The business of being Tanya Plibersek
Labor’s former deputy leader says the ‘thoughtless sexism’ of Canberra politics is fading — at last.
“When I grow up I want to be Tanya Plibersek.”
In these fluid, flexy days it’s a wish you hear from young men as well as women. Plibersek, 49, has been the standard bearer for Labor’s progressives this decade, after becoming deputy leader to Bill Shorten in 2013. She has the earnest drive and easy empathy which appeals to activists who want to save the world and gram it.
Amid a purge of party officials and bitter post-mortems after Labor’s shock loss at the May federal election — and from her role as opposition education spokesperson — Plibersek is ready to acknowledge the mistakes.
“You have to be prepared to examine even the most firmly held views that you have, whether they’re right or wrong,” she tells The Deal in an exclusive interview.
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“When you go through that process of re-examination, if you still believe what you’re doing is right then the next step is asking ‘How did I fail to explain?’ or ‘How can I do a better job of communicating what our intention was and what the benefits were?’ You have to be methodical in ensuring that you do better next time.”
Self-analysis goes with the territory and it’s now done increasingly in the open, in real-time, with the surround sound of opponents and disappointed supporters.
“Our job is to think carefully about issues of consequence, so that we can make things better,” Plibersek says. “Once we’ve thought carefully and decided, the next step is to make the argument and convince others our path is the right one.”
‘Our job is to think carefully about issues of consequence, so that we can make things better’
Finding equilibrium out of the fray, she says, is not complicated. “Gather as much information as you can, give yourself a bit of time with it, discuss with others. Think. Decide. Act.
“I don’t really agonise over a lot of policy decisions. In most instances, there are fairly right and wrong answers.”
Shorten quit as leader on election night. Many expected Plibersek to nominate. Anthony Albanese was out of the blocks by lunchtime to announce he was running, but his left-wing rival stepped back. Albo was elected unopposed.
“I made the decision that this was not the right time to take on that role,” says Plibersek, who entered parliament in 1998 as the member for Sydney. “It wouldn’t have been good for my family.”
Plibersek is married to Michael Coutts-Trotter, secretary of the NSW Department of Justice, and they have three children. Over two terms as deputy she saw the contours of the leader’s job, its sheer grind and pressure, and grew to admire Shorten’s even temper, resilience and public demeanour.
“Being a leader is being prepared to make the hard decisions that no one else wants to make and to take responsibility for them,” she says. “But also to have the trust of the people you are leading. When you make those difficult decisions they understand that you’ve thought about them carefully and that you are doing it for the right reason.”
As well as federal Labor’s walking, talking bloodletting, there is ongoing tumult within Plibersek’s NSW branch. Albanese called a review following revelations during an anti-corruption body’s investigation into illegal donations from a Chinese property developer and the resignation of the state general-secretary, Kaila Murnain. As she made a dramatic exit, Murnain spoke about Labor’s “nasty culture of sexism”. Plibersek says she doesn’t think there’s any workplace in Australia where there’s not sexism.
“Certainly there’s sexism in politics,” she says. “I don’t know if the ALP is worse than other environments. In some sense it’s better because at least we have acknowledged that it’s important to have more equal numbers of men and women.”
In the past two decades she’s seen a lot less of the “thoughtless sexism” that pervaded Canberra. She recalls, with astonishment still, that as late as 1983, one of her role models, Jeannette McHugh, was the first woman from NSW to sit in the federal parliament. There were no female toilets in Old Parliament House in the members’ area.
Labor has been more successful than the Liberals and Nationals in promoting female representation.
Plibersek says her opponents don’t prioritise it. “You can’t say: ‘Let nature take its course, one day we’ll be equal.’ You have to say: ‘This is important, this is the target, we are prepared to be judged on whether we achieve that target.’ The Libs have never done that. Unless you have a mechanism, nothing changes.”
Plibersek came into parliament with a cohort that included Julia Gillard, Nicola Roxon and Julie Bishop. She’s outlasted them all, and in November 2021 will become the longest-serving female member of the lower house (surpassing former Labor deputy leader Jenny Macklin, who served for 23 years and one month).
You have to say: ‘This is important, this is the target, we are prepared to be judged on whether we achieve that target’
Politics attracts alpha types. “To imagine that you can do politics without conflict is ridiculous,” she says. “The things we are fighting for are really consequential. It means you have to make an argument, be tough and stand up, not give way. But the manner in which you do that doesn’t have to be aggressive or shouty.
“I think it’s important to see (politics) as a calling and not a job. It’s not nine to five, it consumes your life in lots of ways and it’s not always easy to balance it with other responsibilities in your life. You have to have a partner and a family who are understanding.
“But it is just phenomenally rewarding,” even for branch members, she says. “When you see something concrete, a policy you’ve changed, a thing that you’ve built … those kernels of achievement make it all worth it.”
She nominates a strong lineage of women and men from Labor’s left as mentors; in Canberra her closest guides and friends were Wayne Swan and Macklin, who share her social justice mission and values.
But her major influences were her parents, Joseph and Rose, post-WWII migrants from Slovenia, who instilled a strong sense of helping others, especially in their Oyster Bay neighbourhood in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire. Plibersek’s father would mow people’s lawns and water trees planted by the council on the communal nature strip by hauling buckets of water from the family home. Her mother made soup when people living in their street were ill and took care of kids after school whose parents were working. “Both of my parents showed me you had to look after people and the environment,” Plibersek says.
Her older brothers, 10 and 12 years her senior, talked about the news all the time. “Their politics were very different to each other,” she recalls. “I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested in politics. My first political memory was seeing Gough and Margaret Whitlam walking down the steps of a plane — maybe after visiting China — sitting on Dad’s lap watching the news, aged four. I said: ‘That’s Gough Whitlam, Daddy! He’s a good man, isn’t he?’ ”
What brought her to professional politics was she “always hated seeing people treated unfairly”. Even though opposition has been her lot, more or less, she speaks with satisfaction about her time as human services minister under Gillard.
Plibersek wants Australia to refocus its efforts to become a more just and equal society. Aspiration, she says, is not the property of the conservatives. “I hope all of us aspire for a country to be better, stronger, fairer and wealthier than it was in the past. We need to have policies that meet the aspirations of people right across income levels.”
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