Pawn or player? The competing narratives about controversial Liberal MP Gladys Liu

Gladys Liu is in her kitchen, rustling up dinner. While the politician stirs and sautés, my eye is caught by a photograph on the wall of a glamorous woman dressed in a cheongsam. Her hair is swept into an elegant coiffure. She clasps a fan and strikes a pose. When I move closer and study the image, I realise with a start who the woman is. At least, I think I recognise her. Spending time with Liu is like falling down a rabbit hole into a world where things are not always what they seem. She glances up. “Yes, that’s me,” she says.

Liu is a federal government backbencher, the Liberal member for the east Melbourne seat of Chisholm. In person, she is small, neat, unflamboyant. She wears rimless glasses and demure business suits. Yet since the revelation last year of her past membership of organisations linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), controversy has swirled around her. “The curious case of Gladys Liu”, as one headline writer called it, has baffled some and brought out black humour in others. When an acquaintance of mine learns I am profiling her, he says delightedly, “The Chinese spy!”

Sitting in the kitchen, a glass of wine in my hand and the aroma of sizzling prawns in my nostrils, I reflect on the deceptiveness of appearances. The woman in the photograph is Liu. But who is Liu, exactly?

Her jauntiness is what strikes me the first time we meet, at her electorate office on a late-spring morning. The cloud of suspicion hanging over her might have been expected to dampen her spirits but no, Liu is resolutely looking on the bright side. “The whole thing has raised my name and face recognition,” she says.

Liu won her seat in the federal election last May. She had been in the House of Representatives for just four months when the ABC reported that Chinese government records indicated she had belonged to associations with ties to the United Front Work Department, a CCP agency that aims to promote China’s political interests by exerting influence on overseas Chinese communities and foreign governments.

Liu agreed to an interview with Sky News host Andrew Bolt, presumably with the intention of quashing suggestions that her integrity was compromised. But on air, she seemed nervous and evasive, fanning speculation that she had something to hide. She said she couldn’t remember being on the council of the Guangdong chapter of the China Overseas Exchange Association for 12 years to 2015. “If I can’t recall, I can’t be an active member of that council, can I?” she said. Neither could she remember being honorary president of the United Chinese Commerce Association of Australia.

When Bolt tried to draw Liu into criticising China, she demurred, declining to use the word “illegal” to describe the country’s military expansion in the South China Sea and refusing to categorise China’s president, Xi Jinping, as a dictator. She said she supported Australian government policy on China and always put Australia’s interests first. Bolt finished the interview with a showman’s flourish: “Gladys Liu, are you in effect a spokesman for the Chinese Communist regime in Australia?” She replied, “The simple answer is no.”

By then, members of the Canberra press gallery had gathered outside the Sky News studio in Parliament House. The following day, as the brouhaha escalated, Liu issued a statement reiterating her allegiance to Australia. She said she had resigned from many Chinese community organisations and was checking whether others had made her a member without her consent.

Between then and now, she has kept her distance from the media and resisted calls by the Labor Opposition to explain herself in Parliament. Insisting to me that her morale is absolutely fine, she says, “I know they’re not attacking me as Gladys. They’re attacking a person they want to bring down. And I am able to step out from that person.” I blink as I grapple with the concept of two Lius, one taking flak on behalf of them both. “What it means,” she says, “is I don’t take things personally.”

Liberal MP Gladys Liu and Prime Minister Scott Morrison after her maiden speech, in which she declared, “How good is Australia?”Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Liu sometimes refers to herself as Australia’s first Chinese-born MP, though in fact she was born in Hong Kong in 1964, when it was still a British colony. Her parents had moved there from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, where they were poor farmers. Sigmour (Liu’s Chinese name), the fourth of six children, came to Australia aged 20 to take up a scholarship to study speech therapy. “I had no family here, no friends, no money and very little English,” she tells me.

While at university in Melbourne, she paid the rent by working in factories. Then she landed employment as a waiter at the city’s famous Flower Drum restaurant: “I was walking down Little Bourke Street with a few friends and I said, ‘I want to get a job there.’ They just laughed at me. So I went in and half an hour later I came out and said, ‘I got the job.’ ”

At 55, Liu’s chutzpah has not deserted her. One afternoon I trail after her as she sails into cafes and stores in a shopping centre in the suburb of Mount Waverley, shaking the hand of whomever she finds behind the counter and announcing, “I’m Gladys Liu, your federal member of parliament.” At the pharmacy, the response is polite but perfunctory: “Okay.” Undeterred, Liu says brightly, “How are you today?” Pharmacist (keeping it brief, customers waiting): “Good thanks.” Liu beams: “That’s good. Nothing special, I just wanted to come and say hello. Yeah! It’s good to see that you are busy.”

Back outside, she introduces herself to a man standing on the footpath, who asks how she is enjoying being a parliamentarian. “Loving it,” she says. “To have this opportunity to serve the community – this is something that I never dreamed I’d be able to do.”

The truth is that Liu dreamed of getting into parliament from the moment she joined the Liberal Party in 2003. “I went straight on to the prospective candidates’ training program,” she tells me. But forging a parliamentary career turned out to be a long-term project. She made six attempts to be selected as a Liberal candidate for the Victorian parliament, failing to win endorsement for lower-house seats and, on the three occasions she was chosen to stand for the upper house, failing to get elected.

In her 2018 application for preselection for the federal seat of Chisholm, which was leaked to the ABC after the Bolt interview, Liu pointed out that she had raised a lot of money for the party. More than $1 million over 15 years. She argued that as Chisholm had a significant proportion of voters of Chinese background (“nearly 30 per cent of families in Chisholm speak Mandarin or Cantonese at home”), the Liberals would be smart to follow the lead of the Labor Party and select a Chinese-Australian candidate for the 2019 election.

On the section of the form that asked would-be candidates to list organisations “of which you are or have been a member”, Liu provided 17 names, from the Hong Kong Youth Symphony Orchestra and Band, in which she played trombone as a teenager, to Melbourne’s Scotch College Junior School parents’ association, where she served on a committee from 2000-02. She did not name organisations such as the China Overseas Exchange Association and the United Chinese Commerce Association of Australia, whose reported links to the CCP have subsequently brought her under scrutiny. Why not? “I am involved in so many things,” she tells me. “You can’t possibly list everything because there is not enough space.”

After Duncan Lewis’s retirement as head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) last year, he declared in an interview that the Chinese Government was actively seeking to interfere in Australia’s political system, and anyone in political office was a potential target. Around the same time, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald revealed that Australian authorities were investigating claims a Chinese espionage ring had tried to install an agent in federal parliament. According to the report, a Melbourne luxury car dealer and Liberal Party member named Nick Zhao told ASIO in 2018 that he had been offered $1 million to run for preselection for a seat in the city’s east. Zhao was found dead in a Melbourne motel room last March.

When Liu was shown a photograph of Zhao before the story was published, she said she had no recollection of their having met. Then pictures surfaced of her sitting beside him at a Liberal Party meeting at her place in 2016. Embarrassing, you might think, but Liu’s tone when I raise the subject is almost breezy. Evidently she did meet Zhao, she says. But “I meet so many people. I just cannot recall.”

The photo on Gladys Liu's kitchen wall of the MP dressed in a cheongsam. Photo courtesy of Gladys LiuCredit:

At first I presume that Liu’s blitheness about all this is some kind of defence mechanism: as real life takes on the quality of a John le Carré novel, she is putting on a brave face. Then it dawns on me that she may be genuinely unperturbed. As I sit in on her meetings with constituents and tag along to events in the electorate, I start to see her as one of those people whose confidence forms a force field around them. Whether dispensing advice on curing a cold (“boiled Coke and lemon: it will fix you”) or issuing instructions to the staffer driving her to her next appointment (“slow down, slow down, slow down”), she is crisp, composed, self-assured. As the car pulls up in front of a neighbourhood centre in suburban Ashwood, she whips out a mirror and reapplies her lipstick. Before alighting, she checks her reflection and says briskly, “Good to go.”

She may be new to Parliament but Liu is an experienced political operator. In the lead-up to the federal election before last, in 2016, she chaired the Victorian Liberals’ communities engagement committee and helped organise an anti-Labor campaign on WeChat, the Chinese-language social media network. After that election, in which Chisholm was the only seat the Liberal Party won from Labor, she said in an interview with Guardian Australia that the campaign’s impact on Chinese-Australian voters had helped the Liberal candidate for Chisholm, lawyer Julia Banks, get over the line. “If you ask how many Chinese people read the mainstream news, the percentage is so, so low,” Liu said. “But the first thing they do in the morning is turn on the phone and go to WeChat straight away.”

The defeated Labor candidate for the seat, Stefanie Perri, was quoted as saying that WeChat users had spread disinformation designed to turn the Chinese community against Labor. For instance, Perri had seen posts claiming that Labor would increase the refugee intake at the expense of Chinese immigration. “It was lowest-common-denominator politics,” Perri said.

There are different kinds of migrants. Some are very hard-working, do everything well for the family, for the country. Whereas others, they just come in and they reproduce and have many children, and they take welfare from the government.

Gladys Liu in a 2016 interview.

Liu is no longer keen to claim credit for the campaign (“so many supporters put forward their thoughts,” she tells me), but in the 2016 interview she explained that it had three focuses: economic management, same-sex marriage – which hadn’t yet been legalised and which she claimed the Chinese community opposed – and Victoria’s Safe Schools program, an anti-bullying initiative designed to ensure schools are safe spaces for all students, including those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI). Chinese-Australians regarded the idea of variation in sexual orientation as “ridiculous rubbish”, Liu said. A few months later, she was involved in presenting to the Victorian parliament a petition calling for the abolition of the Safe Schools program.

Before the 2019 election, Guardian Australia published some remarks Liu made in 2016 that weren’t included in the original article. Chinese-Australians distinguished themselves from “not as good” migrants, Liu had said. “Because there are different kinds of migrants. Some are very hard-working, do everything well for the family, for the country. Whereas others, they just come in and they reproduce and have many children, and they take welfare from the government.” She dismissed criticism the comments provoked, saying she had merely been passing on views expressed to her by members of the Chinese community.

At the Flower Drum, Liu fell in love with one of her fellow waiters, a pharmacy student. They married, and eventually opened two restaurants of their own, as well as several pharmacies. Liu worked for 14 years as a speech pathologist in the Victorian education department, then went into private practice. She and her husband, who have since divorced, had two children: Derek, 27, a management consultant who is studying for an MBA at Harvard, and Sally, 25, who graduated with a science in engineering degree from another American Ivy League university, Princeton, and currently works in Melbourne for a multinational food production company.

In Liu’s apartment, which is pleasant without being palatial, the dining room serves twin purposes. It is a place to eat and a place to contemplate Derek’s and Sally’s all-round brilliance. Carefully arranged on a long sideboard and in a glass-fronted cabinet are dozens of ribbons, medals and trophies presented to the brother and sister when they were younger for various academic and sporting pursuits. “They’re mostly participation awards,” jokes Sally the night I’m there for dinner. “Well, Derek’s are mostly participation awards.”

Liu and her kids are all keen chess players – Sally was the Australian under-18 girls’ champion – and Liu ran the Box Hill Chess Club for a while. She tells me she didn’t want to be club president but took on the job because the members insisted. Trevor Stanning, the club’s longtime treasurer, remembers events slightly differently. “She put herself forward,” Stanning says. “She’s a go-getter, so she wanted to engage with the club.” What isn’t disputed is that Liu shook the place up, triggering the club’s transformation from a small suburban concern into a national powerhouse. “We’re now by far the biggest junior club in Australia,” says Stanning, who remembers Liu’s response when told it would be a struggle to find people willing to serve on the club committee. “She said, ‘Get all the parents in one room and we’ll end up with a committee at the end of an hour or we’ll go on for two hours.’ ”

Stanning, who admires Liu, hesitates when asked whether she was popular at the club. “She can be breathtakingly energetic to work with,” he says. “And in a volunteer organisation, there are some who just want to contribute a little but are being asked too much.” I hear the same ambivalence in the voices of people who were Liu’s colleagues in the office of former Victorian Liberal premier Ted Baillieu. “Her energy was exhausting,” says multicultural communications consultant Fotis Kapetopoulos. Everyone on staff worked hard, he says, but Liu was the resident overachiever. “We’d get together for 8am meetings and she’d tell us 15 things she’d done really well. Some of us would go, ‘Oh, groan.’ ”

Baillieu had hired Liu as a multicultural adviser in 2007, when he was state opposition leader. She stayed with him until he resigned as premier in 2013 (she then worked for his successor, Denis Napthine), and the two have remained friends. Looking back, Baillieu says Liu gave him an invaluable entrée into Melbourne’s Chinese community. An accomplished networker, fluent in both Cantonese and Mandarin, she was at his elbow at countless community events. “We worked hand-in-glove,” the former premier says. “Wherever we went, she introduced me to lots of people. She was able to explain who people were.”

One of Baillieu’s former staffers says Liu occasionally overstepped the mark: “She’s a forceful character. Very forceful. There was an annual event that every ethnic community would attend, a big dinner. Each community had their own tables, and they all loved Ted. Everyone wanted their photo with him, and to shake his hand. But Gladys would just drag him over to the Chinese section. Someone would say, ‘Look, Ted has to be spread around.’ Nup. Forget it. She grabbed him and that was it.”

Political staff generally try to stay behind the scenes but Liu seemed to some on Baillieu’s team to be working to promote not just the premier but herself. “She was using her position as a way of garnering greater validation amongst her community,” says one. “Lots of times, people had to pull her back a little bit and say, ‘Hey, the premier is the person who gets seen, not you.’ ” Kapetopoulos says Liu didn’t hide her political ambition: “She was hellbent on being a member of parliament.”

Gladys Liu with Ted Baillieu, for whom she worked during his stint as Victorian premier. Baillieu says she gave him an invaluable entrée to Melbourne’s Chinese community. Photo courtesy of Gladys LiuCredit:

In Hong Kong, Liu’s parents operated a small milk bar. It opened early and closed at midnight, leaving them little time for anything else. Liu says she was only seven years old when she was entrusted to care for her two younger siblings, aged three and two. While the rest of the family lived over the shop, the three smallest kids stayed on their own in an apartment 30 kilometres away. Their grandmother lived next door but didn’t really look after them, Liu says. “In fact, from time to time we had to look after her, because she’d had a stroke and she wasn’t that mobile.” Liu shopped for food, cooked meals, mopped the floor. On weekends, she took her little brother and sister across town by public transport to visit their mother and father. “This day and age, people would say this is child abuse,” she says with a tinkling laugh.

At the age of 10, Liu discovered she was deaf in one ear. She kept this secret even from her parents, she says, because having a disability was considered shameful in Chinese culture. It didn’t stop her learning to play the trombone or asserting herself at school as a take-charge kind of person: “When my classmates, especially the girls, were not happy, when they felt they were bullied by some boys, they would come to me. And then I would go and talk with the boys.”

A natural leader, is how she sees herself. Ted Baillieu attributes Liu’s success as a party fundraiser largely to stamina (“She’d have a function and then there’d be another function and another function”), but she herself believes her ability to inspire trust in others is the reason she can sell so many tickets. In the Chinese community, particularly, she says, “I have a lot of people who look up to me and believe in me.”

Despite having delivered so much money to its coffers, Liu has had to struggle for support inside the party’s Victorian division. The three times she was part of the Liberal team that stood in state elections for the legislative council, or upper house, she was too far down the ticket to secure a seat. “Gladys was unfortunately given unwinnable positions on certain tickets,” says Doug Campbell, a former senior adviser to Baillieu. “And she was a far better candidate than some of those above her, I can tell you. A lot of people would have just given up, but she never did.”

She was a far better candidate than some of those above her, I can tell you. A lot of people would have just given up, but she never did.

Doug Campbell, a former senior adviser to Ted Baillieu.

I hear a range of theories as to why Liu was held back. She was too pushy. She was Chinese. “They’re wary of somebody who’s obviously very ambitious but doesn’t come from the usual mould of a Liberal in Victoria,” says Campbell, who was dismayed when he learnt that party power-brokers had selected her as the candidate for Chisholm: “I said, ‘Here they go again.’ ” No seat in the country seemed less likely to be retained by the Liberals if, as was widely expected, Scott Morrison’s Coalition government was swept out of office in 2019. Julia Banks had quit the party in disillusionment the previous year and was standing as an independent in another seat. Almost everyone assumed the next member for Chisholm would be Labor’s Jennifer Yang.

Still, Liu threw herself into the contest, leaving the business consultancy she had co-founded to devote herself full-time to campaigning. She is understood to have contributed at least $100,000 of her own money to the fighting fund – and reportedly has since asked for the party to repay her. (The amount she donated is expected to be revealed when the Liberal Party’s annual financial returns are published by the Australian Electoral Commission [AEC] this week.) She ended up winning the seat by the skin of her teeth – the margin after the distribution of preferences was just over 1000 votes – and her victory helped the government to be returned with a wafer-thin majority. “I remember getting phone calls,” says Liu’s former colleague, Fotis Kapetopoulos. “People were saying, ‘Oh my god, she got in. Can’t believe it.’ We were laughing because we thought, ‘That’s Gladys. Somehow she did it.’ ”

Gladys Liu greets a voter on election day in 2019, having worked polling stations assiduously for weeks.Credit: Chris Hopkins

On election day, signs written in Mandarin appeared at some polling stations in Chisholm, as well as in federal treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s adjoining electorate of Kooyong. They were purple and white, like AEC signs, and carried the message that the “correct” way to vote was to put the Liberal candidate first. The Court of Disputed Returns later found that the signs were deliberately deceptive, having been designed by the Liberal Party to look like official AEC material. But Liu and Frydenberg were cleared of any role in creating them, and the court rejected a bid to have the results in Chisholm and Kooyong overturned.

Liu had spent the weeks before the poll at two early voting centres in her electorate. Jennifer Yang’s campaign workers were impressed as they watched Liu greet people arriving to cast their ballots. “No breaks,” says one. “She ate where she stood and she shook every single hand.” Actually, people were greeted whether they liked it or not, according to the worker. “She would literally stand in front of a voter and not let them walk by.”

The ALP candidate for Chisholm she defeated, Jennifer Yang, faced a barrage of lies on Chinese-language social media about Labor’s policies.Credit: AAP

But it was something else Liu did that still has the worker shaking his head in bemusement: “When she wasn’t talking to a voter, she would be talking to herself. Hyping herself up. ‘Shake every hand, shake every hand, shake every hand.’ One of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Similar stories come from two other Yang supporters who observed Liu at the early voting centres. “It was like she was in her own little bubble,” one tells me. “She’d talk to herself and rev herself up: ‘Keep going Gladys. Go Gladys.’ ” Asked if she really kept up her enthusiasm in this way, Liu says: “I didn’t need to. It was just so natural. When I see someone: ‘Strong economy, more jobs and lower taxes!’ I say that more than 10,000 times.”

During the 2019 campaign, as in 2016, WeChat was awash with wild claims. That Labor planned to roll out Victoria’s Safe Schools program to all Australian primary schools and “teach students same-sex sexual intercourse”, for instance, and that Labor would open Australia’s borders to refugees. Catherine Yeung, former head of Chinese studies at Perth’s Curtin University, says people who identified themselves as Liu supporters posted and endorsed misleading articles and urged others to share them.

I ask Liu whether she considered intervening to stop her supporters spreading lies. And whether she protested when her older sister, Connie, said on WeChat that Jennifer Yang laughed “like a mental retard and idiot” in a video. Liu smiles regretfully. “You can’t really control people,” she replies. “They can say whatever they want to say, whether it’s real or fake.” In her maiden speech in parliament, Connie was the only one of her five siblings Liu warmly mentioned by name.

Gladys Liu with her father at Parliament House in the July 2019 week of her maiden speech. Photo courtesy of Gladys LiuCredit:

Liu says she can explain why she got into such a muddle on TV about her membership of various associations. “The names of the organisations were given to me in English,” she says. “I know them by their Chinese names.” She adds that the sheer number of community groups makes it difficult to keep track of them: “We have up to 800 Chinese organisations in Victoria alone.” Ted Baillieu can see how Liu could have been signed up without knowing it. “Some of them are organisations where the members actually have no input whatsoever,” Baillieu says. “They’re just on a list.”

Shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus argues that Liu is smart and hard-headed enough to have raised more than $1 million for her party and benefitted from “two successive dirty tricks campaigns in the same seat”. Yet suddenly, he says, we are expected to believe that “she’s had an amazing loss of memory, become a rather hapless and disorganised person who doesn’t remember very much and can’t really explain very much”. Dreyfus, for one, doesn’t buy it.

Scott Morrison tried to make political capital out of the Liu affair by claiming that Labor, in asking questions about her, cast aspersions on the more than 1.2 million Australians of Chinese ancestry. Says Catherine Yeung: “It’s getting very difficult for people of non-Chinese ethnic background to criticise people like Gladys Liu, or criticise any of those CCP United Front-linked community groups, because as soon as you do, people say you’re racist.”

Yeung makes the point that the China Overseas Exchange Association is “a formal organisation that treats membership very carefully”. She is puzzled by Liu’s claim that she wasn’t aware of having been on the council of the Guangdong chapter for 12 years. “That doesn’t sound credible to me,” says Yeung, who conducts independent research on the Chinese diaspora in Australia and the South Pacific, with a particular focus on United Front activities.

She emphasises that she isn’t accusing Liu of wrongdoing. Rather, Yeung is concerned that Liu’s fundraising has put her in a position of potential susceptibility. “For some years, Liu has been actively seeking and also receiving support from known pro-Beijing groups and individuals,” Yeung says. By doing so, “she may have allowed herself to become a target of Beijing’s agents of influence in Australia. I am worried about her vulnerability, and also how this is going to have an impact on her political party and the democratic political system here in Australia.” Academic Clive Hamilton, author of Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia, shares Yeung’s disquiet. “There are some serious questions about some of the people at Gladys Liu’s fundraising events,” Hamilton says.

Liu may have allowed herself to become a target of Beijing’s agents of influence in Australia.

Catherine Yeung, former head of Chinese studies at Perth’s Curtin University.

It has been reported that members of an intelligence service warned the Liberal Party against preselecting Liu for Chisholm. Michael Kroger, former president of the Liberal Party’s Victorian division, is highly doubtful about that. “I was the senior person in Victoria and no one raised it with me,” says Kroger, who describes Liu as “a very genuine, decent person”. He also disputes a report that $300,000 raised for the party in 2015 by auctioning dinners with the then prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, and other Liberal luminaries had to be returned after security checks were run on the successful bidders, who were associates of Liu. “Utter nonsense,” Kroger says.

Last December, the spotlight fell on Liu’s past association with Brighsun New Energy, the Australian subsidiary of a Chinese-controlled renewable energy company that wanted to manufacture electric buses in Victoria. It was reported that in 2015 Liu acted as an unpaid lobbyist for Brighsun, which gave more than $100,000 to the Liberal Party before getting caught up in a money-laundering investigation. According to court documents, the company’s key financial backer was a high-rolling Chinese gambler who used a former heroin trafficker to deliver $1 million in cash to Brighsun’s Australian chief executive.

Investigative journalist Nick McKenzie, who led the team that broke the story in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, says his contacts in the security world found no evidence of Liu doing anything underhanded on behalf of the CCP: her only sin was what they described as lack of judgment when it came to sourcing party donations. “The worst we can say about her is she could be targeted by people who may not have our national interest at heart,” McKenzie says.

Liu seems keen to nip that possibility in the bud. At a security briefing for new federal MPs last year, she asked whether ASIO could vet people who requested meetings with her. She tells me she was disappointed when told that wouldn’t happen. “Because very often when you meet someone, you just don’t know their background,” she says.

Gladys Liu with her children, Derek and Sally, on Christmas Day 2019. Photo courtesy of Gladys LiuCredit:

At an aged care home in Glen Waverley, I watch Liu speak to a group of residents. She is earnest, engaging, eager to connect. “What is important to you?” she asks. “How can we make the electorate a better place to live, and this country a better place to live?” Later, she prowls the corridors with the home’s owner, looking for residents of Chinese ethnicity. When she finds one, she disappears into her room and has a long chat with her in Mandarin.

Derek tells me that having a mother in federal parliament makes him extremely proud. “It also makes me admire the way Australia is progressing, with more and more representation for all minority groups,” he says. My thoughts go to a note that arrived in Liu’s Canberra office the day I visited. On a piece of white office paper were six neatly handwritten words: “Piss off you Communist Chinese c---.”

Hate mail keeps on coming, apparently. Not that Liu wastes any time dwelling on it. “I’m very tough,” she says, raising her hand and grabbing her cheek. “Tough skin.” It seems to journalist Nick McKenzie that media and political scrutiny of Liu has been unusually intense. “Is that because she has a Chinese background? I think that has played into it,” McKenzie says.

"Now I’ve done my job as a mother and I can give to the community, the country.”

Gladys Liu.

What drives Liu? She isn’t in politics for the perks: travelling to and from Canberra, she saves taxpayers’ money by flying economy instead of business class. No one I ask has a coherent theory about her motivation, nor even a clear idea of her interests. “Gladys Liu is interested in Gladys Liu,” says one. She herself maintains that her overriding aim is to help people, and that she has felt this way all her life. As a girl in Hong Kong, she taught reading and writing to kids on the sampans who didn’t go to school. In this country, she set up an organisation to assist domestic violence victims from non-English-speaking backgrounds. Her children were her main focus for many years, she says. “Now I’ve done my job as a mother and I can give to the community, the country.”

The last event I attend with Liu is a Friday afternoon assembly at Blackburn Lake Primary School. “Good afternoon, boys and girls!” she says, standing straight-backed and cheerful at the front of the auditorium. The reply comes in chorus: “G-o-o-o-d aftern-o-o-o-n,Gladys L-o-o-o-o-o.” The parliamentarian has brought the school a gift: a set of Australian flags. After the presentation, everyone sings the national anthem. As the music rings around the hall, I hear Liu’s strong voice rise above the rest.

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