Ministry of toughness: MP Jane Garrett’s focus on hope, gratitude and politics after horror year

JANE Garrett says that after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, a friend told her people facing such a frightening health crisis often chose to re-order their lives around a single powerful idea.

Jane Garrett at home with husband James Higgins and children Sasha 9, Max, 4 and Molly, 13. Picture: David Caird

JANE Garrett says that after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, a friend told her people facing such a frightening health crisis often chose to re-order their lives around a single powerful idea.

“For some people, it may be ‘I will win this’,” she said.

“Another I’ve heard is ‘faith and courage’.

“The words that resonate with me are ‘hopeful’ and ‘grateful’. I want to feel grateful for my life, and I want to live with that gratitude and hope rather than how you could be — like, ‘Why has this happened to me?’

“That would be an easy hole to fall into, and no one would blame you. (But) I don’t want to feel bitter about it, and I don’t want to feel resentful about it.”

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Jane Garrett at home. Picture: David Caird

It is an admirable stance, given the personal and professional pounding this 43-year-old mother of three took over the past year.

Garrett’s 2016 began with the bitter dispute over the United Firefighters Union pay deal, included a “horrifying” daylight street assault, and ended in a cancer diagnosis.

It also included allegations of severe bullying and harassment of her, including an allegation that a comment was made that the UFU had 300 members willing “to put an axe through” the then emergency services minister’s head.

Though she returned to work at Parliament House this month, and looks and sounds as though she has fully regained her health and energy, you could forgive this fit-looking former industrial relations lawyer for thinking “Why me?”

But in keeping with her “hopeful and grateful” manifesto, Garrett does not wish to blame her illness on the extreme stress of 2016.

“Yes, it was a big year, but I also think there are plenty of people (with very stressful work situations) who go through their whole lives and don’t get cancer,” Garrett says.

“There are people who smoke their whole lives and don’t get cancer.

“So you have to be a bit at peace with it, otherwise you can get even more down on yourself, and I think that’s futile,” she says.

“But we (she and her husband, Slater and Gordon lawyer James Higgins) have certainly changed the way we live and our whole outlook on it.”

Premier Daniel Andrews holds a press conference after Jane Garrett resigned. Picture: Alex Coppel

Garrett found a lump in her breast when she brushed up against the couch at the family’s inner-city home.

She “knew something was wrong, didn’t sleep and went to the doctor the following morning”.

Of getting the diagnosis many women dread but one in eight receive, she says: “You go into shock, but like anything, you just have to get up each day and deal with it, look after the kids, do the washing, make breakfast.”

She took four months away from work, five weeks of which were spent on a family road trip to the Gold Coast.

She tried to keep the family routine normal, despite a couple of hospital stays, including her initial surgery in late October, whiling away days watching kids’ TV shows like Teen Wolf, or junior YouTube clips with children Molly, 13, Sasha, 9 and Max, 4.

The experience has left her very grateful for her family.

“You just become acutely aware of just the absolute importance of your kids and family — what a gift they are.”

She is also grateful to be healthy enough to go straight back to work — though she confesses a few people have asked her: “Why would you want to?”

“But I believe in it. It’s a life’s work. And you get ill, and you think what’s it about — a life’s work.

“You do change people’s lives. My passion (for politics) is absolutely still there.”

She won’t rehash the details of her annus horribilis, but it’s all there on the public record: including that in late 2015, UFU members surrounded and yelled at Garrett at an event that was intended to promote women becoming firefighters.

Garrett’s Baptist church upbringing taught her about working for a more just society, and her late mother set an example as a strong member of the Australian Education Union.

So for her, her distressing treatment at the hands of a union leader was “a very difficult thing to confront”.

“I was devastated about it,” she says.

Jane Garrett in Parliament. Picture: Ellen Smith

When she stepped aside from the emergency services portfolio — a job she cherished for the chance it offered to support Victorian communities — Garrett tweeted simply that she was leaving “with a heavy heart”.

All she is willing to say about what drove her to step aside is: “The things that occurred were absolutely not done lightly.

“We spoke about it endlessly, James and I, at home, about how to deal with it. Ultimately, we came to the decision that we couldn’t go on with the job.”

Garrett says her background as an industrial relations lawyer, who often acted for women who suffered discrimination after maternity leave, means she will always defend the rights of women at work and of part-time workers.

“For me, unionism is about advancing the rights of members, playing a broader and constructive role in the community, and behaving in a way that supports the vulnerable, the weak, minorities.

“I think there was a double toll for me,” she says.

It hurt because “the treatment was coming from a union, and I believe so much in the union movement”.

Garrett, who still sometimes attends church, says the values she learned listening to her Baptist minister father preaching are still a guiding force.

So is the political commitment of her mother, who took her daughters to anti-nuclear rallies.

“Both my sister and I were taught very much in that religious frame that you walk the walk and that Jesus was an activist … and that you had to fight for change.

That has certainly shaped me in a very serious way,” she says.

Does she feel her father is proud of her?

“Yeah, I think he’s proud; part of, you know, what happened last year in resigning and everything, you’re kind of guided by how you’ve been raised.

“A lot of those church people have been really beautiful to me.”

“Walking the walk”, the way Garrett was taught to understand it, involves being brave “and standing up for what’s right”.

She says her passion for participating in the democratic process is undimmed, and part of the attraction is seeing the impact of good policy on the ground.

“One of the things I learned when I was the minister and visited all those communities — and it’s such a privilege to be welcomed so warmly into those communities — is that you don’t get any sense of it when you’re up in Spring Street unless you’re out meeting people,” she says.

“When you meet the people protecting communities, you just get such an incredible insight, and a great respect for people who live differently (from life in the inner city), and have huge pride in communities.”

She says another thing the adversity of last year taught her was that you have “just got to be yourself”, and part of that was being able to talk about your struggles in life.

“I’m not suggesting last year was anything other than a really hard year,” Garrett says.

“Not everything was perfect.

“It’s hard in those situations; there’s no rule book for it. But at times when people would go ‘can you face the outside world?’, of course — I get great strength from the outside world.

“And I think it’s important people like me can talk honestly about experiences.”

She says she hopes sharing her experience, and how she got through it, “helps me to be somebody who helps other people through these times”.

“They can say. ‘Well, you know, she stood up’.”

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