From Turbo Tom to Treasurer Koutsantonis

TOM Koutsantonis says cutting chips at his parents’ chicken shop and driving cabs helped him when drawing up next week’s State Budget

Tom Koutsantonis, his wife Anthea and children Helena and Tia on election day in March. P

THE voice from the back of the cab was frightening. The passengers had just been picked up from an Adelaide city nightclub, bound for a hotel on Glen Osmond Rd, when one of the men made an inquiry heavy with menace. “What would you do if we put a knife to your throat right now?’’

The cabbie didn’t let his fear show, and his decisive answer defused a dangerous situation. “I said ‘oh well, I would probably ram the car into a pole and see which ones of you survived’.’’

Meet South Australia’s crash or crash-through politician, taxi driver-turned-Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis.

These days the 42-year-old has a different kind of knife-edge situation to deal with. On Thursday he will deliver his first Budget since being appointed Treasurer following Labor’s surprise election win in March. His job is to shore up Labor’s minority government with a document that sets the direction for the next four years.

The trouble is, it’s likely to deliver massive cuts across the board as Koutsantonis deals simultaneously with rising debt and deficit and drastically reduced revenue from Canberra.

Not surprisingly, he is casting his first Budget as a brave one. He says last month’s federal equivalent ripped the guts out of his plans and he had to start again.

His strategy will be to persuade people that the person to blame is federal Treasurer Joe Hockey and not him and Premier Jay Weatherill. That’s not going to be easy.

“My Budget will reflect exactly what it is Hockey is attempting to do, and I will pass on the political responsibility to him where it belongs,” he says.

We meet to discuss his Budget, and his life, in the Treasurer’s office on the eighth floor of the State Administration Centre in Victoria Square. In a previous life I had sat in this same office, discussing budget strategies as a staffer with one of Koutsantonis’s predecessors. I express doubts as to whether the “blame Canberra” strategy will work.

“I think people will be very cynical about it but I will spend my time talking to them about it and I am going to explain it,” he responds. “The great thing about numbers, whether they are political numbers or dollars and cents, is they don’t lie.”

But to sell the message Koutsantonis is going to have to overcome the perceptions of him built over 17 years in State Parliament. Koutsantonis knows, even if he doesn’t like it or agree with it, how many people view him.

Words such as arrogant and bully are thrown around with abandon. Then there is his famous driving record. In 2009, one month after achieving his long-cherished ambition to become a minister it emerged that he had collected 60 traffic infringement notices and had lost his licence. It wasn’t a good look for the newly-appointed road safety minister and he resigned from that portfolio although he stayed in the Cabinet.

Koutsantonis’s voice takes a harder, more serious edge when talking about that time. It’s not a comfortable part of our conversation. “It was terrible,’’ he says. He accepts his driving record was “horrific” and that people had a right to know about it and that he will carry that ignominy for the rest of his career. But the memories are still raw.

At the time Koutsantonis said not all the fines racked up in his name were actually incurred by him, but today he says he will not be “relitigating” that argument.

He thinks he was harshly dealt with by the media. “All these front-page stories about what an awful person I was,’’ he says. “I didn’t recognise the person they were talking about. It hurts, but you get on with life and you realise that they are not actually talking about me, they are talking about some public figure they can demonise to sell papers.’’

His response is typical Koutsantonis: while he accepts he did wrong his instinct is always to fight. To fight the Liberals, to fight the media, to fight against any perceived slights on his character and reputation.

In part this is because Koutsantonis has always had to struggle to get to where he wants to go. “I have to work twice as hard as everyone else, not because I am not as good or as talented as everyone else,” he says. “I carry a very long last name and that carries with it stereotypes and I have to overcome those stereotypes, there’s just nothing I can do about that and I react.’’

It is this head-on approach to life that has brought him as many enemies as friends. It feeds the perception of Koutsantonis as arrogant and even a bully. That he is a bloke more interested in the game of politics than in actually helping the ordinary person.

His radio and television interviews tend towards the abrasive, although counter-intuitively, since being appointed to the more high-pressure position of Treasurer, he seems to have calmed down a little. In a presentational sense he also hasn’t been helped by his rapid-fire speaking voice and a necessity to stop to breathe in the middle of long sentences because of a birth defect that means he can’t breathe through his nose.

But there is another side to Koutsantonis as well. There is a tendency by some to underestimate his capabilities. He is smart, quick-witted and funny in a caustic fashion. Outside of road safety, he was regarded as a capable minister and, according to his wife Anthea, he is also “very charming”.

He is entertaining company, forthright in his opinions and passionate about the Port Adelaide and Liverpool football clubs. A devoted father to two girls, Tia and Helena, he is – again according to his wife – a “hands-on dad’’ who loves to cook and even helps out with the cleaning. He goes to church every Sunday with his family and can be safely classed as a social conservative having spoken out against hot-button issues such as legalising same-sex marriage, prostitution reform and euthanasia.

Koutsantonis, christened Anastasios, is the son of Greek migrants. His father Antonis left Greece shortly after buying his first pair of shoes, in 1957. Antonis was around 22 when he arrived in Australia but couldn’t be sure as he didn’t know his date of birth. He finally settled on August 15, a religious day that marks the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into Heaven.

His mother Dimitra, was one of nine kids, and arrived in Australia in 1960 to live with a sister. Antonis worked at the ACI Pilkington glass factory on Port Rd for 25 years; Dimitra was a cleaning lady. After accepting a redundancy package from the glassworks the pair opened up a deli in Cowandilla. It was a seven-day-a-week operation and the husband-and-wife team worked from 7am to 10pm each day.

George Koutsantonis is Tom’s elder brother by nine years and is a professor of chemistry at the University of Western Australia. He says his parents’ work ethic had a tremendous impact on them both.

“They worked hard and we saw them working bloody hard,’’ he says.

Later when the family sold the deli and established a chicken shop the brothers were expected to be there every day at 6am to hand-cut the chips for the day’s business.

But for all their hard work Antonis and Dimitra were determined their sons should have better lives and pushed the value of education. “They had not been given the opportunity of going to school in spite of being intelligent thinking, logical human beings. They made sure we had every opportunity we could have,’’ George says.

George says the brothers “grew up tough”. But they also grew up political. George and his father were Labor supporters, but his mother was a Liberal and many family arguments followed.

The age gap between the brothers meant Tom, in some ways, was raised as an only child, but it also meant he was influenced by his brother who was becoming increasingly interested in the febrile student politics found on university campuses in the 1970s and 1980s. “He was influenced by a lot of what I was reading and what I tried to inculcate into him about the concern for people and making people’s life better,’’ he says.

Koutsantonis must have been an unusual child. He says by the age of 12 he knew he wanted to be a politician.

His teacher at Netley Primary School, Andrew Payne, who stood as a Greens candidate in the last Federal Election, remembers asking the class who the prime minister was after Bob Hawke’s triumph in 1983. Only one kid put up their hand.

“Uncle Bob,’’ said the young Koutsantonis.

Apart from that Payne remembers a well-mannered child trying to balance his Greek and Australian lives and who was intelligent even if he didn’t want to show it. “He hid it a bit, sometimes if you are too bright people give you a hard time,” he says.

Koutsantonis was one of only a few Greek kids in his class and remembers some racism at school. Particularly on the day he wore the Greek national dress, the foustanella, as part of a multicultural day. There were quite a few fights but, with a laugh, Koutsantonis says he can see why. “I was wearing a dress to school, let’s face it,’’ he says.

Still, he says school days “made me a lot harder”. “I am not the most trusting bloke in the world,’’ he says. “It takes a while for me to accept people, that might be because of what happened at school.’’

His connection to politics came from his next-door neighbour at the chicken shop. It was the electorate office of deputy premier Jack Wright. Koutsantonis remembers marvelling at the power this politician seemed to wield. When his father, who still struggled with his English, received a routine letter from a government department he would feel overwhelmed and go next door for a bit of help.

“It was jaw-dropping stuff,’’ he remembers. “He came to the house, said it was nothing, said he would fix it. That was the moment I realised the power of helping people who didn’t have a voice; that has always guided me. It’s what drove me into the union movement, into politics.’’

His early political heroes were Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. Like many on the right of the Labor Party he also has a fascination with US politics. On his office wall hangs a poster of John F. Kennedy, just outside his door is one of Barack Obama.

What he liked about Keating was the feeling that he was speaking to families like his. He was speaking for working-class people and for people with small family businesses. “Being from a small business family, we were a conservative family,’’ he says. “We weren’t hot-blooded socialists waiting for the revolution to come. We were trying to make money.”

After Adelaide High School he went to university but struggled to settle down. He tried his hand at computer science, arts, maths science and was going to give chemistry a whirl when family circumstances dictated he needed to go back and help with the business. By 1993 though, the family business was sold and he was planning to return to university. But, instead, current Parliamentary Speaker Michael Atkinson offered him a job in his electorate office. This led to a role with the state’s most powerful union, the Shop and Distributive Allied Employees Association.

In the meantime he was putting together his plan to enter parliament. He was signing up new members for his branch so he could control it and when the time came he would then present himself as “the only obvious choice’’ to be the candidate.

Circumstances also worked in his favour. The Labor party was routed in the 1993 State Bank election, leaving it with only 10 seats in the 47-seat Lower House.

Such was the swing against Labor following the catastrophic collapse of the State Bank that many seats had fallen to the Liberal Party that would never do so again. Including a couple in the western suburbs.

Koutsantonis stood in Peake (now West Torrens) and was elected at the 1997 election when Labor regained much of the ground it lost four years earlier. He was only 26 years old. He acknowledges now it was very young to go into parliament. Indeed he says the party would be reluctant to put in anyone that young again. Asked if he has regrets about moving into parliament so early he wavers. “I’m not saying it’s a bad thing because I can’t,’’ he says. But he admits there were times he would have liked to join his friends backpacking around Europe or living a life that didn’t always involve counting numbers and running campaigns. “I missed out on all of that to do politics because I was in such a rush,’’ he says. “I’ve always been in a rush which has been a big problem for me.’’

For a bloke in a big rush the next 12 years were to prove extremely frustrating. The first five years of Koutsantonis’s parliamentary life were spent in Opposition. Then, when Mike Rann defeated Rob Kerin in 2002, he was left on the backbench. And there he would stay until March 2009 when he finally made it into Cabinet.

Which isn’t to say he was inactive. He was a voluble backbencher, he ran the party’s dominant Right faction and he was a noisy nuisance in the chamber itself constantly baiting the other side. He seemed to treat parliament like a football match; an us against them forum where insults and intimidation were just another weapon.

There were rumours he didn’t get on with Rann. Koutsantonis says that’s not quite right. “I don’t think Mike actively stopped me, but I don’t think he actively helped me either,’’ he says.

There were also many internal battles against his current boss Jay Weatherill, a man he appears to have had a Damascene conversion about in recent years. Of those clashes he now says: “That’s factional show, that is not real” and instead argues that the Premier “has not had a greater supporter than me’’.

And on face value he is right. When Senator Don Farrell, the “godfather’’ of the Labor Right suddenly announced he was switching to State Parliament and wanted to run in the March election, Weatherill proclaimed he would rather quit. Koutsantonis sided with Weatherill rather than Farrell – a man of whom he said in 2006: “I would lie down in front of a truck for him.’’ That decision was either a sign of his growing maturity, or another indication that politics is a “me first’’ business.

Koutsantonis argues the last few years have changed him markedly.

Firstly he met Anthea. They were introduced at the television industry’s “funny reels’’ night, an event Koutsantonis turned up to as a sidekick to then treasurer Kevin Foley in late 2007.

Anthea says she had heard of her future husband but had never heard of Foley. “He was funny, very charming and I thought this was the way a girl should be treated,’’ is her memory of their first meeting. Five months later they were engaged. “We were a little bit older, so when you are older you know,’’ she says of the swift nature of the romance.

Then there was the birth of their daughter Tia. Tia was born at only 28 weeks. She spent the first nine weeks of her life in the Women’s and Children’s Hospital and her father says it fundamentally altered his view on life. They were told early that Tia would be one of the lucky ones. That the afflictions that make life difficult for other premature babies such as developmental problems and chronic health issues would not affect Tia.

“I didn’t realise at the time how dangerous it was (for Tia),’’ he says. “This is how naïve I was, and almost how arrogant I was about my life, thinking nothing can go wrong – I am bulletproof.’’

But when he saw the baby in the humidicrib next to Tia and heard doctors tell that child’s parents that they may have to amputate toes and fingers, the full gravity of the situation started to set in. “Slowly, but surely, I think God was bringing me down notches, knocking big chips off my shoulder and saying to me life is not as you think it is where the world is your oyster,’’ he says.

“It’s completely out of your control and you are helpless, and that taught me a lot, what kind of father to be, what kind of politician to be, what kind of person to be and how to treat other people.’’

Tia is now 3½ and in perfect health, and another daughter, Helena, was born in December last year. Koutsantonis says though that the memory of Tia in hospital will be reflected “in my Budgets’’.

But it didn’t change him in some ways. As politicians go Koutsantonis is as forthright as you will find. If he doesn’t like you, he will tell you. If he doesn’t agree with you, he will tell you. Forcefully. He enjoys nothing more than baiting the Libs either in parliament or on Twitter. He has had a hard time restraining his joy at the result of the March election where Labor was returned against all the odds. Weatherill’s triumph against Steven Marshall was predicted by no one in the media and Koutsantonis takes great delight in issuing reminders. He is, though, shocked by what he sees as the media’s great negligence in how the campaign was covered. “I just thought it was one of the great examples of mass delusion I have ever seen,’’ he says. “I can’t think of a single issue on which Steven Marshall beat us on in the campaign. I don’t want to make it sound like hubris but he was comprehensively beaten on style, on substance, in policy, in tactics and campaigning.”

After the win Weatherill asked Koutsantonis to be Treasurer. He went home and talked about it with Anthea, understanding the scale of the task ahead. Laughing, Anthea says budget is “like a rude word in this house” because of the hours involved, but Koutsantonis says he is loving the challenge and looking forward to Thursday. Indeed, he says, this is the best time of all to be the state’s Treasurer.

“There is nothing better than being in charge when it is a difficult opportunity,’’ he says. “No one gets to see and measure your ability when times are going really well. They just don’t.’’