Labor leader Peter Malinauskas on family, footy and the future of democracy
Family and footy are Labor leader Peter Malinauskas’s two great loves but the former union boss says he’s concerned about the future of democracy.
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Peter Malinauskas draws his compadres into a tight circle. He eyeballs as many as he can. He is pumped up, not desperate, but deeply committed to the cause as he delivers his message. Loudly.
“When that contest comes around, win that contest. And we will win the game.”
But it’s not politics that has Labor leader Malinauskas so worked up. It’s not Labor’s caucus he is addressing with such fierce passion. It’s the Adelaide University C6 footy team, popularly known as “The Scum”, who are about to take to the field for the second half of their grand final against the Marion Rams.
The 40-year-old Malinauskas kicked the first goal of the game, after lining up at full forward, but it’s been a struggle for his team that had entered the decider unbeaten in this COVID-reduced season. And despite the rev up, Uni would lose the grand final by a goal in what was supposed to be Malinauskas’s last game of footy. He was going to quit if they won. That decision was helped along by a severe concussion that put him in hospital for a night earlier in the season. But, now? Maybe not. Maybe he’ll keep fighting on, trying to hunt down that one last flag.
A couple of days after the grand final, over a coffee at Welland Plaza in his Croydon electorate, Malinauskas is still carrying the pain of unexpected defeat. Desperately searching for an upside, he decides there is some comfort to be had from losing when everyone expects you to win.
“If anything I have come to realise that being the underdog is in vogue at the moment,” he says with a look halfway between grimace and grin on his face.
Is it as bad as losing an election?
“You win a low grade amateur footy grand final, the celebrations last a few days, you lose one the sting tends to last for a few days whereas elections tend to matter more in the long run,” he answers pragmatically, even if not entirely convincingly, as if he is trying to convince himself of the obvious truth of his statement.
There is no doubt Malinauskas and Labor are underdogs 17 months out from the 2022 state election. Premier Steven Marshall’s handling of the COVID pandemic has seen him elevated in the eyes of the community and a recent poll in The Advertiser had the Liberal Party holding a comfortable 53-47 advantage. Still, Malinauskas says he doesn’t believe the pandemic will be the defining factor in March 2022.
“The next election is not going to be about COVID,” he says. “It’s going to be about the future of our state. It’s going to be about who best represents a vision to deliver a decent standard of living, economic prosperity for families and children, and that is what I am focused on,” he says.
Malinauskas took over as Labor leader after the 2018 election, which unseated Jay Weatherill as premier and put the Liberals into government for the first time in 16 years.
It wasn’t a surprise Labor turned to the relatively youthful Malinauskas. He’s been touted as the next big thing in Labor circles since he was in his mid-20s. He first came to wide public prominence almost a decade ago when it emerged that he had been the one to deliver the news to long-serving premier Mike Rann that he was to be replaced by Weatherill.
Malinauskas demurs when asked about what it’s like carrying such a label. To go back to footy terms, it’s a bit like being the number one draft pick.
“My mates gave me shit about it, so I don’t know,” he says before lapsing into a more traditional politician’s answer. “It’s nice when people have confidence in you.”
Malinauskas can be like that. He can do that polished politician thing, and do it well, but there is the sense he has to curb his natural instinct to be direct and straight-forward. Occasionally, blunt.
It’s not an assessment he agrees with. He says it’s important to him to be “authentic”.
“When you take on the leadership you are conscious that what you say matters more because you are speaking as someone with the authority of being the leader of the party, so you want to be considered,” he says. “I don’t find myself in situations where I consciously withdraw from saying something that I want to say.”
Malinauskas fell into the Labor Party through the state’s largest union, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association, which looks after retail workers. He was working at Woolworths in Mitcham when he was asked to be a rep for the nightfill crew.
Malinauskas was maybe not an obvious candidate. Coming from a self-described “comfortable middle class background” he had been school captain at Mercedes College, a swish Catholic establishment.
At one point the Liberal Party thought he might be a chance to jump on their side. Former Liberal member for Boothby Andrew Southcott invited the young Malinauskas to a function featuring then Treasurer Peter Costello. Also sent was a Liberal membership application form. By then Malinauskas was at university and starting to figure out his political allegiances. He sent Southcott a letter politely declining the invitation.
Malinauskas was studying commerce at Adelaide University when he met the head of the union, and now Labor senator, Don Farrell. It was at St Paul’s church in Glen Osmond. Farrell was friendly with the parish priest who told him there was someone he should meet.
“He’s a shop steward of yours,” Farrell was informed.
The young Malinauskas made an immediate impression.
“You could see he was a serious sort of person,” Farrell says. “You could see he was the sort of person who could convince people of his cause and that is important in unionism.”
Malinauskas combined working for the SDA with his uni studies and joined the union full-time when he completed his degree.
“He takes an interest in people and a genuine interest,” Farrell says. “He is prepared to defend his position and justify it. He turned out to be a fantastic employee in terms of convincing people to join the union.”
Malinauskas does have an easy way with people. Wandering through the city with him he is often recognised – maybe his height is a help, he is well over 190cm tall – but he stops and chats with anyone who wants a moment and doesn’t make it look like a chore.
When Farrell left to join the Senate after the 2007 federal election, Malinauskas was the obvious choice to replace him. He was 27. Malinauskas says when he finished his commerce degree he had two choices.
“I could try and get a job working for a bank. Or I could commit myself to the labour movement and to me that felt like a no-brainer.”
He says he didn’t grow up in a political household. His mother Kate worked in the library at The Advertiser for many years. His father Peter worked for the Housing Trust. Neither were members of any political party, although “there was a genuine commitment to social justice”.
It was a commitment reinforced by his education at Mercedes, where he became school captain on a platform of “allowing guys to wear shorts in winter, getting footy goals on the oval and getting new vending machines”.
But Malinauskas says it is the influence of his grandparents that stays with him. His mother’s side were Irish, but his paternal grandfather, also Peter, was a post-war refugee from Lithuania, fleeing shortly after it had been annexed by the Soviet Union. Grandmother Eta was a post-war refugee from Hungary.
Eta had been captured by the Nazis and sent to a forced labour camp. When the Iron Curtain came down after the war she was unable to return to Hungary. She was only 20, but her husband was dead and she had left behind an infant daughter in Hungary. She would never see her daughter again. Malinauskas talks about his grandparents with a mixture of awe and gratitude.
“They went through an extraordinary amount of adversity,” he says. “They came here with literally nothing. Their whole story fascinated me.”
They met at the Bonegilla migrant camp, in northeast Victoria, before Peter found a job as a cook in Woodside and Eta used the little money she had to follow him over. When they met they didn’t know each other’s native language and conversed in German.
“They dropped that language pretty quickly when they came to Australia and learned English as quick as they could,” he says.
What his grandparents impressed on him was to make the best of the opportunities life granted you.
“This woman was truly extraordinary,” he says. “She went through the full, the full horror of war. All that human tragedy and then she came here with nothing, to build a complete life out of nothing and she was probably one of the most optimistic, happy, generous, loving people I have ever met in my life.
“They had nothing, so what excuse do I have? I have been lucky. Grabbing every opportunity you can get and trying to use it in a way you are making a contribution. That was drilled into me growing up.”
In 2003, Malinauskas visited Hungary to meet the daughter his grandmother had been forced to leave behind. Over the intervening years there had been contact but his grandmother didn’t want to leave Australia and her daughter, so long behind the Iron Curtain, didn’t want to leave Hungary.
“Grandma never wanted to leave Australia ever again. She couldn’t tolerate the risk,” he says.
Before Malinauskas left Australia he thought it had been all arranged.
“It was a big deal,” he remembers. The night before travelling to Budapest he was in Prague when his father called to say it was all off. His aunt Gizus didn’t want to see him. He decided he was going anyway.
He arrived in Budapest with a name and a phone number. No address. He spoke no Hungarian but found his aunt in the phone book and set out to find her. She lived out of Budapest in a jungle of Soviet-era high rise apartment blocks. He found the right building, but couldn’t navigate the locked door. He rang his father back in Adelaide and told him to ring his mother and tell her to ring her daughter and let him in.
While he was waiting a woman loaded down with shopping opened the door to enter the block and he dived in behind her. When the lift stopped on the right floor, he was greeted with another locked gate. But this one had a button with his aunt’s name on it.
“I see her name and I press this buzzer and this lady came out. I will never forget it, she walked out and I just saw grandma,” he says. “I was perfectly OK with everything and then soon as I saw grandma I lost it, I lost it.
“It was amazing. Here I am. My grandmother’s grandson and her daughter she has not seen since she was an infant. I still get emotional thinking about it. It was the most unbelievable experience of my life.”
The visit opened up a new line of communication between mother and daughter, although they never did meet again. However, after Eta died, her son travelled to Hungary to meet his sister for the first time.
Malinauskas says his “vehemently anti-communist” grandfather would “roll over in his grave that I joined the Labor Party, let alone I am the leader”. Yet, his grandparents’ suffering at the hands of totalitarian regimes, also imbued the younger Malinauskas with the feeling “that election day was always a big deal”.
Now Malinauskas is worried about the state of democracy.
“The thing about democracy with universal franchise is that it’s only 126 years old,” he says. “You think about all the history of human civilisation, democracy is a blip on the radar. This is an experiment in the context of the way civilisations have organised themselves. Which means it’s precious and we can’t take it for granted as something that will always be there.”
He worries about the increasing polarisation of politics, about the pernicious influence of social media, which he believes has been a “net negative” for society.
It’s a problem, he says, that afflicts both sides of politics.
“Close friends of mine have very different politics, family members of mine have very different politics and it strikes me they are on social media having their world view reconfirmed to them, whether it be about Trump or conservatism,” he says.
“Meanwhile, others who are progressive or Left wing are on social media having their world view confirmed to them and no one is talking to each other. It’s highly problematic. It undermines civility.”
Malinauskas is also unhappy with those on the Left who talk down to those who do vote for populists such as Trump. He says it’s more important to understand why they are unhappy, instead of denigrating them as former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton did when she called Trump voters “deplorables”.
“It’s not unreasonable for a working or a middle class person to gravitate towards someone who appears to have solutions to your problems and your frustrations,” Malinauskas says.
“Maybe we should spend a bit of time asking why it is that someone in their situation decided to vote for a gilded millionaire who has a penthouse over New York.”
Malinauskas doesn’t pretend to have all the answers to these problems, which stretch far beyond Australia. He suggests some form of control may be needed for social media.
“I think we have to try and get a bit creative and, if necessary, punitive about it because there is a lot at stake, a lot at stake.”
Malinauskas knows politicians have to shoulder a lot of the blame. That the community has become increasingly sceptical about the motivations and actions of its elected leaders. He says when he became leader he didn’t want to just oppose the government for the sake of it.
“(Former Prime Minister) Tony Abbott was a fierce, full blown 100 per cent attack, oppose everything opposition leader and look how he turned out to be as prime minister.”
It’s a claim, the Liberals will tell you, that has more spin than reality, but Malinauskas points to the bipartisan support he offered on the government’s handling of the COVID health crisis. He even claims that he is happy Marshall’s handling of the health side of it has been popular.
“Crises lend themselves towards governments. That is an iron first rule of politics,” he says. “I think people quite rightly are willing for their governments to succeed. That includes myself when it comes to the health response. That reflects itself in polling.”
Watching Malinauskas for a day in parliament it becomes obvious the Liberals will try to paint the Labor leader as just another anti-business faceless union hack. During Question Time he was peppered with reminders that he had been the one that had told Mike Rann, the state’s third-longest serving premier, that he was to be replaced by Jay Weatherill. At that stage, Malinauskas didn’t even have a seat in parliament, he was still running the Shoppies. He was accompanied by a Cabinet Minister in Jack Snelling, but it was clear the authority to deliver the message was held by Malinauskas, who was still only 30 at the time.
Malinauskas is reticent about talking about that day, but says he and Rann are on good terms. Rann confirms this, saying the two had met for a beer earlier this year when the former premier was back in Adelaide.
“Peter and I talked about being in Opposition. Being Leader of the Opposition is the toughest job in politics, which every Opposition Leader I’ve met, regardless of party or country, agrees,” he says.
Rann also says he holds no “hard feelings” for the way his premiership ended. He says it was always his intention to step down as Premier after 10 years in the job. A timeline that would have seen him leave in March 2012. Instead, when the news of the August 2011 meeting was leaked, the resulting furore meant it was no longer tenable for Rann to remain and he was gone by October. All these years later, Rann remains angry, not about the meeting itself, but that it was leaked.
“My disappointment at the time was that our meeting and the intended nature of our discussions were leaked to the media in advance,” Rann says. “They were not leaked by Peter Malinauskas.”
Malinauskas agrees with Rann that opposition leader is the toughest gig in town.
“Being opposition leader is hard. Being opposition leader with a first term government is harder. Being a first term opposition leader with a crisis of this nature is, of course, a big challenge.”
But Malinauskas says a lot of policy work has already been done and there is no doubt he is trying to reposition Labor as more business friendly than his predecessor Weatherill, who once said he was “not a free-market guy”.
“The Labor Party is, first and foremost, an economic party,” Malinauskas says. “Business does need to do well, capital does need to get a return in order to be able to employ people. It’s a general philosophy I have. I don’t say that because I am interested in sucking up to business, I am interested in it because that is in the interests of working people.”
Malinauskas knows after only four years in opposition, some voters will still have strong memories of 16 years of Labor government. But he is trying to present the party as a clean slate. He has named what he considers to be errors of his predecessors – the closing of the Repat hospital and the selling of forests in the South-East – and is convinced “elections are about the future” rather than the past.
He says policy will be released closer to the election but says education will be a big focus, believing it’s an area multiple governments have failed to adequately address.
“Education remains the greatest lever we have at our disposal, socially, economically, to provide people opportunity and to grow our prosperity,’’ he says.
There’s only one more footy season before the next election. Malinauskas says he’ll make a decision on that in February next year. Wife Annabel has heard promises of retirement before.
“I thought he was giving up seven years ago when they did win a premiership,” she says with a smile. “That was in 2013. Right after we got married. I thought that was his last year and somehow here we are seven years later and he is still playing.”
The pair first met at a 21st, but they didn’t start going out until a few years later. Her first impression of him was that he was “tall and kind”. The couple now have three children, Sophie, 5, Jack, 3, and Eliza, five months. The 35-year-old Annabel Malinauskas, who is a lawyer, says “one of the things he finds hardest is not being able to spend as much time with them as he would like”.
As the election rushes ever closer, that is a trend that will only accelerate.
Despite the toll on family life, he says he is excited and optimistic about the election campaign. But perhaps he should go back to the footy oval first. There are votes to be won there as well. Malinauskas, predictably enough, cops a bit of sledging when he is playing. From both sides of the fence.
This day he was lining up a set shot for goal when he heard a challenge float towards him.
“There was a lady on the boundary and she had been having a rip all day,” he remembers. “She said, ‘If you miss I’m voting for Marshall and if you kick it I’m voting for you’. Thank God I kicked it. I went over and gave her a high five and she was pretty good about it.”
In politics, every vote counts.