Penny Wong ‘returns to her village’ with world view
In Malaysia, they call it Balik Kampong – returning to your village. For Penny Wong, that homecoming to Borneo’s state of Sabah, was a triumphant one.
In Malaysia, they call it Balik Kampong – returning to your village.
For Foreign Minister Penny Wong, that homecoming to the Borneo state of Sabah and its idyllic capital, Kota Kinabalu – perched on the rim of the South China Sea – was a triumphant one.
At a Wednesday night function filled with beaming Sabahans – friends, family and local dignitaries – one after another spoke of the Wong family’s contribution to the town and the inevitability that the oldest child of noted local architect and city councillor Francis Wong would go far.
One claimed to have predicted her trajectory to political office.
“I always said Penny would be prime minister of Australia one day,” said Amy-Jean Yee, who used to live across the road from the Wongs when Penny was a child.
“Mum called it,” laughed her daughter Yee I-Lann, a renowned artist and one of Senator Wong’s oldest friends who also went to school in Adelaide.
That Senator Wong – as an Asian-born, gay woman – does not covet Australian politics’ top job is a matter of public record.
Australia may or may not be ready for that, but it has come a long way since the 53-year-old entered politics determined to effect change. She has never sugar-coated the difficulties she faced as an eight-year-old – student number 19 at the Kinabalu International School – moving to Adelaide with her mother and brother after the breakdown of her parents’ marriage.
She said as much again on Thursday at her old school, where her father designed the main building and where he sent her so she would not speak English with an accent, when a student asked what inspired her to enter politics.
“Most of us want a sense of purpose in our lives and coming from Malaysia to Australia at that time was quite hard because we were not as diverse as we are now. It was 1976,” she replied.
“That was an experience of being different and some hard things happened, and I think I wanted to try and change things.”
As Australia’s top global emissary, however, she wants the neighbourhood to know just how much Australia has changed: barely recognisable in face or in ideology to the country she moved to just a few years after the final phase-out of the decades-long White Australia policy that favoured European migrants.
In Kota Kinabalu, Senator Wong spoke of her homecoming as “an act of hope that my story and my family’s story can contribute to the relationship between the nation of my birth and the _nation to which I belong, that that story can bring human and personal dimensions to strengthen the relationship between our nations.
“My story is a Sahaban story. A Malaysian story. It is also an Australian story. The experience of migration is one so many Australians share. When you walk down a street in an Australian city, you see and hear our diversity,” she told the gathering.
“And I say to you, this is modern Australia. This is today’s Australia. And it is an Australia which understands that our prosperity, our security and our future is shared with yours.”
It is a message Senator Wong has been emphasising across the region since she was sworn into office last month.
Australia’s new Foreign Minister has had years in opposition to think about how to deliver that message to a region that accepts its southern neighbour as a valued partner but which also has a long memory.
Rarely has there been greater urgency for Australia to talk and work with our neighbours, and to increase our influence to shape the region in which we live at a time of such global upheaval.
At the Luyang market in Foh Sang on Thursday where Senator Wong was greeted with a traditional Lion Dance and a giant banner slung over a first floor balcony, and at the Kuo Mam restaurant where she ate her favourite fish ball congee with her brother James, enthusiasm for her success seemed universal.
“It’s just so amazing and it’s also something that young Sahabans can be proud of – that we should never look down on ourselves, that everybody has the potential to do great things,” said James, the last of the seven Wong siblings still living in Kota Kinabalu.
Salleh Keruak, a Malaysian MP and former Sabah chief minister whose children also studied in Australia, said Malaysia’s loss was Australia’s gain but her appointment proved that in Australia, as in Sabah, “people don’t look at your race, or your colour, just your capability”.
“We are so proud of her – to be holding this position and head of the Senate for so many years,” added Adeline Leong, the former mayor of Kita Kinabalu who now heads the Institute for Development Studies and hopes Australia’s new Foreign Minister can forge even closer ties with Malaysia. “She spent her childhood here. She is one of us.”
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