High Steaks: Minister Rose Jackson talks about how everyone needs to ‘hate less'

Fresh from being hauled over the coals for a radio interview where she appeared to suggest rent was “a couple of hundred bucks” in Sydney, NSW’s youngest minister has made a surprise admission over the incident in a High Steaks interview.

In her early 20s, a staunchly feminist Rose Jackson wrote an article in the Sydney University magazine “denouncing” Sam Crosby as an anti-feminist Labor Right hack who ran a boys’ club at the university’s union.

Years later, she married him and the pair now share their children Oscar and Charlotte.

The journey from enemies to lovers — reminiscent of a romantic comedy — is a lifelong reminder for the senior NSW Labor minister to not be too stubborn in her views.

“I remember writing an article in Honi Soit denouncing Sam and, you know, calling on the feminists of the University of Sydney to rise up against this kind of appalling (behaviour) … he was in Labor right, I was in Labor left,” she tells me over lunch at The Song Kitchen in Sydney, a social enterprise cafe that donates its profits to help women escaping domestic ­violence.

She picked it for our lunch to help a great cause — seeing the worst of society in her six portfolios, which include homelessness and mental health — but also because it had a great regular steak for her and a vegetarian cauliflower steak for this interviewer.

“We weren’t together then … when he became president of the USYD union he had this all-male executive … I was a young activist on campus,” she says.

State government minister Rose Jackson says she has learnt to welcome the opinions of others as she has matured. Picture: Jonathan Ng

“Then I became president of the SRC (Students’ Representative Council) and Sam was the president of the union and we started working together in a professional capacity … you have those moments of ‘Maybe I was wrong? Maybe this guy actually is awesome’.

“It was a journey from ‘This man is an outrage’ to married to kids … it’s part of growing up.”

Now Crosby, who works for St Vincent de Paul, is Jackson’s biggest supporter as she balances the demands of Macquarie Street and raising two young children.

He understands the challenges of politics after previously running as a candidate for the federal seat of Reid in 2019.

And Jackson is supportive of a return to politics should he want that — which could open them up to being a political power couple, a term that makes her cringe.

Despite hailing from Labor’s Left faction and entering politics through women’s activism, the minister responsible for some of the state’s biggest portfolios is not afraid to admit she has become less of a leftie over the years.

Journalist Angira Bharadwaj and Jackson at the Song Kitchen in Surry Hills for a High Steaks interview. Picture: Jonathan Ng

“I was like ‘I am never getting married, patriarchal institution’, all of that jazz,” she says.

“I am a strong believer in this idea that not everything you think at every point of your life is going to be definitive and define you.”

It’s advice she would now share with young activists storming the streets and university campuses in support of Palestine — even while she can recognise their fervent dedication to their views.

“The Gaza stuff is really hot on campus and part of me is understanding and it’s familiar and I’m not knocking these kids, I get it,” she says,

“But part of me is like, the world in which you live is not the world.

“I hope they have a chance to get a bit of perspective.”

Jackson’s message to them is to “hate less” — something she says she, too, has learnt during her time in politics.

Jackson with husband Sam Crosby — and their children Oscar, then 1, and Charlotte, then 7, and dog Fala — when Crosby was the Labor candidate for Reid in 2019. Picture: Supplied

The point was never more pertinent than during the past two weeks, when Jackson was hauled over the coals on social media for a live radio blunder where she said the “reasonable rent” for a two-bedroom place in Sydney was a “couple of hundred bucks”.

The Housing Minister was denounced for being out of touch, with some extremists calling for her to lose the role.

But a reflective Jackson says “there are probably a few more of those moments in my future” because she is determined to never be a “cardboard cutout reciting talking points.

“When I see the reaction to a couple of garbled comments in an extended interview, and just how much it blew up and how vitriolic it become, I do worry that society has lost some of its capacity for discourse, for listening,” she says.

Jackson during her student activism days at USYD.

“Dogma is a dangerous thing … I was a super-left-wing tribal warrior … I was so staunch back then, super-partisan.

“As I’ve grown, as I’ve matured, as I have seen the world, I am now way less partisan.”

It’s a full-circle moment for Jackson, who as an 18-year-old told her journalist mother she could not be objective like her — declaring she “just knew” she was a partisan.

“(She told me) ‘you’re making a mistake’ …(but) I just knew I was a partisan, ‘I can’t be in the middle, I’m not independent, I’m not objective’,” she remembers saying to her late mother, who passed away from Parkinson’s in 2018.

“The idea back then that I go to the Library Bar and have a drink with Dom Perrottet and we talk crap and debate (is unthinkable), but now (he is a) good mate, miss him, actually feel the hole of not having a different opinion.”

Jackson has been a good friend of the former Liberal Premier since her days in student politics, and the friendship did not waver even after Labor toppled Perrottet from office in 2023.

She says she misses him since he made the decision to move to the US with his family and work in the private sector.

Jackson says in her younger years she was a ‘super-left-wing tribal warrior’.

The older, wiser Jackson values her friendships across political lines and prioritises listening to different opinions — something her mother and filmmaker father Martin Butler would be proud of.

“I am really big on this now (with) the direction the whole world is going in … I am absolutely willing to have my mind changed,” she said.

Her willingness to listen to a different view was on full display when the hard-core republican recently hosted King Charles III on his visit to Sydney — something she could never imagine herself doing.

But the activist and feisty feminist is not entirely gone with Jackson refusing to curtsy to the King, opting instead to bow like she does in parliament.

“It was a circus and I have to say the protocol briefings challenged me,” she said.

“They recommended the women curtsy, but they allowed or acknowledged that some women preferred to bow and I chose to bow.

“Bowing is something I’m familiar with because when you enter and exit the chamber you give a little bow.

“So I’ve made peace with bowing to authority.”

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