Tag Archives: Politics

Election 2002: A long day for the Doyles

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THE RESULT – THE LIBERALS

He might have been the only convert Robert Doyle spoke to all day yesterday. He didn’t sound like one at first. “At least you registered,” he said drily, accepting a how-to-vote card from Mr Doyle on his way into a Caulfield polling booth.

But on his way out the man came back to Mr Doyle. He looked briefly over his shoulder, as if to check who might be listening, before saying, “You got me on the speed cameras. I just hope you (look after) education and those things as well. I’ve voted Labor all my life, but this time . . .” Mr Doyle and his wife, Jennifer, laughed and thanked him.

It was only mid-afternoon but they had already had a long, cold day, standing in wintry wind at a string of polling booths. Mr Doyle and his wife visited all 13 in his own electorate of Malvern, joined at some by their 15-year-old daughter, Bridie. They also stopped off in the marginal seats of Prahran, Caulfield, Bentleigh and Narre Warren.

Mr Doyle’s booths were all wrapped in red plastic bunting warning of a Labor landslide. At the top of each poster was a reprint of part of a newspaper article with the headline “Labor surges to huge lead”.

But someone had apparently failed to read the fine print. The reprints also contained a reference to Robert Dean, inadvertently reminding voters of the shadow treasurer whose failure to register as a candidate has been the single biggest blow to Mr Doyle’s campaign. Was this an oversight? Mr Doyle would not engage with that question. But he did acknowledge the fallout from the loss of Dr Dean: “From that major setback, yes, it has been hard for us.”

Mr Doyle was at his campaign office by 8am after having read newspaper polls that predicted his party could lose another 20 seats to Labor. Asked if he believed it possible that the Liberals might keep as few as 15 lower house seats, Mr Doyle said: “I think there’s no doubt that if those published polls carry through, then it could well be a landslide Labor majority.”

Would this keep the Liberals on the opposition benches for another two terms? “It is difficult to claw back if it’s a landslide like that.”

He did not let the possibility of disaster dampen his outward bonhomie. He spent much of the day shaking hands, patting backs and exhorting strangers to “Vote for me!” He told journalists: “In modern elections, people often don’t actually make up their mind until they are in the polling booth marking the pink and white cards with their pencil.”

He cheerily accepted good wishes. During the half-hour that television cameras were present at one Malvern voting booth, Kennett-era treasurer Alan Stockdale arrived to vote. “Great campaign,” Mr Stockdale said.

Shortly afterwards senior Liberal Party figure Michael Kroger greeted Mr Doyle with, “Hello, great man, how are you? Congratulations, you’ve done a great job.”
Mr Kroger said he had left federal Treasurer Peter Costello handing out how-to-vote cards up the road at Sacre Coeur.

Not everyone was so encouraging. At a different booth in Malvern, one woman brusquely brushed aside Mr Doyle’s offer of a voting card.

“No way. No way. You’re gonna lose, mate,” she said, striding on.

“When all else fails, courtesy remains,” he called after her, reprovingly.

It seems fear of a negative reaction caused Mrs Doyle to delay her first foray into active vote-grabbing. At 11.40am, she announced, “I handed out my first card and it was successful. I didn’t have it hurled in my face.”

Mrs Doyle said she was looking forward to the election with “in equal measure, excitement and trepidation. Anxious for it all to be over but pleased that it will be over, too.” She said her husband had worked “amazingly hard . . . he has really dug deep . . . and shown me how determined he can be”. He would be very disappointed if he lost “because it’s taken so much out of him and he’s given it everything”.

And if he wins? “Well, that’s daunting, too, but exciting.”

First published in The Age.

Election 2002: The leader still on a learning curve

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Robert Doyle’s lunch with the press didn’t go quite to plan. By Karen Kissane.

There’s nothing like a Freudian slip to liven up a political speech. Robert Doyle, Victoria’s would-be Premier, made only one yesterday, but it was a beauty. Trying to land a shot at Labor over allegedly shoddy accounting, he instead turned the gun on himself.

“I’m concerned about some of the shonky advertising . . . ,” he began. And caught himself. “Sorry. I will come back to that later.”
He didn’t come back to it, actually, or at least not until journalists in his audience at a Melbourne Press Club luncheon raised the question at the end of his speech.

The lunch was one of the few chances journalists have had for serious application of the blowtorch to the political belly. Steve Bracks had declined his invitation to come. Mr Doyle, who needs the airplay, accepted. It was bad luck for him that it coincided with a row over Liberal advertisements and publication of polls that suggest the Liberals are heading for a train wreck.

“If you believe (the polls), I will be the only Liberal member left after Saturday,” he joked at the start of his speech. Only one person laughed.

Mr Doyle has eased into the campaign harness. He was more relaxed and confident at the podium than he was just a month ago and now banters with members of the media ratpack. He teased reporters about being familiar with his 52 policies. “I know you have read them assiduously, every one,” he said, ever the jocular schoolmaster.

He got testy only once, when questioned a second time about the party’s repeated misadventures with political advertising. “I’ve just answered that,” he said, waving his finger reprovingly. Prime Minister John Howard, was equally dismissive when asked an awkward question while at Mr Doyle’s side later in the day. Mr Howard was there to lend the sheen of economic righteousness to Mr Doyle; Victoria would lose jobs if a less-than-thrifty Labor Government was re-elected, he warned.

But Mr Howard would not engage in debate over whether state Liberals around Australia were in disarray, and whether they needed to rebuild. “What’s the next question?” he said dismissively.

Did he think Mr Doyle could win? There was a small brave smile from Mr Doyle. The Prime Minister said he had told Mr Doyle that a lot could happen in the last four days. But that, if the polls were to be believed, Labor would win in a landslide. Mr Doyle’s smile disappeared.

The rest of Mr Howard’s appearance was taken up with questions about federal matters: X-raying baggage, the ABC board. It seems the price a state Liberal leader pays for the Prime Minister’s presence is his hijacking of your press conference.

At the luncheon, Mr Doyle had been asked whether he had enjoyed the ride. “What have I enjoyed most? The responsibility. You have a lot of people relying on you. You either thrive on that or it can be burdensome. I promise you I thrive on it.”
Even “matters of adversity” had been useful: “Even that teaches you something about yourself. It’s easy to be leader when everything’s going on smoothly. Anyone can do that. I guess the real test comes when you do have a setback . . . Then it’s a matter of how you deal with it. You learn a lot about yourself and you learn a lot about leadership. I hope that I was able in both those instances to do both myself and my party proud.”

They are the kind of sentiments he might have to call upon on Saturday night.

First published in The Age.

Election 2002: Doyle’s Doberman makes the most of his master’s voice

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In Ian Hanke the Liberals have one of the best spinmeisters in the country, writes Karen Kissane.

Ian Hanke shaves his head before a battle. It has become part of his legend and Hanke, says one Liberal MP, “likes to think of himself as legendary”.

His head is shaved now; it’s often on the nightly news as he follows his boss, Opposition Leader Robert Doyle. Hanke is the party’s “spear carrier”, according to his old friend, former federal minister Peter Reith. Victorian journalists know him as Doyle’s minder, the backroom man who coaches the leader in salesmanship. The king of spin, 24/7.

When Doyle moves into damage control, it is Hanke’s advice he is probably following. Wherever Doyle goes Hanke follows, standing on the edges of his public appearances like a praetorian guard: impassive, watchful, chain-smoking with one hand and managing a stream of calls with the other.

Hanke became chief of staff to previous leader Denis Napthine when he resigned. Hanke’s first day was Napthine’s last.

But Hanke survived the transition. The Liberals had a new leader who was not yet on the public radar and Hanke is reputed to be one of the best political spinmeisters in the country. He was at Reith’s side through tumultuous clashes, including the bitter waterfront dispute. (Hanke later moved on, but Reith called him back to help manage the phone-card affair.)

Few doubt Hanke’s effectiveness. Even his opponents rail mostly at his politics, as if their main criticism is that he fails to use his powers for “good” instead of “evil”.

Federal Labor MP Arch Bevis was Reith’s opposite number when Hanke was Reith’s media adviser. He says Hanke pursued Reith’s union-breaking industrial goals with almost religious fervour. “If what the Victorian Liberals need is a man with a hard nose and a rhinoceros-thick skin who seeks out trouble to feed a fight to pursue extreme ideological goals, this man is their man.” He says no other apparatchik on either side of politics identifies as fiercely with the cause.

Says Hanke, in the gravelly voice that is his other trademark: “I don’t mind a fight . . . I just like to hunt the bastards, basically.” But he says he’s not one to hold grudges. “Not like the Labor Party. They’re real haters. I think that’s one of their big drawbacks.”

Hanke, 44, is divorced and shares his home with his dog, Buster (“Union-Buster to his friends”). During a campaign – he is now doing his 16th or 17th – he moves on to a war footing. “My day starts about 4.30. I get up, have a couple of cups of coffee and some nails (cigarettes) and read the papers, marking them up with a highlighter, looking for how we went that day and points of attack for the other side.”
He’s at the office before six, trailing the leader during his morning gigs – “You can get a real feel for the campaign when you’re out on the stump. You don’t want to be isolated in an office” – and then bunkering down with him in the afternoon.

Doyle’s campaign, like Steve Bracks’, has been orchestrated for television grabs. Reporters find themselves on a car rally each day, with last-minute phone calls telling them to be at, say, Frankston at 10am and Mitcham at 1pm. The prize is the leader, with a different backdrop and possibly a different shirt, announcing a new policy.

The last-minute notice is to avoid demonstrators, Hanke says. “You don’t want to give a break to the other side. You’ve got to manage your environment so you get a good result for Robert. It’s very competitive in the news. Just trying to get a story up is bloody difficult nowadays.”

During the last federal election, his role was to keep Labor off balance. He led a team that scoured Labor press releases and transcripts for slip-ups; he then sent text messages to the mobile phones of reporters on the road with Kim Beazley. They later estimated that 90 per cent of Beazley’s press conferences had at least one question that arose from Hanke’s messages.

Hanke began as a cadet journalist at The Age in 1976. After stints with AAP and the ABC, he left journalism in 1982 to become an oil field diver. He entered politics in 1985 when the Victorian Liberal Party asked him to monitor the media during an election campaign. He has had time out since then – in public relations, and while running his own salvage and construction diving company – but most of his working life has been spent with the party.

In his 20s he represented Australia several times in the modern pentathlon (swimming, running, pistol shooting, fencing and horse riding). When not campaigning he still manages to swim and run.

Hanke says his job is to “precipitate the flow of information”. Told there are journalists who would be amused to hear that, he has the grace to laugh. Has he ever lied to journalists? “No.”

How about playing one paper off against the other?

“No. It’s not worth it. You destroy your credibility. The only thing you’ve got in this caper is your credibility, and if you shred it yourself you’re f—–.”

Reith says Hanke is useful to politicians because he is grounded. “Ian is never one to hold back. He tells you how it is. You’ve got to be sensible enough to listen. It’s very important . . . to have realistic assessments.” Some political journalists find him less useful, saying he never abandons spin long enough to talk political issues through.

But they enjoy his chutzpah. A few years ago Hanke crashed Labor’s Christmas drinks party at Parliament House in Canberra. An outraged Laurie Brereton demanded he leave. Hanke protested that he had paid $10 for his ticket. Brereton shoved $20 at Hanke who left, leaving $10 at the door.

If the situation had been reversed, Hanke says, he would have handled it differently. “I would have invited them in and said `Well, I’m glad to see you’ve come across’.”

First published in The Age.

‘I’ve seen leaders cursed by disloyal deputies. Not me . . .’ Election 2002

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A sketch of Louise Asher’s life over the past three years would have a trail of symbolic gravestones. First she buried the Kennett government and her job as a minister along with it. Later came the loss of her role as treasury spokeswoman, the loss of her leader, Denis Napthine, and the loss of her job as deputy Liberal leader.

She has fallen from the Libs’ “woman most likely” – a status she had held for nearly 30 years – to one who is cited by some colleagues as a disappointment.

To outsiders, it might seem that she has joined the pile of female politicians who seemed destined for prominence but who crashed and burned.

Ms Asher will have none of it. Dr Napthine moved her from treasury because it was a backroom role and he wanted her to be more prominent, she says. As for the way she resigned as deputy when he was voted out of the leadership in August, “I made a voluntary decision to stand down”.

“It was a decision made out of loyalty. I regard loyalty as a characteristic that is fundamental to the worth of a human being,” she says.

Ms Asher confirms she was approached to do a deal to roll Dr Napthine for Robert Doyle, an approach she rejected: “It was put to me that I was unassailable in the position of deputy, in terms of raw numbers – which is not to say that others didn’t want the job.

“If I simply agreed to a switch of political support, then I would keep my job. But I don’t act like that. I didn’t want there to be any sense of my having been involved in any deal to undermine the leader I supported for three years as deputy.

“I have seen leaders cursed by disloyal deputies. I never would do that.” She believes she has her own reward: “I can sleep at night. I believe I acted honorably in that entire period.”

While it has cost her in career terms, she is in the safe seat of Brighton, which means her ticket to parliamentary life is still secure. And her working relationship with the new leader is sound enough for her to have survived in shadow cabinet.

She is one of the few old hands with ministerial experience on Mr Doyle’s front bench, which puts her in the running for a senior ministry if there is a Liberal win. “If we win the election, I would hope that Robert Doyle would put me in a ministry. I certainly think I’ve behaved in a way that (has earned it) . . . I’ve done exactly the right thing by my party, but I’ve also done exactly the right thing by me.”

How are the Liberals under Mr Doyle different to the Liberals under Dr Napthine? “There had been infighting in the Liberal Party and to pretend there wasn’t is a nonsense. One of the differences is that the backbiting has stopped, and that’s stopped because of a very conscious effort from Denis, in particular, to make sure that Robert really has a fair go in the run-up to the election, because it’s in all our interests
to win.”

Ms Asher emphasises that Mr Doyle in turn has been gracious. “If Robert had been petty and vindictive, he would have dumped both Denis and myself. He hasn’t been. He’s indicated a willingness to want to work with all his members, particularly his most experienced members.”

One of her campaign tasks is to lend her profile to needy candidates. Frank Kelloway is standing for Bellarine, a seat the retiring Liberal incumbent holds by only 1.2 per cent.

He takes Asher down to Queenscliff to meet local figures who want to catch her ear: the fishermen who want their slipway redeveloped, the music festival folk anxious to assure their funding and the small business owners who want government help to market their peninsula. Asher is sympathetic and businesslike, zooming in on their concerns and juicing them for the figures that will back up their arguments.

The issues are different in her own electorate. “Labor wants to shut my police station and sell valuable Brighton land and transfer the whole thing down to Sandringham. And I’m worried about Labor’s metropolitan strategy, which I think would result in very tall buildings in Brighton,” she says.

Her Brighton constituents will increase by one after the poll when retiring National Party MP Ron Best leaves his Bendigo seat to come and live with his wife for the first time. “We’ve been together for nine years now and we’ve never lived together,” she says. “I normally only see him at weekends or if parliament sits.”

She thinks her relationship has helped keep her steady through the past three years: “I think I’ve changed since I’ve married and since some of those global things have hit. Stepping down is not life-threatening.” In any case, she grins, the “career-driven woman who’s been forging up the greasy pole since she joined the Liberals at 19” is still in the race: “I’m absolutely here for the long haul.”

THE ASHER FILE

· Born: 26 June 1956.

· Entered Parliament: 1992.

· Seat: Brighton.

· Ministries: Small Business and Tourism, in the Kennett government.

· Married to retiring National Party MP Ron Best.

First published in The Age.

The night Mr Showman took on Mr Competent

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ELECTION 2002 – THE DEBATE

Robert Doyle rolled Denis Napthine on the basis that he could sell the Liberals better on television. That might well be true. But he cannot yet outsell Steve Bracks.

Last night showed that he has yet to extricate himself from the ball and chain of the Kennett years, and his television persona had an element of showmanship that some will admire but others will abhor. Smiling too brightly and too often makes one’s opponent look more grounded – and more sincere.

Doyle knew he was up against Mr Nice Guy, and he was careful not to slug him. He had been well prepared for this first big gig, but his first few answers were slow and stilted, as he tried to rein in the naturally ebullient delivery.

Facts were at his fingertips, and he scored hits. He attacked the drop in the surplus, cited the Auditor-General’s warning that the state’s economy was vulnerable and asked whether the poll, and the debate, had been called now so the government could duck scrutiny.

He had modified his position on his own costings; caught on the hop at a doorstop, he had promised independent costings but said his auditor would not be named. Apparently having realised this position was untenable, last night he had a name ready.

But he fudged to escape questions about the credibility of his policies in the wake of the Kennett years. It is his side that is now struggling to escape “guilty party” status, and it is proving a sticky task.

He tried to establish himself as an expert on hospitals, serving only to remind his opponent that he was parliamentary secretary for health while Kennett closed hospital beds. Had he been involved in those decisions? The question is still unanswered.

Bracks claimed that Kennett had also promised to increase police but had cut them; why should the public believe Doyle? He responded with the point that swinging voters must believe if he is to win them: that he is a different man to Kennett.

He might have had more success in convincing them of his sincerity without his final hand-on-the-heart declarations of love for this state. America is the land of gushing patriotism. Australians tend to save theirs for the great historical moments. This debate was not one of them.

BEST AND WORST

BEST MOMENT
The apparent genuineness with which Mr Doyle talked about the Liberals having learnt from their years in opposition: “Over the last three years, this is a different Liberal Party. We’ve had a hard lesson. We’ve had to go out and listen to people . . . and we have done that. We have done the hard yards.”

WORST MOMENT
Asked if he had anything good to say of his opponent, Mr Doyle was unable to avoid seeking a political point. He followed Mr Bracks’ carefully judged reply with a limp: “I think he’s a nice guy. I’m just very concerned that not a lot’s getting done.”

First published in The Age.

How people power moved a minister SEX ZONES

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It was always ambitious, but in the end consensus over red-light areas proved just too hard, writes Karen Kissane.

The poster is edged by condoms and syringes. The picture in the centre has two smiling girls, aged three and five, holding more condoms and syringes. The headline reads, “We play in a sex-tolerant zone in St Kilda”.

Deputy Premier John Thwaites seemed not to blanch when St Kilda traders showed him the poster last week. They told him it would be part of their campaign if Mr Thwaites, also their local member, did not halt the push for red-light zones in their neighbourhood.

“He’s been around for a long time,” cafe owner George Takis says of the way Mr Thwaites’ expression seemed not to change. But Mr Takis says that the minister’s adviser’s did.

It is hard to know to what degree the traders’ threats influenced the decision to pull the plug, at least for now, on the proposal to regulate street prostitution into “tolerance zones”. The government says Attorney-General Rob Hulls was concerned by community protests. The St Kilda council says it too is listening to the people.

But it is also possible that this controversial experiment in participatory democracy, which tried to include residents and sex workers, has been vanquished by a coming ritual of participatory democracy: the looming state election.

“It’s probably related to the state election and that’s probably not unreasonable,” says George Tickell, president of the Fitzroy and Acland Streets Residents Association. “I don’t think the issue itself should be tackled during an election because it’s just going to become a political football.”

The anti-tolerance campaign posters, devised by the Fitzroy Street Traders Association, alienated even protesting residents who would otherwise have been the group’s natural allies. Mr Takis says that as well as the children’s picture, there were posters of a house disappearing down a toilet (attacking possible damage to property values).

“I found (the pictures) extremely offensive and didn’t want to be associated with them,” says Jeanette Davison of the Port Phillip Action Group.

But Steve Paraskevas, president of the Fitzroy Street Traders Association and a leader of the delegation to Mr Thwaites, thought they were justifiable.

“Mr Thwaites has . . . obviously listened to us and at this stage we are just going to see if we get a better outcome.”
The push for sex zones was always going to be hard to win, Mr Tickell says. It suffered multiple blows: “Council probably mishandled it. Some of their consultation wasn’t as good as it might have been. There were pretty heavy attacks from talkback hosts. And the issue has been heavily politicised in that the position of some of the groups campaigning against tolerance zones has been closely aligned with the opposition.”
And then there was the not-in-my-backyard factor; even those who sympathised with the idea of tolerance, like resident Leslie Cannold, erupted when told that their own area was a proposed site for it.

Ms Cannold, a spokeswoman for the St Kilda Circuit Action Group, says she was pleased with the report that first recommended tolerance as a strategy because she thought her area would be protected as it contained homes and a church.

“Anyone who had been following the process was dumbfounded (by the proposed sites),” she says.

Ms Cannold says the council talked about “Best fit, least harm”, as if they were going to move it to places where 2000 residents weren’t going to be bothered but 1500 were.

She says residents were so concerned that groups from different areas banded together to object, even though it would have been easy for each to lobby that the other take the problem.

Ms Davison first joined the advisory group that recommended tolerance zones because she lives in a street affected by the sex trade. But she too was disappointed by the proposed sites.

Port Phillip Mayor Darren Ray insists that the council still supports the recommendations of the State Prostitution Advisory Group. He says the council’s decision had nothing to do with state political agendas, and that its processes were not fundamentally flawed. However, he says the council realised the process needed to slow down if it was to win support.

But has the idea been so utterly defeated by geography that notions of consensus are wishful thinking? Does St Kilda have any areas that fulfil the sex workers’ requirements – lighting, toilets and a circuit for customers – and are separated from houses, shops and places where children congregate?

Ms Cannold thinks not: “The only way to implement (tolerance) is to go outside St Kilda. The logic is incontrovertible. None of the sites made sense.”

THE STORY SO FAR

JUNE 19

· The State Government proposes tolerance zones in St Kilda and at least one street-worker centre. The Attorney-General’s Street Prostitution Advisory Group recommends a two-year trial.

JUNE 20

· Opposition Leader Denis Napthine says the Liberals won’t support the plans , claiming the area could become “seedy”.

JULY 22

· About 200 residents attend a meeting of Port Phillip Council as it considers the zones.

JULY 28

· About 130 rally outside St Kilda Town Hall to protest against the proposed zones.

JULY 30

· Residents and traders threaten to sue the council.

AUGUST 6

· Luna Park operators say the plan for Cavell Street, between the park and the Palais Theatre, to be a zone for male prostitutes will jeopardise the park’s “ability to maintain the perception of a clean, safe environment”.

AUGUST 13

· The government shelves the proposed legislation.

A HEATED DEBATE

LESLIE CANNOLD, St Kilda Road resident

We welcome that the council has allowed us to have meaningful input into the process and that they’ve heard our concerns.

STEVE PARASKEVAS, Fitzroy Street Traders president, Monroe’s restaurant managing director

I don’t agree with having tolerance centres in one of the best boulevards in Melbourne. The residents and traders are all united on this, and I think we are going to fight this one off.

DARREN RAY, Port Phillip Mayor

This is not about stopping. What we need to do is take slower steps to ensure all of our community understand the process so that we can move forward with confidence.

JOHN THWAITES, Acting Premier

If you’re going to move forward in this area, which is extremely difficult, you have to move forward gradually with community support.

First published in The Age.

A modern woman

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Karen Kissane profiles Jenny Macklin and finds a feminist with a fire in her belly for change but a considered approach to achieving it.

JENNY Macklin is cheerful with the people lining up for her autograph until one person mischievously asks her to sign herself “Jenny Macklin, Prime Minister”. The fact that she is the first woman to get within cooee of the title is part of the reason for the queue, but Macklin is quick to cut off this kind of talk, glancing at the reporter behind her. “Don’t say that in front of her,” she says firmly. Is this a sensitive issue, then? “Very sensitive.”
Yesterday Macklin, 47, was elected as the new deputy leader of the federal parliamentary Labor Party. She is the first woman to hold such a senior position on either side of Australian politics.

She didn’t get there without a firm grasp of the rules, which include “thou shalt not covet thy boss’s job”, and “never count your chickens before they’re hatched”. So, while her deal was stitched up before the book launch at which she was signing autographs last weekend, Macklin was taking no chances in the lead-up to the vote.

Wandering through a north Melbourne community garden during the launch, which was for a collection of life stories by elderly local people, Macklin did not stand on ceremony. She was quick to notice when someone frail needed help easing into a chair; she grabbed a camera and offered to take photos when the authors were gathered together. She was “Jenny” to everyone.

“She’s got a very natural quality,” says Brian Howe, a former deputy prime minister and one of Macklin’s old bosses. “She’s not trying to … be something she’s not … And she’s a very good operator at the grassroots level.”
Such warm ways may be winning with the locals, but Macklin called on sterner stuff to cut a swathe through the ALP’s factional bloodiness to leadership. She has been in Parliament only five years but has earned her colleagues’ respect and in some cases their dislike for her tenacity and reputedly masterful grasp of policy.

Macklin is an intelligent, left-wing feminist who has the social-justice fire in the belly of old-time Labor but less of its propensity for headkicking. The acerbic Simon Crean has chosen her for his running mate, one ALP insider says, “because he knows he needs her in terms of the community they’ve got very different skills”.

Shrewd and cautious, Macklin refuses to speculate publicly about her future. “I haven’t even started this [job] yet; let’s see how we go … I want to do well at what I’m putting up my hand for.” She says she wants to avoid hubris because it irritates colleagues and voters alike. “It’s not looked upon kindly in any politician … You can’t afford it, especially with Australians. [They] have got wonderful antennae for bulldust.”
The Labor Left women who make up her Praetorian Guard are more outspoken about their hopes for her. “First female prime minister? I hope so,” says the ACTU president, Sharan Burrow. “She’s a strong woman, she’s tenacious, she’s extremely articulate and her knowledge base is incredible. She’s also courageous in terms of speaking out on what she believes in.”
For some she has not been courageous enough. She publicly sells the party’s decision to support subsidies of private health insurance, even though her views that the money would be better spent directly on the public health system are well known. (She called the Liberals’ introduction of the subsidy “the worst piece of public policy ever seen in this Parliament”.)
One observer who has had dealings with Macklin says she sometimes thinks she knows more than she actually does. Some (anonymous) detractors in her own party have muttered that she is not tough enough, or pragmatic enough, to make hard decisions; others on Labor’s Right have warned that she is a closet radical whose leftie urges would be uncaged if ever she won
power. So are we to expect a wimp or a rabid ideologue?
Neither, laughs Macklin. “I think I’ve had to make some pretty tough decisions …you’ve got to take the decision that’s made and run with it … You’ve got to accept that you’ve got a place to argue it, which is inside the party forums. I’m not elected as an independent. I’m elected as a member of the Labor Party.”
As for being too far to the left: “I have a very strong sense of social justice … and I know that one of our big tasks in the Labor Party is to protect people… But I’ve been in the Labor Party for 20 years and I know that you’ve got to take people with you.”
But for all her team-player talk, Macklin has sometimes dared to go out on a limb. The former Victorian premier Joan Kirner says: “I … will never forget when Howard tried to split the Labor Party conference on the issue of an IVF amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act stopping IVF to lesbians and single women. Many of the blokes were dithering around. Jenny just went straight out to the media and went right to the heart of it; that this was not about IVF but about a proposed amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act. She said, `We introduced it and we won’t be amending it.’ And then Kim [Beazley] had to come in behind her, much to our relief, and then people had to back Kim, even though it was pretty hairy. So she won’t be afraid to take leadership.”
Macklin has her critics within the party, most of whom are of a gender and a faction other than her own. She antagonised some colleagues before the 1998 election by successfully resisting efforts to impose an economic rationalist approach on the party’s child-care policies. Others are aggrieved now because she beat them to the deputy’s job. But Macklin is not quite as nerveless with the media as she can be in the party room. Personal publicity makes her uneasy. For this interview in her Heidelberg electorate office she chooses to talk from behind her moat of a desk, arms folded in front of her, pleasant but wary.

Macklin makes a face when asked what strengths she will bring to her new job; self-promotion is really not her bag, she points out, before taking a deep breath and nominating her solid background in policy development and the fact that she is a fresh
face. “I think probably the most important thing is not having been a member of the government,” she says.

Macklin will head the party’s policy review but it is not yet clear whether she will be shadow treasurer. It’s been reported that she was pressed not to take the portfolio, even though it is the traditional entitlement of a deputy opposition leader. MPs Stephen Smith and Bob McMullan are also believed to want the job. Historically, not all deputies have taken treasury, but in Macklin’s case it would be a dilution of the feminist victory.

Macklin denies she is under pressure and says Crean has made it clear the decision is hers. “It’ll be up to me and my view is that I should choose basically where I think I could make the biggest contribution and where I’ll be the most use to the party.”
But there is also the question of whether experience in this senior portfolio would benefit Macklin and her career. “That is definitely an issue,” she acknowledges. “I’m thinking about that. One should never get stuck.”
She will be deputy to a man who the party’s own polling suggests is the most disliked figure in the federal parliamentary party, but Macklin says she has found Crean good to work with. “I’ve seen the other side of him a lot, particularly going back to before he was in the Parliament. He’s actually very inclusive. He’s the sort of person that tries to bring people with him … I think people will see that in a way that they haven’t been able to, particularly over the last three years when he’s really had the tough job [of shadow treasurer].”
What Macklin says about Crean is what others say about her. Rhonda Galbally, founding chief executive of the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, watched her chair the national health strategy review. She was inclusive and took people with her because of her consultative style, Galbally says. “People felt as though their voices were being heard and as if they were being taken seriously.”
Professor Stephen Duckett, dean of health sciences at La Trobe University, worked with the Victorian Health Department and attended round-table meetings run by Macklin. He says she took the same approach to conflict: “She would try to understand why there was divergence of views, trying to clarify the conflict and work out what commonality there was.” At the same time, he says, her policies show she is no pushover: “There are a lot of pressures on shadow ministers to wheel things into policy. You’ve got to resist the blandishments of the lobby groups if they don’t fit where you want to go. And she does.”
What is most likely to trip her up? “She’s a woman, and the evidence is that when women stick their head above the mediocrity line, they become targets in the very blokey atmosphere of Parliament House.”
This is another line Macklin does not wish to pursue. “It’s been very tough for the women who’ve put themselves forward; I’d be foolish not to see it. But politics at the most senior level is tough for both men and women.” What keeps her there, she says, is the conviction that she can help drive change: “I’m an absolutely strong believer that you can make a difference.”

JENNY MACKLIN, MP

Born Brisbane, 1953.

Family Partner Ross and three children aged 25, 19 and 13.

Educated Wangaratta High School, then studied for Bachelor of Commerce (Honours), University of Melbourne.

Entered Parliament March 1996 as MP for Jagajaga, Victoria.

Labor Party career Opposition health spokeswoman and ALP senior vice-president.

Lives Ivanhoe, in Melbourne’s north-east.

First published in The Age.

Election 2001 The leaders – INSIDE THE LOSING CAMP

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His staff stood stiffly at the back of the room, tears in their eyes. His wife and two older daughters flanked him, their eyes shining, struggling for brave smiles. He was the crowd’s hero too, despite the defeat; when he said he would return to the back bench, they roared their displeasure: “We want Kim! We want Kim!”

“Don’t make this any harder than it is,” he begged them.

Kim Beazley had come to end his bid for the prime ministership at the Star Ballroom, a squat building with vinyl chairs and laminex tables in the centre of an industrial estate in working-class Rockingham, in Mr Beazley’s WA electorate of Brand. It was decked out for a party that had became a wake.

When word spread that he was on his way the party workers stood, as one would for royalty, and formed a guard of honor for him. Close to the time, the room hushed. But they broke into cheers when he arrived and began to walk through the room, half a head taller than anyone around him.

He gave a warm, generous, impassioned speech, one that fitted the man former prime minister Bob Hawke had described earlier in the evening as “one of the most decent men I have ever met in public life”.

He thanked everyone who had helped him. He said he was 99 per cent saddened by the result, but one per cent of him delighted in the extra time he would now have to spend with his family after 21 pressured years in politics.

And he appealed to Australian idealism in a way that had been muted throughout a campaign where he had felt obliged to stand with the Prime Minister on asylum seekers: “We are a great nation. We are a nation with a capacity to be better. We are a nation with a capacity for a generosity of heart.

“There are bleak angels in our nation, but there are also good angels as well. And the task and challenge for those of us in politics is to bring out the generosity that resides in the soul of the ordinary Australian.”

After his speech, he walked back down the guard of honor to a song with the chorus, I think the world is turning black. A young woman told him, “I think this means we need better education.” He laughed and slapped her on the back. “You’ve waited SO long,” said a grandmother, sympathetically. A man shook his hand and said, “We did our best.” Replied Mr Beazley, “We certainly did. We more than saved the furniture.”

Steering towards the exit, he suddenly veered back into the room after catching sight of a small elderly woman. She said proudly, “You give us all heart to go on.” Beazley grinned and grasped her by both shoulders: “My mother,” he told the crowd, “is the membership officer for the Cottesloe branch of the Labor Party, at the age of 80.” (His father was in hospital following hip surgery).

Earlier in the day Mr Beazley’s daughter Hannah, 22, had tried to look on the bright side of the possibility of loss. Handing out how-to-vote cards for her father, she said, “For me, for completely selfish reasons, there’s positives in both. If he wins, it will be what we’ve all worked for the past 20-odd years as a family.

Yesterday afternoon in South Perth, just as election booths were closing on Australia’s east coast, there was a wedding in a church opposite the Beazley home. Outside the church a lone piper played Amazing Grace. There was no saving Kim Beazley – but then, it is a hymn often played at funerals.

First published in The Age.

Beazleys join the vote people Election 2001

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The leaders – INSIDE THE LABOR CAMP – NOTEBOOK
Kim Beazley made his mark on the ballot paper with his wife, Susie, looking over his shoulder. “This is as close as it comes to knowing his intimate thoughts on politics,” she quipped.

Susie Annus kept the quips coming, as is her wont, but yesterday there was a nervy edge to her delivery. Beazley himself looked not so much nervous as weary, his eyes red and his voice a little husky. His daughter Hannah, 22, who had spent the morning handing out how-to-vote cards for her dad, felt no need to hide her feelings: “I’ve got about a dozen swarms of butterflies going around in my stomach.”
The Beazley family had come to Rockingham High School, in his home electorate of Brand, Western Australia, to vote in what might be Beazley’s last election as a candidate, or the one that will take him to the Lodge. He moved across the parquet floor of the school gym like a dancer at the centre of a country set.

The party faithful did manage to touch the hem of his cloak. “Was that a curtsy?” cried Annus, of a little old lady greeting Beazley. The reply was a second curtsy.

Three elderly women who accosted him about how, as pensioners, they deserved a cut in their rates, were congratulated on their tactics. “Well done, ladies,” he said, amused. “You’ve just run a great campaign on national television.”

He had the grace to pass on the photo opportunity with the baby girl who had been waiting for some time in her best pink dress. He decided the pack should get out of her face, which was crumpling at the sight of all the cameras.

But he accepted the two wilted roses, casualties of the Perth heat, offered him by another voter – one was Double Delight and the other Paradise, she said: “And maybe tomorrow morning we’ll all be in paradise.”

He planted himself in the shade of a large gum tree to say his last public words before the defining speech he would probably have to make later. “I’ll tell you what keeps me alive in politics,” he said. “What keeps me alive is the smell of those suburbs in Western Australia near to the beach. It smells like relaxation, and it smells like home, and there is no better way to conclude an election campaign.”

But did he smell victory? “The polls this morning say this is a tight one,” he said. “It’s a miracle we’re in this situation. When we began this election campaign all the polls told us that the Labor Party was facing annihilation.”

He talked again about the domestic issues he had tried so hard to put on the agenda: job security, education, families and aged care. “A nation is judged by how it treats its children and its elderly,” he said. “If a society fails its children and its elderly, it’s a failed society.”

And he said he was angered by newspaper posters that reported the Prime Minister John Howard as blaming the navy for the schemozzle over the asylum seekers video: “When I was defence minister … I accepted responsibility for the services who reported to me,” he said. “That’s the job of the PM. He doesn’t shift the blame to the people who defend this country.”

The campaign trail ended, Beazley’s next stop was hospital. His father, Kim Beazley senior, had gone in for a hip operation on Monday, and Kim junior had not yet had a chance to visit him. Then it was to be back to his electorate office with his family and close colleagues to watch what he expected to be a white-knuckle count.

“I don’t know where your heart is,” called out a Labor supporter in the grounds of the school.

Beazley knew. “In my mouth. In my mouth.”

First published in The Age.

Election 2001: The last post plays for Beazley

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PERTH

FLYING from Adelaide to Perth on election morning, would-be Prime Minister Kim Beazley and his wife, Susie Annus, still seemed buoyant. The ominous opinion polls of the previous couple of days had left the rest of his team a bit flattened, but Beazley cheerily chatted to journalists and joined their sweep on the election result. He tipped a Labor win by seven seats, with three independents.

He had more faith in Australians than they had in him.

The Beazley who went to Perth’s war memorial yesterday to lay a wreath for Remembrance Day was visibly bruised. He moved heavily. When he spoke to reporters, as briefly as could be managed without rudeness, his voice was so soft as to be barely audible. Earlier in the week his minders had said he would do a doorstop interview that day, win or lose. But it turned out to be one ordeal he couldn’t face.

He stood still in his black suit through the Last Post and the wail of bagpipes, those rituals for irrevocable loss. After laying a wreath he stepped back and briefly laid his right hand on his heart. Asked later what he had been thinking of during the service, he said: “I was thinking actually of service personnel, not politicians.”

His plans for this week? “I’m going to go to Canberra and clean out the office.”

Would he be taking Susie to Paris? (They had joked during the campaign that if he won, he would take her to Canberra, and if he lost, he would take her to Paris.) He barked a black laugh. “It’s back here for me.” And he stepped into his car and shut the door.

Beazley’s election loss on Saturday is one of Labor’s great tragedies, and not just because the party is sentenced to another three years in opposition. The defeat has also KO’d the leadership of a prince of the Labor tribe and ended a family dream.

Kim Beazley comes from a family of ALP stalwarts. His father, Kim senior, spent 32 years in Federal Parliament. Kim junior first “entered” parliament in 1949 as a baby in the arms of his mother, visiting his father.

He was captivated by politics from the age of 12, when his father used to leave him sitting in the speaker’s gallery on the floor of the Old Parliament House for hours at a time. “I used to imagine myself as part of the process,” he has said. “It seemed to be a place where things were done.”

Beazley was a Rhodes scholar and studied history at Oxford before returning to Australia with his first wife, Mary Paltridge, and the first of his three daughters. In 1980, at 32, he won the marginal Western Australian seat of Swan and became an MP. (He later switched seats and now holds Brand.)

He was marked for responsibility early. He was Australia’s youngest ever defence minister and served his apprenticeship in several other big portfolios, including education and finance, during which he oversaw the sale of public institutions including Qantas, CSL and the last half of the Commonwealth Bank.

In many ways he has been a highly successful party leader. As the new Opposition Leader in 1996, he prevented the party from collapsing into infighting after Paul Keating’s devastating election loss. At his first election as leader, in 1998, he won even though he lost, unexpectedly clawing back much of the 1996 landslide to the government.

He has intellectual depth, a flair for passionate oratory, few enemies and a reputation as a genuinely decent man. He was once described as the first Labor leader since Chifley not to have a major personality disorder. But unless he becomes Lazarus with a double bypass, his story, like his father’s, will end as one of unfulfilled political promise.

For Beazley senior, early hopes that he might one day be prime minister were dashed by the Labor schism over communism in the 1950s. Beazley junior has also been in part foiled by circumstance: he was ahead in the polls until the Tampa sailed over John Howard’s horizon and fate played the wild card of international terrorism.

Beazley’s efforts to keep domestic issues such as jobs, health, education and aged care at the top of the campaign agenda were repeatedly torpedoed as the war on terror and the controversy over asylum seekers continued to dominate the news.

After 1996, Beazley had decided that the party had to win back blue-collar men in their 40s and 50s who had deserted Labor because they were feeling insecure in the world. This time he hammered the same issues of job security and security of access to health and education, not just because the opinion polls showed that these were Labor’s strengths, but because, perhaps, he thought addressing these anxieties would help defuse the hostilities over refugees.

He hinted as much in his speech conceding defeat on Saturday: “As we look at security internationally, we look first at security in the hearts and minds of those around the kitchen table. Because there’s no doubt at all that a sense of generosity in the hearts of an average citizen often starts with a sense of security at home. And if they do not feel a sense of security, then their capacity to feel a generosity is often marred.”
Before the campaign started, Beazley had taken the advice of the public relations man for British Prime Minister Tony Blair, losing weight and making his sentences less wordy to help get his message across. He insisted that he wanted the job, attempting to defuse concerns that he wasn’t hungry for power and lacked “ticker” (a charge that had haunted him for years, to the point where he once told an interviewer with exasperation: “What do you want me to say? That I am a big enough prick?”).
But none of it was enough to get him over the line. Now his political legacy can be assessed much as his biographer, Peter FitzSimons, concluded in Beazley three years ago: “He could take some satisfaction when flying back to Australia – on an aviation system he helped to organise and to finance, through defence security zones he helped to set up, above regional alliances made with his guidance, at the hands of people he had a hand in educating and training, using telecommunications systems working on his own basic model … – that he had made a genuine impact on the life of the nation he was born to.”
But to this must now be added, in the eyes of many concerned about human rights, the grave demerit of his having supported the Howard Government’s stance on asylum seekers – a strategy that did not even have the saving grace of electoral success.

Beazley spoke on Saturday night of being 99per cent saddened by the result, but 1per cent pleased to have more time with his family. Before stepping off the podium after he conceded defeat, he and his wife and two older daughters embraced in a circle, for a moment shutting out the watching world.

How well he will cope with life on the political sidelines is another question. One of his spokesmen yesterday confirmed that Beazley would not stand for the leadership (despite many calls from party members to his electorate office begging him to reconsider) but will stand by his promise to serve out his term as MP for Brand.

Beazley has previously told of having had a black year in 1992, when portfolio changes after Keating seized the leadership from Hawke pushed Beazley from the centre of the government.

On the other hand, Beazley grew up above the political shop and learnt early of the life’s triumphs and brutalities. One hard lesson might stand him in good stead now. In November 1963, Kim Beazley senior had told his children that, at long last, their beloved Labor was about to win an election. The Beazley children cursed and wept when the party lost.

Beazley demanded that his father explain how such a terrible thing could happen. The answer was sad but firm. “That,” his father said, “is politics.”

First published in The Age.