Lara Giddings and the choice that may lead to her downfall as Tasmanian premier

SLASHING services, cutting health ... Tasmania's premier may be engineering her own downfall. But she insists it will be worth it.

Lara Giddings

IT'S a Sunday morning in Pontville, a small, quiet rural hamlet on the banks of the Jordan River, just north of Hobart, and about 30 or so parishioners are dutifully filing through the sandstone entrance arch of St Mark's Anglican Church. Just before retired magistrate Rick Giddings reaches his pew, he's confronted with a petition condemning his youngest daughter - Tasmania's first female premier, Lara Giddings - over her deep cuts to the state's health budget.

Scanning the long list of signatures from locals, Rick Giddings mutters to himself that "pretty well every one has signed this thing". If Rick and his wife Lynn needed any reminder that the policies of their beloved daughter "Larsy" were having repercussions right on their doorstep, this was it. At the same time, the views of their fellow parishioners prompted them to ask themselves: how will the closure of hospital wards and curtailment of elective surgery - deemed by their daughter as necessary to stem runaway public spending - affect their own lives, and those of their friends?

"I said to Lara, 'Bloody hell, you're really putting ordinary people offside over this,'" Rick recalls over a pot of tea at the Giddings' modern, modest home nestled between bush and paddock in Pontville. "I said, 'Look: Mum and I don't have private health cover. I am going in for a urological test in a few weeks' time. What happens if they find something is growing inside my bladder?' I don't want to damn well be put on a long waiting list and not be attended to. I share the fears with everybody else."

It's the sort of confronting moment politicians dread: decisions made in the polished corridors of power affecting those they know and love. Rick confides that Lara - as most Tasmanians know her - was as unreceptive to his complaints as she is publicly determined to carve $1.4 billion from the state budget to avoid a downward spiral into debt and deficit. "She said, 'Look, if you've got something really wrong with you, you'll be treated like anyone else who is in urgent need, so shut up'," Rick recalls. "There's no swaying Larsy. She believes it. I admire her guts."

Even so, her father's admonishments give Giddings cause to reflect. "I think, what hope have I got if my own parents don't understand what's going on?" Nevertheless, she regards her parents as a "good barometer" for determining whether her government is getting its message across. "Nobody likes to see anybody in pain and I don't want to see my parents in pain," she says. "But neither do I want to see the Tasmanian economy and the Tasmanian future damaged because we weren't prepared to make the tough decisions now."

It's for good reason that Giddings has been dubbed Australia's toughest treasurer, having spearheaded a raft of austerity measures not seen on the island in more than two decades. Both sides of politics concede that the scale of the state's budgetary woes - a massive budget black hole stemming from plunging state and GST revenues following the global downturn - requires urgent action. Add to this the unique economic profile of Tasmania, the nation's poorest state. More than 27,000 people - over five per cent of the state's population - receive a disability support pension. Welfare payments are the primary source of income for a startling one-third of households, while more than a third of Tasmanians of working age fail to achieve a post-Year 10 qualification. Tasmania, labelled the "mendicant state", has long been living beyond its means, relying on GST receipts and federal grants for more than 60 per cent of its income.

One of the state's few fiscal achievements, however, has been the elimination of net government debt, and Giddings is determined not to undo the good work of her political predecessors and risk a credit agency downgrade. Nonetheless, many in Giddings' Left faction would prefer she ease the social pain by allowing the state to dip into debt or by raising state taxes. Some on the Right believe asset sales would be a smarter way of avoiding savage cuts to health and other services.

But Giddings has publicly pledged to avoid a return to debt - and she is fiercely opposed to selling off public utilities, believing these will be potential revenue streams in the years to come and that in any case a one-off privatisation would only delay the inevitable day of reckoning. And herein lies the Giddings dilemma: cut services to get the beleaguered Apple Isle back in the black, but earn the ire of her core constituency; or give her government some slack and balloon the deficit even more. The 39-year-old is, in many ways, in a no-win situation.

Next week marks Giddings' first year in the job, which many believe now vies with Julia Gillard's for the toughest in Australia. Last January, when she took office, many within the tarnished ranks of the state ALP were elated: at last, here was a fresh-faced, articulate female figurehead with none of the political baggage of her two predecessors. Giddings, who made history in 1996 as the youngest woman elected to any parliament in Australia, was making history again as the state's first female premier. Play her cards right, and she could restore faith among disillusioned Labor faithful - and give the party a fair shot at stepping back from the brink of electoral oblivion after 13 years in power.

Or so the script went. But instead of taking the easy course and providing more handouts to Labor's lost battlers, Giddings appears intent on tearing the heart out of the public services on which they rely - health, education, community services and the police. The struggles over hospital cutbacks, in particular, have become increasingly bitter in recent months, fuelled in part by public sector unions trying to force the government to back down on the worst of the cuts.

In November last year, the diminutive Giddings found herself the brunt of angry crowds in Hobart, where she sought to defend her budget strategy against public servants, health workers and voters. One unionist released the Premier's mobile phone number, inviting the public to harangue her with their disaffection. Giddings' fearless determination to face angry crowds in the flesh is proving a headache for her security team. During our interview she concedes at one point that there are moments when she asks herself, "Why am I putting myself through this?"

Even some of Giddings' own colleagues complain she is not a team player and boxes herself in by refusing to compromise. And just before Christmas there was talk - albeit just talk for now - of a leadership change to a more fiscally flexible alternative, such as the ambitious economic development minister, David O'Byrne.

Giddings' trademark calm and quiet determination - which seemed such an asset after Paul Lennon's bluster and David Bartlett's perceived need to be loved by everyone - now seems to be rankling a public weary of being told that the state can't afford their hip operation, that their kids' school should close, or that their public service job is being terminated.

But despite the forces arrayed against her, Giddings is holding the line. And whatever you may think of her policies, the 39-year-old still looks and sounds like a leader. Admirers and critics alike say she won't go down without a fight. To understand where this deep determination and unflinching sense of public service comes from, you have to go back to Giddings' childhood, specifically to her parents, who brought her up among missionaries in remote regions of Papua New Guinea.

An enormous pile of scrapbooks divides Rick and Lynn Giddings over their dining table. The yellowing A3 pages are jam-packed with press cuttings chronicling Lara Giddings' stellar political career. "The good, the bad and the ugly," jokes Rick, a serious, upright man, but one with a sense of humour.

Lara and older sister Sonya are the progeny of parents whose political outlooks could not have been more different, but who were united by a deep sense of right and wrong, and of the virtue of public service. Lynn was a passionate socialist with what some during the Cold War saw as a "suspicious" interest in Russia. Rick was distinctly conservative; a colonial patrol officer, or kiap, later district officer and ultimately senior magistrate in PNG. "Lara grew up, with Sonya, in this dichotomy: Dad's a monarchist, pro the flag, God, king and country; Mum's a socialist, Left wing of the Labor party, get rid of the union jack, the monarchy," explains Rick.

Born and raised in PNG until she began high school, Giddings was exposed to a daily diet of debate and dissent at meal times. "They [Lara and Sonya] said sitting at the dinner table was like being at Wimbledon as they listened to Mum and Dad's arguments go back and forward," smiles Lynn. During his career in PNG, Rick was a self-described "big man amongst a hoard of black faces", many of whom he put behind bars, while Lynn set up a probation service. "It was a joke in the family," the Premier explains to me later. "Dad would lock them up and Mum would get them out again through rehabilitation and probation."

Giddings says her mother's world view had a greater influence on her than her father's. However, the respectful manner in which both parents, now in their 70s, handled their differences had a lasting impact. She appears to be an amalgam of the two: a Tasmanian kiap, strong-willed, paternalistic and conservative in some ways, but imbued with her mother's fire and depth of belief in the ALP.

Giddings' budgeting skills can be traced to the latter years of school, spent as a boarder, with Sonya, at Melbourne's Methodist Ladies' College, while her parents remained in PNG. "Boarding school makes you independent at the age of 12," Lara explains. "I had $100 a term, $300 over a whole year and out of that I had to pay for my toothpaste, my washing detergent, my shampoos and other incidentals."

It was a Year 11 visit to Canberra that transformed a background interest in politics into a career path. Giddings joined the ALP as an 18-year-old and gravitated to the party's Left, either working for or being mentored by some of its key operatives, including Tasmanian state MP Fran Bladel, former Victorian premier Joan Kirner and federal MP Duncan Kerr (it was Kerr who encouraged her to stand for parliament).

In 1996, at the age of 23, Giddings was elected to Tasmania's lower house in the largely rural seat of Lyons, the youngest woman elected to an Australian parliament. It was a bittersweet moment when she lost the seat at the 1998 election because Labor was back in government after six years in opposition. Now out of a job, Giddings travelled and found work in the United Kingdom, including a stint as a research officer for MP Helen Eadie in the Scottish Parliament. After returning to Australia, Giddings successfully contested the southern electorate of Franklin at the 2002 state poll, a seat she holds to this day.

Within two years Giddings was minister of economic development and within four had the key but difficult portfolio of health and human services. She kept her nose clean as scandals plagued the cabinets of then premier Lennon and, to a lesser extent, his successor, Bartlett, under whom she became deputy premier and eventually treasurer. As health minister she reduced duplication between Tasmania's network of hospitals, making the unpopular decision to close several in country towns, fronting angry crowds to personally defend the policy. In the midlands town of Ouse she was abused and had firecrackers thrown at her feet.

Not that she let any of this sway her. "When she gets an idea, believes in it and takes advice on it, then she digs her heels in and she sticks with it," observes her father. "It would be very hard to overthrow [her stance]."

Which some see as a flaw. "Her weakness at the moment is that she's not listening," says a senior player in her Left faction, Unions Tasmania chief Kevin Harkins. "She probably sees a change in position as a sign of weakness, which it shouldn't be. That's no good."

The latest opinion poll, published by Tasmanian pollster EMRS in late November last year, doesn't look pretty. Labor's support had declined 7 per cent in 12 months to just 23 per cent. Labor's power-sharing partners, the Greens, who have two ministers in Giddings' cabinet, were almost level with Labor on 20 per cent. The opposition Liberals, under Will Hodgman, are cruising towards majority government with 54 per cent. Giddings' personal approval rating has fallen from 27 per cent in February, shortly after she became Premier, to just 19 per cent. That's dangerously close to the 17 per cent that precipitated Lennon's downfall in May 2008 and well below the 23 per cent that preceded Bartlett's departure.

Giddings' predicament draws inevitable comparisons with Kristina Keneally in NSW, Joan Kirner in Victoria, and Anna Bligh in Queensland: women pushed to the helm just as the ship of state steamed towards the rocky shores of electoral oblivion. When Bartlett quit in the wake of bad polling and a worsening budget situation, Giddings was deputy premier and treasurer. "I was the next obvious choice, so I don't think it was a matter of 'Let's push a woman up and let's allow a woman to cop it'," she says. "It just happens to be that I am a woman and I have stepped up to the mark now. I have three years to be able to prove myself."

While hopeful voters will reward tough economic management, she concedes they may be smarting too much from the budget cuts to consider the bigger picture. Labor insiders say the ALP is resigned to a historic loss. "It's not going to look too pretty for them," explains former premier Paul Lennon. "Experienced members of the caucus are fully aware that Labor's chances ... are quite low. Lara wants to make sure that Labor's period in office, for however much longer it goes, is remembered for repairing and consolidating Tasmania's economic outlook."

Giddings argues that the right thing - bringing the budget under control - is therefore also the right thing in the party's long-term interests. Even if it means a stint in opposition. Joan Kirner, who struggled with Victoria's fiscal crisis as premier from 1990 to 1992, remains a Giddings mentor and friend. Both were founding members of Emily's List in Australia (a support network for progressive Labor women candidates) and Kirner has kept in touch with "one of my favourites". Kirner recently sent Giddings a text message saying: "You're doing a good job!"

"If Tasmanians look at what they've got carefully, rather than just reacting to what they haven't got, I think Lara has got the capacity to fight back," Kirner says. However, even this card-carrying member of the Lara fan club has been concerned about the depth of cuts proposed at times. "I was delighted, for example, when Lara reversed the decision on closing [20] small schools," she says. "I said to her before that Jeff Kennett nearly wrecked education by closing 300 schools and he never lived it down, so be very careful." However, Kirner concedes the Greens may have been the force behind the backflip (Greens leader Nick McKim is education minister). And while school closures remain on the table, Kirner cautions her friend against relying too heavily on treasury advice. "Treasury doesn't always know what's happening out on the ground," she says.

Some of the Premier's Left faction colleagues accuse her of being overly influenced by treasury adviser Ross Smith and economics adviser Richard Dowling, complaining the trio seem "joined at the hip". A former chief economist to the state's peak employer body, Dowling, an ALP member, is one of the driest economists in town. "Richard Dowling has way too much influence," argues unions boss Harkins. "To be honest, Lara might be a member of the Left but in some areas - in the area of finance - I don't think she demonstrates a Left-leaning agenda. The current budget is a business agenda."

The barb stings when I put it to Giddings. "I actually have a fair bit of self-respect and an understanding of my own abilities to listen to various quarters of advice - and to make up my own mind," she snaps, suspending her trademark placidity. "So when the union movement or anyone else makes those sorts of comments, they are actually insulting me and my intelligence."

Lennon believes there has been a shift in Giddings' political outlook. "That's driven in part by being in government - it does push you to the right of your position, having this wider, total responsibility, including economic development and business profitability," he says. The former premier believes there is a "very low" risk of the PLP losing its nerve and dumping Giddings and her austerity program ahead of the election.

Harkins disagrees. "I know there are mutterings there already," says the ambitious unionist. "Politicians, as they do, worry about getting re-elected. The cuts are unpopular and affect the ALP heartland. To be honest, if they don't change tack, [Labor's dramatic election loss in] NSW is going to look good."

Harkins says the health cuts, in particular, are poison in Labor's traditional strongholds, such as the northern suburbs of Hobart and parts of its eastern shore. "For the poor old punter who is out there struggling to pay his bills, for heating, rent and all the rest, and who doesn't have an ability to pay for private health insurance, it is really, really scary," he says. "They're thinking, 'If I get sick tomorrow, what happens?'?"

"Leftist Lara Giddings still looking for Mr Right". The headline in The Australian, published shortly after Giddings took office in January last year, appeared with a news story by this writer in which the new premier reflected and joked about taking the top job as a single woman. Speak to Giddings informally and you're struck by her humour and open, honest demeanour. She is engaging and quick to smile, and away from parliament speaks slowly and softly. Unlike some of her male colleagues, she is no attention-seeker. In various conversations with her since her appointment as Premier the only sign of vanity I detect is an insistence that she is not a redhead. (For the record, her hair is copper-brown.)

Since then, there has been keen media interest in Giddings' new "boyfriend" (her parents' term for former keen sportsman and Centrelink worker Grant Hildyard). The father of two has made it clear he does not want to be in the spotlight and refused to be a part of this article; for her part, Giddings asks for privacy. "He's not the elected member of parliament - he just happens to be going out with one," she says.

As Giddings battles the daily minefield of state politics, she's mindful that her biological clock is ticking away. "I would love to be a mother; my life has not panned out in that way," she says quietly. Insiders say Giddings has for years been consumed by thoughts of having a family, but she insists this is an overstatement. "I could have given up politics and said, 'I'm just going to try to meet a man and have a child' and then been very unsatisfied in other parts of life. Maybe I'll never have an opportunity to have children. I hope I do. I hope that time does come. It's much harder, being Premier, to be able to do that, but who knows?" Giddings pauses for a moment and reflects. "Maybe in time I'll be the first pregnant premier, to add to the other firsts. It's not going to happen in the first couple of years."

Her parents are angered by personal attacks on their daughter, believing she has made sacrifices because of her commitment to serving the public. "I feel she has made an ultimate sacrifice - of having a partner and family, for politics - and therefore I get hurt," Lynn says. "I feel for her. She would have loved to have had [kids]. When it gets tough - and there have been a lot of tough times - she goes home to an empty house."

With several years of budgetary blues ahead, and little hope of early recovery in the polls, there will be plenty of these bad days to come. If her daughter does fall, Lynn will have some advice at the ready: "I would say to her: 'Well, have a life, Lara, you deserve it.'?"

The Premier smiles at her mother's suggestion, but dismisses it. "If we lost then there is an element of rebuilding that needs to be done and an element of experience required to help in that," she says. "I don't think you'll see me handing in my resignation."

In all likelihood, Giddings' determination to do what is in the best long-term interests of the state will lead to her downfall. It may come at the polls or earlier at the hands of her less dogmatic colleagues. Nor is she wearing rose-coloured glasses about her chances of winning the next election in March 2014, which could come sooner if the alliance with the Greens founders. Her hope is that, one day at least, Tasmanians will thank her for the tough decisions she is making now.