From brash Young Liberal to Senate linchpin for Nick Xenophon

THE new independent senator will wield great power and hopes to make a difference.

FILE Nick Xenophou under the "one that got away" from the Liberal Party. Back when he was a student at the University of Adelaide, making quite the name for himself, he looked to be a young man in a hurry to go places in conservative politics.

The year was 1976 and, at 17, in his first year of law, he had clinched the job of running the campus newspaper, On Dit.

Soon enough, the future powerbroking senator from South Australia would walk out on the Liberals, flirt with Labor and blow the whistle on what he breathlessly called "one of the biggest scandals" going: the rigging of the student vote that had delivered him his first position of prominence.

Those familiar with this little-known story still tend to roll their eyes at his undergraduate antics. Some observe, caustically, that not all that much has changed with "Mr X", the No-Pokies MP being touted as the next big thing in national politics and who promises to be quite the handful for Kevin Rudd.

These days, Xenophou goes by the name of Xenophon (more on that later) and from next Tuesday, when the Senate turns over to give effect to last November's federal election, he will share the balance of power with Bob Brown's five Australian Greens and Steve Fielding of Family First.

No independent senator since the now-retired Tasmanian Brian Harradine will command such clout. The Prime Minister must have Xenophon's vote, along with those of the six other cross-benchers in the new Senate, to pass legislation opposed by the Opposition. That will give the neophyte SA senator an improbably important say in the Rudd Government's ambitious first-term legislative agenda. Having dealt with him at length, SA Premier Mike Rann says pointedly that he hopes Xenophon will pay the role "serious attention".

If he stays true to form, Xenophon, 49, will revel in the limelight. Styling himself as the non-partisan politician, he has constructed a political brand in SA by advocating victims' rights - especially his trademark anti-poker machine campaigning - and by eschewing many of the perks that came with his election in 1997 to state parliament and immediate elevation to a balance-of-power role there. The formula has been phenomenally successful: Xenophon is the first independent since Harradine to be elected to the Senate and is so popular at home that a running mate rode his coat-tails into the state upper house in 2006, when one in five South Australian voters backed him.

His work ethic and personal charm are acknowledged by even his sternest critics. "Nick won't be handled and I think that annoys people," says up-and-coming state Labor MP Tom Koutsantonis, who is happy to be identifed as Xenophon's friend, despite Rann's evident antipathy towards him. Family First founder and outgoing state MP Andrew Evans, another unabashed fan, says Xenophon was always "completely genuine" in their dealings.

Yet behind the scenes he forged a reputation for being as political and self-interested as they come. Some senior figures in Rann's Labor Government insist that he is not to be trusted and there is no shortage of Liberals who privately agree. "People like the concept of Nick Xenophon," one high-profile Labor identity says. "It's just that the reality is something quite different."

Another government insider complains: "You can't do a deal with him ... It's like dealing with mercury ... he will agree to something, then walk out and say something else five minutes later." Xenophon may be mercurial, but that doesn't mean he is like mercury. Such criticism doesn't square with the earnest public image Xenophon has cultivated. Nor with the hagiography created by a starry-eyed local media in Adelaide and by his supporters. Yet it resonates strongly with many of those who go back with him to university in the 1970s.

Among them is Tim Cooper, scion of Adelaide's famous beer-making family. Then a medical student, he was one of three members of the campus Liberal Club accused of rigging the student election that secured Xenophon the editorship of On Dit, catapulting him into politics at its rawest. The university's vice-chancellor Don Stranks called the young men in and carpeted them. Cooper, at the insistence of Stranks, now dead, quit his posts as secretary of the student union and with the Liberal Club, essentially the campus offshoot of the Young Liberals.

"The VC told us to give up being involved in university politics," Cooper recalls. "I suppose you could say he was a bit stern."

Another member of the trio, Julian Glynn, now an investment banker in Melbourne, remembers: "A lot of people were upset that Nick turned on these people who tried to help him. That led him to realise that he did not have much of a future on the Liberal side."

SA state MP Michael O'Brien, then president of the Adelaide University Labor Club and now a parliamentary secretary to Rann, says Xenophon learned an early lesson in politics.

"He may not have been involved in the machinations with the others but he certainly was the beneficiary," O'Brien says. "And that's probably been the story of Nick's political life."

To Xenophon's credit, he doesn't try to shy away from the vote rigging episode. In fact, he went out of his way to produce the dog-eared copy of On Dit containing his published confession on June 25, 1978. "It sort of makes me cringe reading it," he explains. "You know, with the writing style and what happened and all the rest of it." The episode was nevertheless a turning point: "When it came to the crunch I realised machine politics wasn't for me."

The annual On Dit election took place in October 1976 in conjunction with a heavily contested poll for spots on the students' association executive. A pimply-faced Xenophon had been keen enough on politics to have sought out the Liberal Club of his own volition after starting university earlier that year. With his unfashionably cropped hair, he was the picture of the young conservative. After nominations for the On Dit position closed, he was told of a plan that would dramatically boost his prospects: a bogus Labor candidate would be run to split the left vote.

Xenophon insists he refused to go along with it. And until O'Brien confronted him, just before the student election, he assumed his fellow travellers in the Liberal Club had backed off. But alarm bells jangled on the Labor side when no one could put a face to the name of the purported ALP candidate.

O'Brien, as Labor Club president, dialled the mystery candidate's supplied home number, only to have the phone answered by "the maid". On initial results, Xenophon came up a handful of votes short of clinching the On Dit role. A recount was ordered, which he won by four votes. Over drinks at the uni bar, he learned that ballot papers had been forged in his favour.

"My election was a farce," he would write, but not for another 18 months, when he finally burst into print in On Dit, having completed his term as editor. "With hindsight, I suppose I should have resigned then ... I should have had that guts then to publicly disclose."

SO what, you may think. As Xenophon himself says, we all have had our youthful indiscretions and dallying with the Liberals was his. But that is not how Glynn sees it. He points out that Xenophon delayed blowing the whistle until he had done his year as On Dit editor; while others took the rap, he got the gig, then the headline. Glynn is not alone in regarding this as highly instructive.

"He was always a very ambitious person," the 51-year-old businessman says of Xenophon. "When he was with the Liberal Party he tried to position himself as a crusader ... he was quite happy to take up any cause that would get him publicity."

O'Brien says he regarded Xenophon as an "earnest lightweight" at university and says his view of the senator-elect has not altered.

After he split with the Liberal Club, Xenophon started turning up at Labor functions, sometimes with his friend Terry Connolly, who became deputy chief minister of the ACT and was a Supreme Court judge in Canberra at the time of his death last September. Xenophon is said to have expressed an interest in joining the ALP, though he denies this, saying that by then "parties didn't feel right". In any event, he was always something of an outsider.

His father, Theo Xenophou, migrated to Australia from Cyprus after the war; mum Georgia came from Greece. Xenophon, the older of two children, grew up with politics being debated over the dinner table, as Theo's building and property development business prospered. At Adelaide's snooty Prince Alfred College he was the Greek Orthodox boy among the Protestant sons of the establishment. Xenophon graduated from university with solid law grades but wasn't interested in joining a top-of-the-town firm. Instead, he went to work for a suburban solicitor, Jacob van Dissel, who specialised in commercial law.

He gravitated to personal injury work and was good at it. Van Dissel, now 58, eventually handed over his PI files to Xenophon so he could set up his own firm in 1984. Far from Xenophon having to chase ambulances, van Dissel insists that clients chased him, such was his reputation for getting results. The two men still lunch regularly: "He was always interested in helping people," van Dissel says of his protege.

Through his work, Xenophon met physiotherapist Sandra Kazubiernis. They married in 1990 and two years later had a boy, Aleksis, at which point the then Nick Xenophou changed his surname by deed poll. His decision has puzzled people for years, entrenching the enigma of "Mr X". But the man himself says there is no mystery.

"When my son was born I wanted to go back to the original family name from Cyprus," he says, before launching into a complicated explanation of how Xenophou is derivative of Xenophon, his paternal grandfather's surname.

"It was just an important thing to do for my son ... if that makes any sense."

He and Sandra separated in 1995 and are divorced but remain on good terms, with Xenophon insisting there was no third party involved in the split. In a way, the circle was about to close. Politics was calling again. In 1997, he morphed seamlessly from the go-getting compensation lawyer into SA's crusading No Pokies MP. Only Xenophon could have got away with it.

AS he now describes it, this was an entirely natural progression. Poker machines, belatedly, had been introduced to South Australia in 1994 and he began to notice the impact though his legal practice. When a client broke down after blowing his payout on the pokies, Xenophon resolved to make it the then state Liberal government's problem. "I thought, this isn't right, there's something wrong here ... it struck a chord," he remembers. "I just thought it was a good idea to run."

Xenophon secured 2.86 per cent of the vote at the 1997 state election and fell across the line on preferences, the first independent to be elected in 60 years in SA. He would go on to rewrite the electoral rule book.

At the 2006 state election, which returned Rann's Labor Government for a second term, Xenophon won an astonishing 20.5 per cent of the upper house vote and dragged his running mate, Ann Bressington, into state parliament. More than 190,000 South Australians voted one, Xenophon. To put that in context, all the might of the SA Liberal Party delivered it just on 248,000 votes in the Legislative Council.

But Bressington, an anti-drugs campaigner, turned on him savagely during last year's federal election campaign, detailing under state parliamentary privilege how Xenophon had asked her to repay $50,000 in campaign expenses after she was elected on his No Pokies ticket. She claimed his interest in victims' rights lasted only as long as the media coverage it generated: the "anti-politician politician" had turned out to be "an illusionist ... a chameleon", she said.

Bressington's motivation was not entirely clear, though she did refer to how she felt snubbed by his decision to jump to the Senate. Through her office, she declined to be interviewed for this article.

Xenophon, for his part, maintains that her claims are wrong or distortions. And, in fairness, many of those he has helped through the years, from sufferers of asbestos disease to victims of crime, have since stepped forward to vouch for him. "I was shocked," he says. "It was simply not the Ann I knew."

He admits that, at his instigation, Bressington took out a $37,500 loan, which he thought was only fair considering he had incurred $120,000 in personal debt during the 2006 state election campaign.

"I don't think it so unusual for a member of parliament to contribute something to your election," he says. "It is an eight-year term in the (state) upper house. That's what Ann got. This wasn't particularly onerous."

Still, there's no question that Bressington hit a raw nerve. Xenophon has campaigned relentlessly against politicians' entitlements through the years. He refused to take a subsidised car during his decade in the SA parliament and boycotted the silver-service MPs' dining room. Were he allowed to, he would opt out of parliamentary superannuation and pay into a less-generous community standard scheme. As with his too-cute media stunts - poor Zorba the goat got trotted out in 2006 to demonstrate that he wasn't "kidding around" - this approach hasn't exactly endeared him to some of his fellow parliamentarians, though the voters lapped it up. For Rob Lucas, then Liberal state treasurer, it was game on trying to deal with Xenophon during the fraught process of privatising the state's electricity businesses in the late '90s.

This provided an early test for Xenophon who, in a precursor to his upcoming Senate role, initially shared the balance of power in the SA upper house with the Democrats. Xenophon, according to Lucas, at first indicated he would back a version of the privatisation plan, involving a timed, leasehold arrangement.

Xenophon doesn't dispute this. "I think it was fair to say I was going down that path and I think Rob Lucas had reason to be disappointed," he admits. Xenophon ended up voting no, but the bill passed anyway with the support of Labor dissidents. He regrets losing the political capital. "If I had my time over again I should not have tried to go through such a tortuous process," he says. "I should have just said no and that was it."

Certainly, Lucas believes that lasting damage was done to Xenophon's standing among his peers in parliament.

"I don't have any doubt that there are people who believe he has given commitments and then reneged on them," he tells Inquirer. For all that, his take on the senator-elect is broadly positive. "I didn't want the electricity thing to become the bottom line," Lucas continues. "Generally my dealings with Nick have been straight ... he was generally straight with me."

The assessment of the leadership group around Rann is, generally, much harsher. It is fair to say the Premier is not one of Xenophon's admirers; the relish with which he dragged out the appointment of Xenophon's replacement to the state upper house last year, pointing out that he was jumping to Canberra only 18 months into his eight-year Legislative Council term, speaks volumes for what Rann won't say directly. His only comment to this newspaper concerning Xenophon is: "Now that he has entered the Australian Senate, I hope he puts the needs of South Australia first ... the responsibility requires serious attention."

Xenophon, bristling, says he has been told that federal Labor is "much more professional to deal with", and he is looking forward to the change of scene. Those close to Rann say they don't want to pick a public fight with Xenophon because that may backfire on their federal colleagues, given the power he will have in Canberra.

Still, one well-connected SA government identity predicts he will be a nightmare for Rudd's team in the Senate. "I just found that the guy could never, ever keep his word," another senior state Labor figure says. "You entered into talks with him and the guy would just break his word, and do it gleefully."

O'Brien says he would have had more time for Xenophon if the independent had lobbied harder for his vote back home in Adelaide, rather than run his agenda through the media.

When legislation went before the state parliament to reduce the number of poker machines by 3000, O'Brien says he was surprised the professed No-Pokies MP wasn't knocking on his door to push for even bigger cuts. "Nick just went missing in action," O'Brien says, a proposition rejected by Xenophon, who argues that the cap was on his agenda from the day he entered state parliament. He reels off his achievements on pokies, chief among them, South Australia's Independent Gambling Authority. This body regulates gaming in South Australia and deals with the social impact of gambling.

There's no doubt that Xenophon deserves credit for getting it up and running.

Victims of crime and sufferers of the dreadful, asbestos-related cancer mesothelioma have also gained legal rights as a result of his advocacy. That, too, deserves to be acknowledged by his critics.

Truth be told, Xenophon is a man of abstemious tastes. He doesn't smoke cigarettes (nor, he insists, has he knowingly inhaled anything stronger, even at university) and takes only the odd sip of wine. Since his marriage broke up, there have been other women in his life, but he is not seeing anyone in particular and doesn't expect to now that he is off to the big house on Capital Hill. With typical overstatement, he says: "You know, we have this romance quota and I've used up my quota. That's it, there is nothing left."

MR X has other priorities in his life, which will unquestionably make Rudd's that much more difficult. For a start, he wants the Government to use federal telecommunications powers to ban automated cash-dispensing machines from pokies venues and will introduce private member's legislation once the new Senate convenes in August.

He has serious reservations about Labor's FuelWatch plan to marginally reduce petrol prices, even though he backed the idea as a state MP. Then there's the proposal to crank up excise on alcopops, opposed by the Coalition and Fielding. Xenophon is not sure he can go along with it either, unless the Government comes up with considerably more to fund public education on binge drinking, which he sees as the real issue.

Xenophon says he admires how the canny Harradine bartered his key vote into benefits for Tasmania during his three decades in the Senate. He's already pushing hard to exploit his new role. The day Inquirer spent with him, as he zipped from Adelaide to the drought-hit Riverland to meet Murray River irrigators, began before 7am.

There's a service at the Renmark Greek Orthodox Church for local saint's day (Xenophon attends services in Adelaide about once a month), souvlaki for lunch and a blur of meetings with aggrieved farmers and business folk. The consummate politician, he remembers every name and to clasp each outstretched hand in his soft, city-boy grip.

Fifteen hours and 530km later, we're speeding back into Adelaide, chatting about all those twists and turns in his life to date, and how he has come such a long way from the Young Liberal who got away at university.

"I don't know if I am a very good politician ... I'm not a good hater," he is saying. And you would like to believe him, really, you would, because a man like that could make a genuine difference in federal parliament.

Let's see if Xenophon is the one.