On Tanya Plibersek’s reticent ambition and why Albanese’s team is confused by it

The following is an extract from Tanya Plibersek by Margaret Simons (Black Inc.)

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By the beginning of 2006, Plibersek had moved to a new level within the party and in public awareness. Her work on childcare had increased her profile. So had her continued outspokenness on the rights of same-­sex couples. She was well known for speaking up in caucus. In March, the veteran Canberra correspondent for The Daily Telegraph, Malcolm Farr, named her in an article about “a new guard of relatively young Labor women who are certain to dominate the next big changes in the shadow ministry”. Julia Gillard was the “most prominent”, said Farr, but Plibersek was the next named. According to Farr, she was now “driving much of the social debate within the parliamentary party”.

In the same month, The Sydney Morning Herald commissioned her to write a fortnightly column under the title “Upfront”. Each episode was about 700 words and she could write about anything she wished. The results were classic Plibersek —­ full of statistics and nerdish detail, leavened with examples and anecdotes. They were well-­structured pieces, often referring to the classics of English literature or to recent research, but there was no soaring prose and little rhetorical flourish.

The first column in the series, published in March 2006, was about risk-­taking among young people, quoting a recent book by her friend Rebecca Huntley on the importance of peer groups. Plibersek argued that “cool kids” needed to be recruited as peer educators. Perhaps recalling her own trajectory, she said young people were more likely to be engaged on issues, rather than through political parties. “We … have to give young people something bigger than themselves to believe in,” she wrote.

The next column was about fringe-­benefits tax and how it encouraged people to use their cars to get to work rather than public transport. Then she wrote about mental illness and how the move to “deinstitutionalise” the mentally ill had become a way of ignoring government responsibilities and failing to invest in care:

We can’t congratulate ourselves for having saved a psychotic teenager from the hell of a psych ward if our alternative is to allow him to wander lost and lonely until he takes his own life or ends up in jail.

Other topics tackled that year included domestic violence in Indigenous communities, human rights, environmental degradation and poverty in Thailand, the latter in response to a news story about eight endangered Asian elephants from Thailand being offered state-­of-­the-­art enclosures in Australian zoos. Plibersek wrote that there was no point in such measures unless Australia took action to tackle the poverty that led to environmental destruction:

Some Thai farmers are so poor they sell their children … In one town, Pa Tek, 70% of families have sold at least one daughter into prostitution. Prices vary from US$114 to US$913 —­ the latter figure equal to almost six years’ wages in Thailand.

In February 2007, she wrote about dental care and how the “last Labor government had a $100-­million-a-­year Commonwealth Dental Scheme that treated 1.5 million people. The Howard government abolished it soon after being elected.” Waiting lists for public dental care had blown out. She shared the story of one of her electors, a single mother who had fled domestic violence and was “bursting with pride” when her son won a scholarship to attend a North Shore private school.

But she could not attend his first day of school with him. Her rotting teeth were so bad she did not have the confidence to leave the house … This is the human cost of government neglect.

In one of the most lyrical of her columns, she used the 19th-­century English writer Anthony Trollope and his Palliser series of novels as the jumping-­off point for reflections on public life. Concluded Plibersek, “Trollope’s last and perhaps most important message is that on your death bed it will be your family and the relationship you had with them that counts, and that whatever you may achieve in public life, your first responsibility is to the people you love.”

Those were to be significant words, given the choices that lay ahead of her.

As Plibersek’s profile rose, the ALP was once again preoccupied with leadership destabilisation, with the resulting media reporting overshadowing all the hard work on policy.

Plibersek is among those who believe that Kim Beazley is the good prime minister, perhaps the great prime minister, Australia never had. She describes him as having values and a temperament similar to her own. He is decent, she says. His would have been a quiet kind of leadership. He would have been a team player rather than driven by ego.

He didn’t get the chance. By the second half of 2006, Rudd and Gillard had formed an alliance, combining their support. Gillard, as she wrote later, had accepted that she could not at this stage be the leader. Rudd could represent a “safe change” from Howard for conservative voters, whereas she, as a left-­wing unmarried woman, could not make that pitch, so she would settle for deputy. That would mean deposing not only Beazley but also Jenny Macklin. As the challenge approached, Plibersek made it clear to Macklin and Beazley, and within the party more generally, that she was on their side. Her loyalty cemented their friendships.

Gillard was convinced that Beazley did not have the ability to cut through and win against Howard. In parliament in 2005, Howard had made a stinging personal attack on Beazley that encapsulated the doubts about his leadership on both sides of the political aisle. Once, Howard said, he had thought that Beazley would be an effective opposition leader, but he had failed to develop a persona, or to let the Australian people know what he stood for. “I’ve watched him over nine and a half years. He does not, Mr Speaker, have the ticker.”

The Coalition had now won three elections in a row. Despite lagging in opinion polls, Howard had, in 2001 and 2004, conjured what political scientist Paul Strangio was to describe as “Houdini-­like escapes” come election time. Labor had been wrongfooted in the Tampa election of 2001 and had wrongfooted itself with Latham as leader in 2004. Now Howard, with a majority in both houses of parliament, was pursuing a massively unpopular program of changes to industrial relations that would undermine workers’ rights.

As Gillard reflected in her memoirs: “If Labor could not unseat John Howard after eleven years in those circumstances, ‘When would it ever happen?'” The 2007 election was, it seemed to her and to many political commentators, a make-­or-­break contest. If Labor couldn’t win, it would stop believing that it could. The Hawke–­Keating years would be regarded as the exception and Labor’s capacity to be a party of government would be permanently damaged.

Meanwhile, Rudd and Gillard were massively popular with the public and the media —­ dubbed the dream team —­ which can only look ironic in retrospect. It was their public popularity, as much as anything, that persuaded the party to make the change.

Rudd has argued in his memoirs that rolling Beazley was a necessary precondition to victory in 2007. Gillard, in her book, was more self-­critical. She said she might have been wrong in her judgment that, in 2006, Beazley was taking the job of opposition leader too quietly, and that the party was headed for defeat:

In politics you never get to run the control test. We will never know what would have happened in a John Howard versus Kim Beazley election or what a Beazley Government might have been like. How long Kim would have stayed. Who would have been his successor.

She went on to say that it was her decision to ally with Rudd that made the difference. He could not have attracted sufficient support on his own, without her intervention. “I bear the responsibility for creating his leader­ship.” She said she had correctly judged his campaigning capability and electoral popularity, but her “assessment of how he would perform as leader, in essence what kind of man he was, proved to be dreadfully wrong”.

Plibersek is reluctant to criticise former colleagues, but it is clear there is little in Gillard’s reflection with which she would disagree. Beazley would have won in 2007, Plibersek believes, because people were tired of Howard. “It might not have been the same landslide that Kevin achieved, but a win is a win.” She points out that in the six months prior to Beazley’s overthrow, and despite his lukewarm personal approval ratings, Labor was ahead in the polls. And had Beazley won, it would have been a different kind of Labor government.

On Friday, December 2 2006, Rudd and Gillard confirmed that they would contest the leadership of the party at a meeting the following Monday. The result was a weekend of dread for Plibersek. Nobody was more outspoken in support of Beazley and Macklin than she was. She dropped her customary restraint in talking about internal party matters and condemned the challenge in colourful terms. The leadership challenge was “heartbreaking … Because people won’t vote for a disunited party”. Rudd and Gillard were talented, she said, but not ready to lead. She compared the Rudd–­Gillard challenge to the elevation of Latham, who by this time was universally derided. “If we persist in repeating the mistakes of our history, then we don’t deserve to be in government … People will punish us at the ballot box for this”.

The day before the spill, she told The Daily Telegraph that the challenge was being driven by a small group of people who were “waiting like spiders in holes to dart out and spurt their poison”. Beazley backer senator Steve Hutchins, on hearing this comment, shot a jot of venom at Gillard, saying “the spider is a redback”.

Plibersek was not alone in speaking out. Wong, too, was one of Beaz­ley and Macklin’s most vocal supporters. Macklin had been a mentor to Wong, as well, and she owed her personal loyalty. But the next day, the caucus voted 49 to 39 to replace Beazley with Rudd. Macklin withdrew from the contest, allowing Gillard to be elected as deputy unopposed. Plibersek, the media reported, emerged from the vote “downcast and stony-­faced”. She sarcastically blamed “the same geniuses who gave us Mark Latham”.

In the short term, Plibersek was wrong about the electorally damaging effect of the Rudd–­Gillard move. Rudd led the party to a thumping victory in November 2007. The long Howard reign was over. Labor at last had its chance to govern. But in the longer term, history might judge her prescient. In the words of Paul Strangio, the November 2007 federal election appears like a hinge between two political eras: one stable and marked by executive mastery; the other chaotic and characterised by confounded leadership.

The Labor government of 2007–­2013 achieved a lot but squandered many of its opportunities. The most important policy issue of all —­ action on climate change — was dropped. Gillard deposed Rudd in 2010, claiming “a good government has lost its way”, and Labor was forced into minority government at the subsequent election. Then Rudd replaced Gillard. By 2013 the “dream team” was clearly unelectable. Labor had failed to manage itself. It had self-­sabotaged.

Reflecting on Labor’s decades of agony in interviews for this book in late 2021, Plibersek attacked what she described as “the great man version of history”, in which the party and the nation look to a single person as saviour. What matters, she said, is the team, not so much the leader.

Every leader has their strengths and weaknesses, she said. “[They] are not as bad as their enemies think, and they’re not as good as their friends think. And the one thing that is absolutely guaranteed to keep a party in opposition is chaos and instability. The view of the public is if you can’t govern yourselves, how can you govern the nation? A precondition for any leader’s success is a unified party, and a unified caucus behind them … The leaders who get there by destabilising the previous leader create an environment that guarantees their own eventual demise. Bad behaviour becomes more acceptable because it is more commonplace. And it’s a real problem, an institutional problem.”

She believes that if Rudd and Gillard had held their hand in 2006, a victorious Beazley would have served a term or two and then there would have been a “solid, stable, methodical, process” of succession. Either Rudd or Gillard would have taken over. On balance, she thinks, it would have been Gillard. “She would have had more time to assert her credentials. If she had had that time, it’s possible that Kevin wouldn’t have had a chance, and we might have gone straight from Kim to Julia.”

And if that had happened —­ a peaceful transition to an energised new generation —­ Labor would be a different kind of party, and Australia would be a different, better country. Perhaps Labor would have won in its own right in 2010, and again in 2013. The Abbott government might never have been.

Needless to say, not everyone shares Plibersek’s assessment of Beazley as a potentially good prime minister. They criticise his apparent lack of energy and lack of hunger for the job, and what they see as a lack of policy vision.

Significantly, these are exactly the kinds of shortcomings that some of Plibersek’s critics perceive in her. They question whether she has the edge, the ruthlessness, to make a good leader. They question her policy credentials. They don’t agree with suggestions from her supporters that she might represent a different kind of leadership — less macho, more team-­oriented, with less ego. “One of the persistent questions in Labor whenever Tanya is discussed as a possible leader is how she would go down, not with the inner-­city lefties but with the soccer mums in Penrith and the miners in the Hunter Valley,” says one. “Views differ.”

This is as good a place as any to say something about Tanya Pliber­sek and ambition, particularly in light of her comments about the great man version of history, the emphasis of the team over the leader.

In 2021, when she gave the bulk of interviews for this book, Labor was approaching the 2022 election, with Anthony Albanese as leader. Given the tiredness of the Coalition government, Labor was not doing as well in the polls as might be expected. Once again, the dialogue was that the Labor leader could not cut through. Some people were encouraging Plibersek to challenge Albanese for the leadership.

At the last election defeat, in 2019, she had at first intended to contest the leadership, but had withdrawn. Now she was being urged to reconsider. Meanwhile, Plibersek had a fanatical following — almost a cult —­ within the party membership.

Plibersek’s supporters, and those close to her, offered two narratives during this period. They denied she ever counted the numbers in 2021 with a view to a challenge. And they argued that had she taken on Albanese, she would have won, because she had the numbers. I heard stories of her taking soundings of her support. She denies doing this. Bill Shorten, from the Victorian Right, was said to want her to challenge. So did a group within the Socialist Left in Victoria. On the other hand, Albanese’s supporters continued to assert that he was not only strategically head and shoulders above Plibersek, but also able to hold a conversation with the Australian people —­ including those who would not usually vote Labor. Where was the evidence, they asked, that Plibersek could pull votes outside the lefties of the inner city? “She might have the luvvies on side,” said one senior Labor figure to me. “She might get people who’d consider voting Green to stick to Labor. But where’s the evidence she’d pull blue-­collar votes?”

But all this conversation remained subterranean. Plibersek never challenged.

She knew she was being watched. One of her main concerns when the idea of this biography was first raised was that it should be clear she did not seek it to be done: she feared it would be understood as her stalking Albanese.

It is hard to write about ambition in a woman. It is part of the background noise of patriarchy, the landscape of politics and achievement, that ambition accepted and expected in a talented man will be seen as illegitimate and unappealing in a woman.

Plibersek is an interesting case study. As Anne Summers had angrily noted, when Plibersek entered Parliament, she denied any ambitions other than to represent her electorate well. In her 2006 columns for The Sydney Morning Herald, she used Trollope to argue for the primacy of family and relationships, responsibility to “the people you love” over ambition in public life.

And yet Plibersek is ambitious, as evidenced by the way she seized the opportunity of preselection for Sydney. She threw herself into that contest with such energy, charm and determination that she won against the odds, and against more obviously qualified candidates. How would that capacity play out in a contest for party leadership?

Those closest to her say it was the experience of watching and living through Labor’s leadership contortions, from Beazley to Crean to Latham to Beazley and then to Rudd, that helped Plibersek begin to sense her own leadership ambitions. She watched the manoeuvring and assessed the talent and the judgment of those who circled the leadership race and compared her own abilities to those of the contenders. Nobody was speaking of Plibersek as a leadership contender at that time. She was not even in shadow cabinet.

Rebecca Huntley is one of Plibersek’s supporters. She talks about Plibersek’s “conspicuous, extraordinary empathy”. But, says Huntley, “the Achilles’ heel of Tanya’s deep and almost poetic humanity is her reticence to make herself into a guru”. She needs, in Huntley’s view, to assertively grab an issue and make it her own. “Has she got the ability to do that? Absolutely. But is there a reticence about doing that? Absolutely.” The idea of a leader having to set out a vision and demand to be followed is a male paradigm, she suggests. Plibersek would represent a more collaborative, less ego-­driven model. Huntley draws a comparison with the New Zealand leader Jacinda Ardern.

On this view of things, if Labor were ever to choose Plibersek as its leader, it would be voting for sense over sensibility — for Elinor over Marianne, for calm and good management over vision, emotion and ego. It would be the same kind of choice that Plibersek believes the party should have made in 2006 — a choice for Beazley rather than Rudd. But with the added factor of her undisputed communications abilities.

Meanwhile, the thing that confuses people about Plibersek is that both her reticence and her ambition reside in the same political persona. And this is one of the reasons the Albanese team don’t entirely trust her. They see her record — the occasional audacious moves for advancement —­ and understand her ambition as cloaked, rather than as ambivalent. I think that’s wrong. Tanya Plibersek would be a simpler, less layered character if that were true. It is once again that Elinor Dashwood opacity. I think both the reticence and the ambition are real. She has struck a different balance between them at different times. You could call the balance between them unresolved.

In March 2007 the voters of New South Wales returned the state Labor government, now led by Premier Morris Iemma, for its fourth term. Michael Coutts-­Trotter had become “indispensable” to NSW Labor, in the words of his boss, Michael Egan — “beloved” by Treasury and a confidant of politicians and senior public servants throughout the government. He had risen to be Egan’s chief of staff, but after seven years had made a switch to the public service, taking up the position of director-­general of the NSW Department of Commerce.

Now, after the election, the new education minister, John Della Bosca, appointed him the director-general of the Department of Education and Training. The appointment triggered another round of publicity over his criminal past. The media could hardly get enough of the story and its implications. Twelve years had passed since Coutts-­Trotter had been in the headlines, and for most of the parents whose children were being educated in schools under his supervision, his drug-­dealer past came as a shocking revelation. Talkback radio callers pointed out that Coutts-­Trotter could probably not be a lollypop man on a school crossing with such a criminal record, and almost certainly not a teacher. Yet now he oversaw the state’s schools.

As he had in 1995, Coutts-­Trotter took the controversy head-on, making himself available to the media, talking again about how he had made his mistakes and “luckily and remarkably” been given a second chance. This time, though, the right-­wing commentators of the Emerald City were not on his side. Tanya Plibersek was mentioned in almost every news story. The ABC Radio program The World Today declared that while his talents were undisputed, “there is little question his impeccable relationships with the Labor Party, including his wife, Federal Labor MP Tanya Plibersek, have been critical to his success”.

The NSW opposition described him as a “Labor mate” who would never have been appointed to the job —­ which was not advertised — without his connections. Gerard Henderson, the director of the Sydney Institute and conservative columnist for News Corporation papers, said that while everyone was entitled to make good on their youthful mistakes, it was “most unwise” to make Coutts-­Trotter head of education. “I mean, Alan Bond has done his time, but I don’t think anyone would make Alan Bond head of the Treasury Department.” The head of the Public Schools Principals Forum, Cheryl McBride, asked whether he was “really the model we want for our young people … do we want young people to think it is OK to be a drug addict and to be a trader, and to recover from that?”

As he had 12 years before, Egan spoke in Coutts-­Trotter’s favour — how he had redeemed and rehabilitated himself, how indispensable he had become. “People who work with him swear by him and all of his detractors today, particularly those who will be working with him, will soon find that he’s a first­class human being and they will regret ever having any doubts about him.” Della Bosca declared that Coutts-­Trotter had the government’s “absolute confidence” and that he was a “stellar example of someone who has learnt from the mistakes he made as a young man. I think he is exactly what we need to provide reinvigorated organisational leadership for public education”.

Tanya and Michael had known that the appointment was likely to renew the controversy. This time, navigating the consequences was more complicated. They had their children to consider. Anna, now six years old and in primary school, was old enough to know something was going on. There had to be a family conversation.

Anna Coutts-­Trotter remembers that the family talk came in the car, after they had been out for a meal. She was mostly preoccupied with the fact that she had been promised an ice cream for dessert. Her parents told her there was something they had to tell her. She listened and then, the family folklore goes, continued to lobby for the ice cream. It was only years later, as she grew older, that she came to a deeper understanding of what her father had done, and what he had been through — the police brutality, the violence witnessed in jail, being “banged up” with the killers of Anita Cobby. And the social media posts in which her mother would be described as a drug whore.

But at this time, the private family conversation was soon played back to the public as part of the media management. Coutts-­Trotter told The Sunday Telegraph:

I had to sit her down and explain to her that her dad’s been to jail. As a six-­year-­old, you understand things in pretty black-­and-­white terms, you know: people who go to jail are bad, and people who don’t are good. I’ve got to tell her no, it’s a bit more complicated than that. I felt a bit heartsick about it. I worry that it might get raised with her in the playground, but I really wanted this job.

Plibersek and Coutts-­Trotter told The Daily Telegraph their message was pitched at a level they hoped their daughter could accept. They had used the example of a friend who was a smoker, and used that to tell her there were other kinds of addiction. Coutts-­Trotter added, “She’s a bright girl. I think she’ll be asking the next set of questions far too soon.”

Meanwhile, Plibersek leapt into the media herself, to frame the story. She said that whenever she was confronted by drug-­blighted kids in her electorate, she thought of her husband. He was a “beacon of hope”, she said, and “an inspiration”. He showed that change was possible for everyone. “If there’s any good to come out of his past being dredged up again by the opposition it’s that it might give hope to other families struggling with having a teenage child in similar circumstances,” she said.

It was great media fodder and a welter of profiles, interviews and opinion columns followed. For the month of April 2007, Michael Coutts-­Trotter, Tanya Plibersek and their story of redemption were at the centre of public debate in Sydney and even nationally. Coutts-­Trotter was, as usual, almost embarrassingly frank. He was asked about redemption and said, “Redemption … well, I’m not sure how you can tackle life without the belief that redemption is real, is possible, is a factor. I’m a lapsed Catholic but I’m culturally Catholic. When I think of redemption it is notions of Christian redemption I think about.” He talked about achieving a “state of grace” through the recovery process, particularly through attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings. “I felt as if I did better than I could have on my own. So you draw strength from human fellowship.”

Then, as such things do, the issue faded away. By the end of April, Plibersek was in the media being asked, as part of a lifestyle feature, what made her happy. She answered that it was exercise. She had hated sport at school. But now, “Feeling fit and strong is something that makes me very happy. I swim, go the gym, do yoga, bushwalk and run.” She was swimming about a kilometre each day in the harbour, and being a mother had transformed her attitude to exercise. She wanted her children to see her as strong and physically competent. Joe, she said, was now two years old and fearless. When swimming, “He sticks his head right under water and comes up laughing with the water dripping off his eyelashes.”

And the Emerald City moved on.