Sussan Ley’s next big challenge

SHE’S flown an unconventional route to high office, but health minister Sussan Ley is used to negotiating turbulence.

Ley with her aircraft in Albury. Picture: Simon Dallinger

CLAMBERING into the rickety cabin of a single-engine Cessna where new Health Minister Sussan Ley sits at the controls flicking switches and checking dials, my butterflies flutter disconcertingly.

“I’ve got my good-luck scarf,” she jokes of a blue and mauve patterned neck tie worn the day she won Liberal pre-selection for the south-western NSW National Party stronghold of Farrer in 2001. She wriggles free from her black ankle boots for the comfort of socks that have sprung a hole where her big toe with its bright red nail pokes through. “Clear prop” she sings out over her shoulder with the unflappable spirit of a squadron pilot from the Biggles paperbacks that fired her childhood thirst for adventure. She gives me a headset to muffle the roar as we rocket down the runway of Albury’s airport, lifting into a clear blue sky above the political dust storm threatening to bury Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Ley’s hands dance authoritatively over dashboard instruments as she talks so that I’m soon calm enough to allow myself a quick glance down at the miniature patchwork of fields, dams, and farm buildings far below. She checks the iPad on her lap to chart our course for the tiny Riverina town of Urana, reaching for a well-thumbed copy of the National Airfield Directory to confirm where we will land. “Indigo Foxtrot Romeo on descent,” she radios to air-traffic control as the plane begins to drop. When it dawns on Ley that the straight stretch she’s aiming for is a road, not a runway, she coolly corrects her flight path, circling until she spots a red ochre strip overgrown with grass.

Although fond of the rule that a sloppy approach equals a sloppy landing, she touches down smoothly and rolls to a halt beside the terminal, a corrugated tin shed with a rusty tractor parked at the rear. Dressed casually in black ­leggings and a blue shirt, she straddles the padlocked gate and climbs into a waiting car for the short drive to the main street where she’ll hear the local GP warn that the federal government’s controversial proposal for a $5 Medicare co-payment resulting from a GP rebate cut would ruin him.

Promoted to Cabinet in December, doubling the number of senior female ministers to a grand total of two, some wondered whether Ley, 53, had been handed a noose. Health is a notoriously complex portfolio and her steep learning curve is encumbered by the fate of unpopular reforms. Her first task was to dump the PM’s $20 rebate cut for six-minute consultations after a grass-roots campaign by doctors began mobilising patient protests in waiting rooms around the country. That revolt is in abeyance pending the outcome of her efforts to broker peace with those on the front line of health-care delivery.

Ley (pronounced Lee) is listening up, scribbling in her spiral notebook as she tours surgeries and clinics, perhaps the only frontbencher doing core business while Abbott’s tenuous future concentrates the rest. “We might have a female prime minister in a minute,” a cheeky constituent teases Ley during a meeting in Urana. “If we do it won’t be me,” she smiles. Liberal talent scouts who picked the secretary of the party’s Tallangatta branch from obscurity disagree. “She’s a bobby-dazzler,” says one.

The short blonde hair is misbehaving. Ley’s media minder has forbidden a fringe and the stylist for our portrait shoot is trying to tame a wispy bob that seems to be channelling the minister’s late adolescent period as a punk rocker. “I remember one day I really excelled myself: no shoes, bright orange glasses, spiky purple hair, a dog collar, a razor blade in one ear, a nose piercing, skinny black jodhpurs and black lipstick.” That was in 1979, after she’d finished secondary school at Canberra’s Dickson College, never imagining for a moment she’d wind up in corporate jackets and sensible frocks riding through the capital in white Commonwealth cars.

Canberra art historian Dr Sarah Engledow remembers Ley dancing in high-heeled boots and short skirts when they were junior clerks in personnel at the Department of Capital Territories. “She’s so intrepid. Sometimes I’d find her wildness completely exasperating because it was so far beyond my comprehension.”

But on this overcast morning in Melbourne she’s skirting danger. The Socceroos victory over South Korea, which Ley attended in her secondary role as Sports Minister, is forgotten amid the primal screams of colleagues in a foetal curl after the Queensland election rout. “I don’t think the answer is to change leaders,” she says. Ley didn’t vote for Abbott when he fought ­Malcolm ­Turnbull in the 2009 leadership ballot but now she’s on the PM’s team she appears unwaveringly loyal. Her electoral campaign manager, a local farmer, Angus Macneil, isn’t duty-bound. Aghast at Abbott’s Prince Philip knighthood “captain’s pick”, he thinks the PM has “completely lost the plot”. Days later, after fielding irate calls from party faithful threatening to resign, he jokes: “They’re saying the best thing that could happen is Abbott falls off his bike.”

Ley refuses to be drawn into the frenzy. When the heat turns on Abbott’s chief of staff Peta Credlin, Ley defends her publicly, even though Credlin vetoed Ley’s personal candidate to run her ministerial office. She’s a stickler for self-discipline. “Maybe it’s because I didn’t come through the political system,” she suggests. Not for her the orthodox springboard from student politics, law firms, unions or party machines.

Ley didn’t attend university until she was 30, waking at 4am to study economics part-time with a doona around her shoulders before her three young children rose for breakfast. She’d been too busy during her 20s with bug-eyed feats even Biggles might baulk at, from an epic journey on horseback with dog and swag to aerial mustering in remote Australia. When Engledow heard her old friend was going into politics, “I thought it was just another of her hare-brained ideas.”

Wanderlust and a rare breadth of experience blooded her for a profession demanding shoe leather, a steady nerve, a thick hide and a ticker both sinewy strong and sensitive to the country’s mood. An active member of her local Liberal branch, Ley was encouraged to seek pre-selection in 2001 for the seat of Indi in a contest won narrowly by Melbourne lawyer Sophie Mirabella. Insiders present that day sensed the runner-up was easily the more exciting talent, so when ­former National Party leader Tim Fischer retired from the neighbouring electorate of Farrer the same year, Macneil persuaded Ley to cross the Murray River for a riskier proposition. “She was a candidate from heaven,” he says.

But head office was not interested in staging a fight with its Coalition partner over political turf the Nationals had ruled for a decade. “Nobody thought Sussan could win. Nobody gave us any money. We had 94 booths to man and hardly any members west of Corowa.” Six months of campaigning in an old blue caravan delivered victory by a mere 206 votes, a buffer that has fattened with every election. Farrer is now safe Liberal property while the rival who beat her by a nose in Indi lost to Independent Cathy McGowan at the last election.

Former Liberal Lou Lieberman, who served in state and federal parliament, reckons Ley is good enough to get to the top. “One day Sussan could well be prime minister. I mean that sincerely,” he says. “I’ll never forget ringing her during her first campaign. There was this huge rainstorm in the background, lightning, thunder, and I asked her what on Earth she was doing and she said, ‘I’m knocking on every door in Holbrook’. And she did,” he recalls. “She’s remarkable. Health is one of the toughest portfolios with a 100 different issues a day but you couldn’t find a better minister. She’s got the capacity, the candour and commitment to listen carefully and come up with a model that most caring people will support.”

Ley was leaning in long before Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg coined the mantra, so she didn’t hesitate when Tony Abbott rang before Christmas to offer her the minefield of Medicare reform. A brief stint assisting the Minister for Education with responsibility for child care is a cakewalk beside the bruising arena of health. The reshuffle spared her from thorny decisions based on the Productivity Commission’s report into children’s services. “It was not clear what direction she was heading in,” says Dr Anne Kennedy, chair of ­Community Child Care Victoria, which fought with Ley unsuccessfully to lift qualifications for staff in charge of children under three.

Industry bodies liked her up- front “out and about” approach but they say she’s no pushover. When Early Childhood Australia attacked budget cuts last year, its secretariat funding was axed. With an Orwellian flourish, Ley insisted that the removal of operational subsidies for family day care be described as “lapsing programs”.

“I’ll be interested to see how she manages the doctors,” says a child care lobbyist. “If she thought we were difficult to deal with she’s seen nothing yet.” Both sectors are vexed. Both have human welfare at their core. Both involve tough questions of affordability and accessibility versus quality. But the $67 billion health portfolio is bigger on every score. “It’s a dream job,” Ley tells me. “If I can play a small part in getting future policy right I’d be honoured to do that.”

Her crazy-brave streak comes from continent-hopping parents, British-born Edgar and Angela Braybrooks, who travelled independently around Australia in the 1950s. Edgar ran a boarding house in St Kilda and hunted crocodiles up north while Angela came here as a nurse and wound up on Thursday Island. “He was an adventurer,” Ley says of her father. “He pulled the pin on life in a small rural village in England and went to work in Palestine for the police.”

Born in Nigeria, Susan, as she was christened, grew up in the Middle East with her brother John. The family shifted from Qatar to Sharjah, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Al Ain because her father, who was attached to British intelligence, was working with the sheiks. Ley was chair of parliament’s Friends of Palestine group and often links her love of red dirt and blue skies to her early immersion in the desert. “I remember the peculiar smells… the smell of heat, the smells of the market. As a child I wanted to be out in that world exploring rather than inside an air-conditioned environment, but it wasn’t that simple.”

At the age of 10 she went to a boarding school in Sussex, south of London, hoping for a St Trinian’s romp. Her father had promised horse-riding lessons if she won a scholarship. “I thought it would be very jolly – in fact it was a bit grim,” she says. We’re talking at her Albury electorate office in between meeting and greeting doctors. She describes herself as a “skinny, plain, gawky girl” who found it difficult making friends. “Boarding school taught me a great ­lesson in resilience. I can remember thinking, ‘Well, I don’t have to like it but I have to be able to cope, to manage it’.”

When I ask whom she most takes after, she nominates her father. “He and I share a great love of horses,” she says. Her mother Angela suggests father and daughter also enjoy a keen intelligence. The family’s peripatetic existence is a constant pattern in their lives. After migrating to Australia in 1974 they settled briefly in Toowoomba, where Edgar farmed and Angela worked at the local hospital, then moved to Canberra when Edgar joined the Federal Police. They kept horses on a small hobby farm in nearby Murrumbateman.

“She was always ahead academically,” Angela says of her daughter. “She was clever but it was very difficult to say what she was going to do.” The punk-rock phase was fleeting. “I remember that, definitely,” her mother stiffens. When I ask why she chose the spelling Sussan for her ­daughter, she says: “I didn’t”.

After leaving school, Ley spent six months on the dole until she joined the public service. Bureaucracy scared the hell out of her. “I got this panicked feeling when I thought, ‘Is this it?’ ” She survived the boredom by planning an overland trail ride, possibly inspired by Robyn Davidson’s camel journey through Central Australia in 1977. Persuading a friend to come along, she trained a packhorse to carry their supplies and set out in the summer of 1980 to ride from Canberra to Adelaide via ­Victoria. The odyssey ended traumatically in Gippsland near Ninety Mile Beach when Ley’s dog was run over in an accident, his traumatised yelp scaring the pack horse who fell, crushing the saddle bags, billy cans and all.

Desk jockeys back at the Department of Capital Territories admired her spunk. “I hated her from the moment I heard of this legendary woman,” jokes her then co-worker, Sarah ­Engledow. “I wanted to be the star of the office.” The two shared a love of pranks and often amused each other by ringing departmental employees who had “funny” surnames.

Around this time Ley changed the spelling of her first name. “I read about this numerology theory that if you add the numbers that match the letters in your name you can change your personality. I worked out that if you added an “s” I would have an incredibly exciting, interesting life and nothing would ever be boring. It’s that simple,” she says, chuckling. “And once I’d added the “s” it was really hard to take it away.”

Upon discovering that short-sightedness did not preclude her from flying, she took ­practical steps towards an adventurous life by getting her pilot’s licence. “This is the thing that made me extremely happy.” She supplemented her wage, cleaning department stores and waitressing at a roadside diner after hours to pay for her lessons. Getting a licence was easy; gaining employment proved harder. When job knockbacks grounded her ambition she became an air traffic controller in Melbourne, then Sydney. Back then, women pilots were a novelty. Victorian Deborah Wardley fought a landmark discrimination case against Ansett for years before finally winning an airline job in 1980. Facing the same discouragement, Ley finally advertised her qualifications in rural newspapers. Queensland shearing contractor Keith Johnson’s mustering pilot had gone to Papua New Guinea. He rang Ley and gave her 48 hours to get to ­Thargomindah, 1000km west of Brisbane. She loaded up her 1969 Holden, vacated her Coogee flat and headed for a place she’d never heard of before.

Johnson’s wife Julie has never forgotten this slip of a girl with the grit of an ox arriving in a whirl of dust. “She was absolutely fantastic. She could put her hand to anything, any challenge that was put in front of her. She was most ­definitely mature beyond her years.”

Ley met her former husband, John Ley, at Thargomindah. When the station owner went broke, the couple spent two years travelling and working on rural properties. As a rouseabout cook for sheds of hungry men, Ley found it the toughest grind of her working life. Eventually they returned to John’s family wool and beef farm in the Tallangatta valley, north-east Victoria, where they were tested by periods of drought, falling wool prices and an expanding household of three children – Paul, now 26, Georgina, 24, and Isabel, 22.

Hoping to earn a second income, Ley enrolled in an economics degree at the Wodonga campus of La Trobe University. She’d get The Australian Financial Review delivered daily, a luxury she increasingly regarded as a necessity for the debates over economic policy. When a neighbour invited the young couple to a local Liberal Party function for Bronwyn Bishop – then considered a leadership contender – Ley was hooked. “She was a celebrity. I liked her emphasis on individualism and taking responsibility for oneself but also the need to contribute. I’d always been interested in the spirit of public service. So I started going to meetings. I was a loyal foot soldier. It never occurred to me that I might stand.”

From the mid ’90s Ley worked at the Albury tax office, adding a Masters in Tax Law and a Masters in Accounting to her muscular resumé. Promoted swiftly to a rank below SES level, she made ­similar progress through the Liberal’s Tallangatta branch, impressing locals with her smarts and strength. Former president Sheena MacLeod admires Ley’s capacity to work hard and engage constituents. “What she’s achieved in her life makes the mind boggle. She has the ability to talk on anybody’s level without being patronising.”

Elected midway through the Howard ­government’s term, she cut her teeth on parliamentary committees including the Murray- Darling Basin review, so critical to irrigators in her vast rural electorate. Labor MP Steve ­Gibbons, who worked beside her, praises her people skills and grace under pressure. “We didn’t always agree but she worked bloody hard. I’m not surprised she’s in Cabinet but she should have been there from day one.”

Liberal MP Sharman Stone, from the next-door seat of Murray, agrees. “Our party continues to look out of touch and unrepresentative so long as 50 per cent of women are excluded from ­Cabinet, the outer ministry and the backbench,” says Stone. “This is not acceptable in the 21st century.” The two women grew close as they supported each other through marital breakdown. “Like me she’s divorced, got children, she’s a neighbour and I like her,” says Ley. “People often say would you do it all again,” she says of her career, “and sometimes I think, well, maybe not.” Why? “Well, my marriage broke up. It wasn’t because of parliament but I think it probably hastened the inevitable end.”

She frets over the impact of separation on her now adult children and we agree that mothers are only as happy as their unhappiest child. I’m introduced to her new partner, Graham Johnson, over dinner in Albury. They met at a pub. “Sussan asked what I did and I told her I was a bin cleaner,” he laughs. “He runs a bin cleaning business,” she adds quickly.

Campaign manager Angus Macneil, who joins us at the restaurant, says Ley had to overcome a natural shyness to succeed on the stump. “In the early days we’d go into a pub to campaign and there’d be all these blokes at the bar and she’d have to grit her teeth. You can imagine their reaction. People would step back but once she started talking to them they’d edge forward.”

I see this quality while tailing her around the ­electorate. She’s interested in people. Many politicians never pause for breath. Ley’s popularity in a seat that has undergone three redistributions (with a fourth pending) is proof of personal charisma. In 2013 she won a booth in the ­historically solid Labor town of Broken Hill.

“As my mother says, courtesy doesn’t cost anything,” she tells a grain grower in Urana who compliments her on the way she’d handled a rally of angry farmers during a long-ago fight over a single wheat desk. Later, she likens the mob mentality of that rural meeting to a scene from Wake in Fright.

Doctors are more formidable foes. Ley acknowledges the power of fight-back posters in every waiting room during a round table forum with Albury GPs. “Doctors see more people in one day than a politician,” one of them warns her. They welcome her conciliatory stance but they want an end to the co-payment and the current freeze on indexation of the Medicare schedule. At least Ley signals a fresh start. Her predecessor Peter Dutton gave Frank Jones, the president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, a perfunctory call to inform him of controversial government changes the morning they were announced.

GPs argue their costs have remained flat while spending on hospital and tertiary care has risen. Jones claims a co-payment will discourage patients from presenting early, resulting in ­additional tests and more expensive intervention. “It’s an economic no-brainer – investing in general practice will result in long-term savings and better health outcomes for doctors.”

Health researcher Lesley Russell believes the Coalition needs a much bolder plan. “We’ve done all the easy stuff. The low hanging fruit has been picked already. What we need to do is the harder cultural changes among providers and consumers that will deliver more substantial returns in the long term,” she says, urging primary preventative health-care programs.

Behind closed doors, Ley takes every suggestion thrown at her agreeably. “You could raise the Medicare levy,” one GP suggests. They ­discuss it for a bit but she grimaces at lifting the levy to pay for an “inefficient” system. As she sifts through ideas preposterous and plausible, she stresses: “Everything is on the table.”

At the year’s first party meeting after Abbott defeated the spill motion, she tells MPs that “co-payment” has become a dirty word. I hear her language shifting from “price signals” to “value signals” as she picks her way forward, sensing that “people don’t mind contributing, don’t mind that they have to pay” and indeed “value” the service more as a result. At the time of writing no announcement had been made, but political prag­matism will now drive policy.

“I don’t want to be the Minister for Health Financing,” Ley says. “I want to be the Minister for Health.” Her 97-year-old father has exceeded life expectancy by prudent management of his ­diabetes. “I have a real interest in wellness and preventative health. It must start with the individual and their understanding of nutrition and exercise. My parents were ahead of their time in this respect.” She doesn’t eat sugar but for lunch in Urana, where healthy choices are few, she buys a battered potato cake. “I haven’t had breakfast,” she pleads. Besides, she has to ferry me safely back to Albury and needs something to line her stomach.

Ley is not aligned to any faction. Socially ­liberal, she explains: “I’m not as liberal as ­people think. Sometimes I’m painted as being on the left.” One encounter in Urana reveals how Ley’s signature gift of affable openness often camouflages her economic spine. Face to face with the town’s Indian-born GP, Dr Veerendra Giri ­Yaramati, she reassures him: “We are not necessarily going ahead with what the Government has announced.” Impeccably civil, he tells her he could not pass on a co-payment in his depressed rural community and would have to shift to the city. I am moved by his pitch, given how he has revolutionised services in the region, reopening the local hospital, even reviving talk of a young cricket team. Later, when I mention how terrible it would be for the town to lose him, she shrugs off his threat, pointing out he gets free accommodation and makes a good living. She listens, but she’s not captive to everything she hears.

On difficult debates she ignores “the out­liers” because “I don’t like intolerance” and she’ll listen to the moderates for and against. “That’s how I make decisions. I draw how I approach a lot of issues from aviation when it comes to the management of ideas,” she says. “One of my favourite sayings is that if you muck up the approach, you muck up the landing.”

Her closest shave as a pilot was a night in Queensland when she couldn’t turn on the landing lights. The cockpit holds lessons for Cabinet when it comes to post-mortems. “Crew resource management came in after a pilot crashed and the crew felt they couldn’t speak up,” she says. “I’m interested in what everyone thinks: advisers, departmental staff, constituents… I take everything into account. I accept people have a view and I take it on board.”

Stone reckons Ley is the conservatives’ best hope in the dispute over Medicare. “So long as she’s given enough leeway without intervention from above, because the trust she’s building can go out the door if she wakes up to a text message or a phone call making an announcement.”

During the flight back to Albury the little Cessna lurches through pockets of turbulence. Traffic is heavier in the skies around the airport but Ley pulls off another graceful landing. On the ground Tony Abbott hurtled towards a near-death experience but his newest minister steers clear of hot air and static. The Government should follow her example.