle and Queensland. Since 1996, it has tracked the physical and emotional health and important life-events (marriage, birth etc.) of 58,000 Australian women throughout their lives. A new, younger cohort was added in 2012.13 The data is shared with 650 researchers and is linked to Medicare and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme usage, to test take-up of services and medications relating to health issues ranging from depression to weight gain. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the ongoing benefits for Australian women’s health of this research. Fortunately it has won international acclaim for successive governments which have funded its continuance for more than two decades.14
This was just one example of relatively small, but carefully targeted, policy announcements on women’s health in direct response to women in the focus groups. A few months earlier, Brian Howe had announced a $64 million program for the Early Detection of Breast Cancer and named Dr Mary Rickard to be the public face of a campaign that, within five years, would be able to screen 860,000 Australian women. This followed an earlier decision to allocate $23 million for a cervical cancer-screening program and to appoint Dr Edith Weisberg as the spokeswoman for that. I had arranged for Howe to make these two announcements to a group of women’s magazine editors in Sydney—in the cabinet room in the federal government offices. There had never before been a media briefing there, so I was pretty sure the editors would all turn up—just so they could say they had been there—and they did. Once the official business was over, I had a quiet word with Nancy Pilcher who was the editor-in-chief of Vogue.
‘Would you be interested in an interview with Annita Keating?’
‘We’ve been trying for months,’ she said, smiling widely.
It took several months as magazines have very long lead times, but the March issue of Vogue featured a spread of photographs of the Prime Minister’s wife looking ultra-stylish and, sensationally, her usual tangle of curls replaced by long, straight hair. All the media picked-up the photographs. They were reproduced on the front pages of all the newspapers and featured on television news bulletins meaning that few Australians would not be aware that Annita Keating, mother of four, could hold her own in the country’s top fashion magazine, wearing Australian apparel and looking absolutely stunning. I’d also been instrumental in talking to Kathy Bail, editor of Rolling Stone magazine, about featuring the Prime Minister on the cover. I’d gone with him to the photo shoot, at Lorrie Graham’s Surry Hills loft studio, where Keating was surprisingly receptive to being treated like a rock star. Perhaps it reminded him of his early days in Sydney, when he’d managed a band called the Ramrods, before he’d opted for a career in politics. The cover showed him looking supercool, peeking out over the top of a pair of Ray-Bans. Inside was an interview conducted by the musician Reg Mombassa, and writers Linda Jaivin and Peter Corris. The Prime Minister stated that he did not think marijuana should be legalised and revealed that his favourite Beatle was Paul McCartney. No surprises there. The PMO was ecstatic. ‘Annita in Vogue and Paul in Rolling Stone …’ enthused one staff member to the Sydney Morning Herald, mocking the Opposition efforts with far less-groovy publications.15
My final media effort was with Woman’s Day, which had been only too happy to accept my offer of unprecedented shots of the Keating family relaxing on the lawns at Kirribilli House. The children were young and, like their parents, arrestingly photogenic. They even had a good-looking dog. These media gigs were not a substitute for policy initiatives, and were never intended to be. They merely added a few more pieces to the mosaic of altering perceptions about Paul Keating, especially by women. They were not artificial; instead they revealed things about Keating and his wife and family that were apparent to anyone who was close to them, but which had never before been on public view. I thought it was totally appropriate for the people who would be deciding who should govern the country for the next three years to know more about the Prime Minister, to see his lighter side and to watch him interact with the family he adored. It was part of who he was, but it was a part that he had always been reluctant to share before.
Paul looked exhausted and dispirited when he arrived at the State Theatre in Market Street, Sydney at midday on Sunday 28 February 1993, for what was ostensibly the launch of Labor’s arts policy, but in fact was a concert to honour him. I was waiting at the kerb with the movie actor Sam Neill, who would escort Paul and Annita to their seats. Garry McDonald was there too, in character as Norman Gunston, getting in the way with his camera crew, trying to engage with the Prime Minister. As he emerged from the car, Paul swatted at him as if he were a troublesome insect.
‘I don’t think I’ve got a twenty-minute speech in me today, Annie,’ Paul said as I hurriedly briefed him on what to expect inside and handed him some notes Don Watson had prepared.
I followed them into the theatre; it was dark, except for the spotlight on a lone Circus Oz aerialist who, clinging to a rope, swung daringly across the void above the heads of the audience. He was a bit like Paul Keating the politician, who was also a high-wire act performer, putting on a dazzling show, taking risks, no net. You could see, as the Prime Minister watched the brave performer swing from side-to-side in that cavernous space, that he felt something of a connection. He seemed to perk-up a bit. Then the audience realised that Keating had arrived and there was a mighty roar. A tumultuous wave of sound swirled around the room that bore within it the affection, the admiration, the gratitude and, also, the fear of what was to come if this man were to be swept from office and replaced by John Hewson. That morning, when he had spied Sam Neill handing out pro-Labor pamphlets at the Double Bay shopping centre, the Liberal leader had threatened him with the words, ‘You will never work in this town again.’ The applause was raw and raucous, and it bore Keating down the aisle towards the front row seat from where he would watch the performance. You could see his shoulders lift as he surveyed the screaming adoring crowd, a huge grin breaking across his face. He sat down, and the show began.
The concert started with a short piece by Russell Page from Bangarra, the notable Aboriginal dance company. Then, following a scene-setting speech from leading actor Bryan Brown, there was a short, sizzling dance by Jan Pinkerton and Paul Mercurio, the star of the current Baz Luhrmann hit film Strictly Ballroom. Mercurio was wearing his trademark white singlet, the same one that—unwashed and still smelling of sweat—would be auctioned-off at the end of the week, along with many other significant items, including a Prime Ministerial tie, to raise money to pay for the costs of this extraordinary show.16
It had been made to happen by a high-powered group of people from various parts of the arts industry who decided that, whatever the election outcome, they wanted to thank Keating for the support he had given them throughout his public life. Arts for Labor, as they decided to call themselves, first met at the Birchgrove, Sydney home of publicist Rae Francis. I was invited and soon found myself the liaison person between the PMO and the group. Its core members included Anne Britton, the federal secretary of the Media Arts and Entertainment Alliance; film producers Erroll Sullivan, Michael Thornhill and Hal McElroy; literary agents Rosemary Creswell and Jane Cameron; the Writers’ Guild’s Jeanette Paramour; and Michael Lynch, who was general manager of the Sydney Theatre Company. They had met regularly over a couple of months and conceived a show that would be part-performance, part-tribute, showcasing the best of Australian arts in an unprecedented act of gratitude. One Saturday I drove up to the northern beaches with Erroll Sullivan to Bryan Brown’s home to persuade him to lend his support by emceeing the event. Once he was on board, the other big names quickly followed.
After the first performances, the actor Robyn Nevin read excerpts from scores of testimonials from grateful recipients of government financial support for the arts, including almost every single living person who had benefited from a ‘Keating’. This was the unofficial name given to the generous two-year Australian Artists Creative Fellowships, instigated by Keating in 1989 when he was still Treasurer, to provide financial security for mature artists across all genres. Between 1989 and 1996, 65 artists received Keatings. They included writer Frank Moorhouse, who used his to produce two of the books of his impressive League of Nations trilogy; theatre director Neil Armfield, who created Cloudstreet, based on Tim Winton’s novel and which became one of the most successful theatrical productions ever staged in Australia; poets Les Murray and John Tranter, who produced significant collections; writer Kate Grenville, who wrote The Idea of Perfection which won the UK Orange Prize for Women’s fiction; and a host of other Australian greats, such as Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Dorothy Hewett, Thea Astley, Richard Meale, Geoffrey Tozer, John Bell, Reg Livermore and Garth Welch.
Paul Keating understood the concept, and the value, of ‘soft power’ long before it was touted as a tool of diplomacy. The ‘Keatings’ cost a total of $11.7 million over their lifetime (they were abolished by the Howard government). Compare the value of this investment in Australian creativity and its value to the nation (even if it cannot be measured with any precision) with, for instance, the embarrassing and unsuccessful tourist campaign on television in 2006, that featured a bikini-wearing blonde woman on a beach shouting ‘Where the bloody hell are you?’ and which cost $180 million.
That afternoon in the State Theatre the words were followed by more performance: the Hermannsburg Ladies Choir—a group of middle-aged Aboriginal women who had never before travelled from the former mission in Central Australia, and who were brought to Sydney by Roger Foley; Jane Rutter did a sexy flute performance; Reg Mombassa performed with his band Mental as Anything; and a vocal ensemble, The Song Company. All the while, Roger Foley, in his capacity as lighting-master Ellis D. Fogg, projected brightly coloured psychedelic images onto a screen at the rear of the stage. Mardi Gras, Sydney’s boisterous annual gay pride march, had been on the night before and quite a few members of the audience had not yet been to bed. There was a lot of nervous energy in the room, and the kind of low hysteria brought about by exhaustion and anxiety. It was almost hypnotic in its allure.
I had been living in New York for almost seven years and, I realised, that despite my frequent visits home and the American tours to the Big Apple of everyone from Midnight Oil to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, I was totally out-of-touch with Australian creativity. I watched spellbound. I had never seen anything like it. Not just the array of talent, although that was impressive and stirring; it was also the generosity and the gratitude. This was so different from the cynical and backbiting Sydney arts community I remembered from the late 1970s, it told me something was happening in this country. Something good, that perhaps I wanted to be part of.
The final performance, by several more men from Bangarra, was a moving reminder of the ancient culture on which everything else we do rests. When they had finished, Keating walked onto the stage. He was a radically different man from the one who had dragged himself out of his car an hour earlier. He stepped lightly, he was grinning. You could tell that he was profoundly moved—by the show itself, and that it had all been put on for him. He said later that it was the turning point in the campaign. He was suddenly energised—and motivated. He was not going to let-down these people, nor this country. As Don Watson describes the event in his book, ‘… the prime minister could not stop smiling and bowing.’17
He threw aside the notes Watson had prepared and launched into a passionate address. ‘There’s no way the Liberal Party would understand this,’ he said of the performances he had just witnessed. ‘They don’t understand that the Arts resonate the opportunity and energy of Australia … they don’t see its importance and they never have.’
He told his avid audience that ‘even though we pulled the budgets back in the ’80s we always kept the Arts budget growing, and we did because we know to let the Arts down is to let ourselves down’.
‘How many countries have had the chance to put together a new society,’ he said. ‘Here we are on the oldest piece of crust on the earth’s face, with one of the oldest nations of the earth, Aboriginal Australians, with ourselves as though we were towed on a raft into one of the most interesting parts of the world, next door to a civilisation 900 years old, 180 million people—what a phenomenal opportunity we have to develop a new country, a multicultural country, a new society, with new expression, new feelings, and new resonances.’ He spoke for 40 minutes, and as he unfolded his theme, drawing on historian Manning Clark’s language, of Labor as the enlargers ‘out there feeling the resonances and pushing out the boundaries’, something in me responded. I considered, for the first time, whether I might want to stay in Australia if Keating won.
When it was over, an exuberant throng of performers joined Keating on stage. The newspapers the next morning showed photographs of the Prime Minister in his slightly rumpled light grey Zegna suit, standing close between two Bangarra dancers who were wearing not much more than lap-laps and a bit of body paint. It was an arresting image: representatives of this ancient civilisation beside the modern man who, if he won, would follow through on his promises in his already famous Redfern speech18 two months earlier, that Australia’s first inhabitants deserved to be treated with dignity.
The Saturday after next he’d be on another stage, in the Bankstown Sports Club in the western suburbs, in the heart of his electorate, again unable to stop grinning as he stepped onto the stage and proclaimed:
‘This is the sweetest victory of all.’
The night before his entire staff, including the cops and the drivers, had gathered at a Chinese restaurant in The Rocks. Most of us wore ‘Keating is Right’ badges. Don Russell had them made as a take on the ‘Lang is Right’ buttons worn in 1932 by supporters of the controversial NSW premier, who had been Paul’s political mentor. Unlike the originals, our buttons did not bear an image of the Prime Minister; just simple white letters on a solid black background. We wore them with irony, and to distract from the tension we all felt. When Paul spoke, he said that Labor ‘might be able to win’. Unlike at ALP headquarters, which had written us off and briefed a gullible national media accordingly, there were pockets of optimism in the PMO. Weeks earlier, on the Sunday that Keating had called the election, when along with all the advisers I had gone into the office, I was overcome with gut-churning apprehension. Elections can change everything and this one could very well alter the course of Australian history but now I was convinced, after being based in Sydney for the weeks before the election and talking to a lot of different people, that Keating could win. I had even accepted a $1000 bet from Barbara Riley-Smith’s husband, who was an out-and-out Lib. If Labor lost, I did not know how I would be able to pay him. Perhaps that’s why I was so fervent when I yelled out at the dinner, ‘You’re going to win, you’re going to win!’ ‘Let’s hope so, Annie,’ Keating had replied. ‘If we win, it will be the win of the century.’19
The early votes from Tasmania the next afternoon (they were an hour ahead of the mainland, due to daylight saving having ended early) were promising. We staffers mooched around in a room somewhere out the back of the Sports Club, trying to keep our hopes contained while the numbers guys crunched furiously with their computers. I found it hard to breathe, and not just because the ghastly carpet had absorbed decades of spilt beer and cigarette smoke. As the night wore on and certainty grew, we allowed ourselves a few self-congratulatory smirks, and then the key advisers were gathering around Paul while he went over his speech. Just before he walked onto the stage, I grabbed his arm.
‘Don’t forget to thank the sheilas,’ I urged him.
The crowd eventually calmed and settled back to hear Paul Keating claim his win and to tell them: ‘This is a victory for the true believers, the people who in difficult times have kept the faith …’ His speech that night was subsequently criticised for being insufficiently humble, and for suggesting that he would govern only for those who had voted for him, but it did not sound that way on the night. At least, not to me or, it seemed, the rest of the team. We were exultant. He had won.
And then he said, ‘an extra special vote of thanks for the women of Australia who voted for us believing in the policies of this government.’
Although I had asked him to, I could scarcely believe he was saying it. Putting us at the heart of who he was and how he would govern.
Later that night a group of us gathered at Zanzibar’s in Kellett Street, Kings Cross which was one of the few restaurants in Sydney to stay open into the early hours. Paul and Annita, Laurie and Trish Brereton, Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin (who’d designed the backdrop curtain for Bankstown), Tara Morice (the star of Strictly Ballroom), Mark Ryan, Don Watson, maybe a few others—and me. It was late, well past 3 a.m., when the doors of the restaurant burst open and in came another bunch of revellers. We looked up at them when we heard a woman scream. It was Anna Cronin, Hewson’s chief-of-staff. Of all the gin joints, the team we had literally just defeated in the ‘unwinnable election’ had chosen this one. They looked at us and fled.
On the way back from Bankstown I’d rung Chip who was in Washington DC, with ABC journalists Heather Ewart and Barrie Cassidy, at an Embassy party where the diplomats had clearly expected, and seemingly wanted, a different result. I had trouble telling Chip how I felt. To say I was happy would be trite and insufficient. I had turned 48 the day before the election, but I’d barely stopped to acknowledge this milestone. Nor did I now, as I was so overwhelmed by waves of relief, of gratitude, of pure joy that I actually did not feel a thing.
I offered to spend my final couple of weeks in the PMO organising a special celebration to mark the extraordinary election win. Paul agreed and no one else demurred, not at first anyway, but the immediate feedback from ALP headquarters was that my proposed True Believers Victory Dinner, to be held in the Great Hall at Parliament House on 23 March, was ‘too American’ and, at $100 a ticket, plus the cost of travel to Canberra, ‘too expensive’. I argued that some American traditions were worth imitating, and celebrating an unexpected victory with grace and style was one of them. I suggested we allocate a certain number of freebies for party supporters, to be subsidised by the more affluent attendees. I promised that I could bring in a classy event that would pay for itself. I got grudging agreement and then I went to work.
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 memory 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.