Margaret Simons has followed her well-received biography of Penny Wong with one on the other feminist star in Labor’s firmament, Tanya Plibersek.
Plibersek was a reluctant subject. She did not want people to think the biography, Tanya Plibersek: On Her Own Terms, was part of a publicity campaign for the leadership. But as the biography would be written anyway, she cooperated, offering introductions to former and present staff, friends and family, and eight interviews of her own. The voices of those who know her well, especially her family and close friends, give the biography an appealing intimacy.
Plibersek was blessed with a stable and happy childhood. Her parents, both born in Slovenia, met and married here in Australia. They were practising Catholics and their three children developed a strong ethical sense with a commitment to the common good, compared with what Plibersek would later describe as “the state-led selfishness” of neoliberalism.
Her parents also gave her an interest in politics and literature. She loves Jane Austen and identifies with the clever, sensible Elinor Dashwood in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. When the family could afford it, they travelled regularly back to Slovenia. All of this has given Plibersek the poise, confidence and cultural capital of a middle-class upbringing, but her father, Joe, was a plumber, and unlike many of her cabinet colleagues, she went to the local public school, where she was taught by a strong cohort of feminist teachers.
Plibersek joined the Labor Party when she was 15, left about a year later over the Hawke government’s 1984 decision to allow uranium mining in Australia, and re-joined in 1993 while working in the NSW ministry for the status and advancement of women.
Four years later she contested and won preselection for the safe Labor seat of Sydney. She was only 29, up against more experienced candidates with better claims to the seat, but she personally visited the branch members, talking with them at length about their concerns, and so won the ballot. During the campaign, her brother, Philip, was murdered in PNG. Despite the shock and grief, she kept going, an answer Simons writes to those who doubt her toughness.
A theme of the book is the tension between Plibersek and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who did not make himself available for an interview. They are seen within the party and by the media as rivals, and before the last election, when a Labor victory was uncertain, some were agitating for her to replace Albanese.
She did consider running for the leadership after the 2019 election defeat, and believes she would have won, however, her then-18-year-old daughter, Anna, was in serious need of her. She had been drawn into an abusive relationship, the ex-boyfriend was facing charges of assault, and she would be a witness in the coming court case. Plibersek wanted to be there for her, not hitting the phones and counting the numbers.
This is revealing, and Anna’s story is told here for the first time. As interesting to me is what the speculation around Tanya’s ambition tells us of prevailing assumptions about leadership. Her critics cite her lack of ruthlessness and hunger for the top job, and doubt her policy vision, judging her outstanding communication skills to be less important to prime ministerial success than ego and driving ambition.
And her policy achievements are impressive. Together with former politician Jenny Macklin, she achieved a paradigm shift in the framing of childcare and parental leave, successfully pivoting them from welfare issues to accepted parts of economic policy as means to boost workforce participation and economic productivity. This now has bipartisan acceptance.
There are, says Simons, limits to passion and conviction compared with patience and persistence. The path to reform is long and incremental “studded with half-measures and less-than-perfect schemes, rarely allowing for moral vanity or declarations of victory, but eventually becoming an accepted part of how the nation works”. Successful policy outcomes count for more in the long run than grand visions that come to nothing, like so much of what Rudd promised.
My overall takeaway from the book though is not that Plibersek would make a good prime minister, though I’m sure she would, but that she is a thoroughly decent human being who is committing her life to a difficult and demanding job that few of us would be able to stomach, let alone have the physical and mental endurance for. She restores one’s trust in politics. If only there were more like her.
