What drives NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian?
She’s known for being “all work, no play”. But NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian can explain — it all goes back to a birth, and a death.
It’s just after 7.30 on a Friday morning in December and I’m being assailed at a bus stop by the premier of Australia’s most populous state. The female security detail, Maryanne, has followed Gladys Berejiklian up her street to meet me and we’ve made our way to the start of a typical day for the NSW premier — a ride on a government-owned bus into town. But I’m not ready for this. Berejiklian is giving it to me with both barrels as morning commuters pretend to ignore us.
NSW Premier driven by loss of secret twin sister
In the lead-up to this morning, Berejiklian had told her press secretary Ehssan Veiszadeh that she would grant me an interview and a day out with her for this story, but I could forget it if I was going to be “nasty” in the piece. She still seems to be having second thoughts. “I don’t know why you’re wasting your time and mine,” says the state’s 45th premier as we wait at the bus stop on Sydney’s lower north shore. “You haven’t written a positive thing about me in eight years.” She stares at me with big brown eyes and carries on for some time about what I’ve written, how I once called her naive. It is my job as a political reporter to hold politicians to account but I tell her I can’t remember ever calling her naive. It’s hard to think of what else to say at this point so I opt for appeasement. “I couldn’t do what you do,” I offer. “I’m not tough enough to be premier.” Which is kinda true. Who would do that job?
Plenty of premiers have let off steam at me but this outburst seems to be a sign of the pressure on the premier as she faces the biggest test of her life at the March 23 state election. Win or lose, all the responsibility will be placed on her head. And Berejiklian, 48, has not really lost anything before.
She was elected school captain at Peter Board High School in North Ryde. She was elected president of the Young Liberals. She wanted to work for former treasurer and opposition leader Peter Collins and badgered him until she succeeded. She wanted to work as an executive for the Commonwealth Bank and succeeded in winning a job and being promoted. She wanted to win preselection in Willoughby, succeeding Collins. She did. She won her seat in 2003 by 144 votes against a local mayor running as an independent and has vastly increased the margin since.
Sure, the Liberals lost the 2007 election but then Barry O’Farrell won in 2011 and Mike Baird in 2015. The former staffer and bank executive wanted to be a politician and she was; wanted to be transport minister and she was; treasurer and she was, premier and she was — in January 2017, following the resignation of Mike Baird. Then came the Wagga Wagga by-election loss last year after the resignation of Liberal MP Daryl Maguire over corruption allegations. That shook her. Now it’s the ultimate test.
Having had her vent, the premier settles down. She starts checking her app for when the bus is due to arrive. The app isn’t accurate. She isn’t happy. When we board, the automatic Opal card reader doesn’t work. The public transport ticketing project, often trumpeted by Berejiklian as something she could achieve as transport minister that Labor could not, has failed its test today and we all get a free bus ride. The premier quizzes the driver on the faulty machine and tells me later it’s the first time she can remember the Opal reader not working. I tell her they don’t work all the time on buses I catch.
On the bus we stand and talk while around us the other passengers are quiet. The premier calls this “public transport ethicate”. Kind of a great thing about Australia, I think — that the NSW premier is standing on a crowded bus and no one offers her a seat. On the way to her office Berejiklian drops into a cafe on Bligh Street and lines up to order her mocha like everyone else before we traipse into the office. By now she is relaxed and telling me how much she loves Sydney.
There must be some reason, I tell her as we head out for the day in her ministerial car, that she works the way she does. To sacrifice everything — even, it seems, a personal life — to be leader of the state. Berejiklian is a workaholic but she’s tough, too, and I wonder if there’s more to this inner drive than the migrant background she’s previously spoken about and the horrors suffered by her Armenian grandparents. She hints at something else and when I sit down to formally interview her a week later I press her on it.
“I’m very lucky… for me every day in life is a bonus,” Berejiklian says. “I had a twin sister and she didn’t make it. It was just luck that I came out first. Imagine if you had a twin; you came out first, they didn’t make it, I feel like I’ve got to justify my existence by sacrificing. So I don’t care if I’m not happy all the time. I feel like I’ve got to work hard.”
What an extraordinary admission; it almost sounds like survivor guilt. Having said that, it’s hard not to admire her for it. And whatever Berejiklian’s opponents might say about her, no one could question her devotion to the job and her work ethic. Even her opponents can see in this woman the attribute of decency.
Berejiklian says she found out about the twin at a young age when a family acquaintance came over one day and said, “Where’s the other one?” The acquaintance had heard her mother Arsha was having twins. Final proof came at the age of 12 or 13 when Berejiklian applied for a birth certificate to obtain a passport. The birth certificate said “elder of twins”. She says I can tell this story on one condition. It must come from her mother. “If she volunteers it, you can write it.” It’s her mother’s piece of grief; it’s her private story to tell. Arsha Berejiklian says later, without much prompting: “Yes, she was twin sister. I never told her that she was one of the twins. The other one was a stillbirth. Sometimes I feel a bit sad. Maybe she was like Gladys. I never told her she was one of the twins because I don’t look to upset her.” The premier’s sister, Mary, tells me later: “She does always say she feels she has someone shadowing her.”
Part of the Berejiklian family stoicism can no doubt be attributed to the family’s history. As she has previously revealed, all four of her grandparents were orphaned in the Armenian genocide that began in 1915, and 40 relatives lost their lives. Her father, Krikor, was born in Aleppo, Syria, and they still have family there. Her dad didn’t want to raise a family in the Middle East, she says, and moved to Australia in the 1960s. Arsha, also Armenian, was a nurse in Jerusalem but was shaken enough by the Six-Day War to emigrate. They met “on a date in church” in Sydney, she says.
Berejiklian says she has a “deep gratefulness for where I’m born. My parents are both really smart people, neither of them got a chance to finish high school. Life is precious. My motto’s always been: ‘Try to make a difference’.”
It’s a restless Sydney. Former Liberal premier Barry O’Farrell came to power in a Coalition landslide in 2011 promising to fix urban congestion. With the third premier along, not much has changed in that department. Yes, metro rail lines are being built plus a $17 billion freeway called WestConnex — the biggest road infrastructure project in the state’s history — but regrettably for the Liberals, the projects are set to open after the state election. Sure, the economy is great in NSW, the cooling housing market is offering first-home buyers their best opportunity in years, and schools and hospitals are getting built. But people still haven’t seen the real fruit promised by this government — the mega-billion-dollar transport projects paid for by Mike Baird’s privatisation of the state’s electricity network. Partly this is because Barry O’Farrell took so long to get moving after being elected in 2011.
In focus group testing, Berejiklian is seen as “all right”. Not someone who captures the imagination but not someone to vote against either. But the Liberal brand is on the nose — partly due to the federal shenanigans. Berejiklian won’t offer up the federal Liberal situation as any excuse for a poor March election outcome but seems to reaffirm she won’t involve Prime Minister Scott Morrison, whose seat is in southern Sydney, in the state campaign. “We run our own race in NSW and we will be judged on what we have achieved and our plans for the future,” she says. “We have always stood on our own in NSW and that will continue.”
The Liberal brand also suffered in the bush when Baird banned greyhound racing (and later overturned the decision under media and community pressure). The issue suffocated the government in 2016, causing the Coalition two-party-preferred vote to sink from 55 to 50 virtually overnight. And it’s still stuck there, deadlocked with Labor on 50-50, according to the latest Newspoll. Forced local government amalgamations also bit hard. There’s a view that while the Liberals have looked after Sydney, they have not done the same for the bush. The amount spent on regional NSW suggests otherwise.
If only six seats in the 93-seat Legislative Assembly chamber change hands, Berejiklian will lose her majority. There is a widespread view that she would be able to garner supply and confidence from Independents Greg Piper and Alex Greenwich to form minority government. Labor’s job is to get itself to a position where it can potentially form a minority government in a bizarre coalition with the Greens and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, meaning it must win nine seats. Thirteen seats changing hands would give Labor a majority. But people remember the bad old Labor government — two former ministers are in jail. You almost feel that Berejiklian and her people half expect to be re-elected on the premise that old Labor was so bad. (Never mind that a Liberal premier, O’Farrell, fell for misleading ICAC over a $3000 bottle of Grange and several Liberal MPs resigned in 2014 over donations scandals.)
The new Labor leader is Michael Daley, 53, who replaced Luke Foley when he resigned following an allegation that he’d groped a journalist at a party. Some Labor insiders joke that pursuing Foley was one of the best things the Liberals ever did for the Opposition’s election prospects.
Berejiklian talks about the weight on her, her fears about Labor getting elected again. “I just feel enormous responsibility because I guess day-to-day when considering decisions… I think, heaven forbid if Labor was in how would they deal with this, and the alternative to me… is scary.
“I just don’t feel they’ve got a good grasp of how to manage the state’s finances. I don’t feel they’ve got a good grasp of the need to plan long term, which means you might not get an instant sugar hit but it’s the right thing to do for the state. I worry we’ll go back to that horrific period where nothing happened, where the public service got bloated, where people’s taxpayer dollars were wasted on futile efforts.”
Of course Berejiklian faces her own accusations of wasting taxpayer dollars: announcing she would rebuild two Sydney stadiums at a cost of $2 billion (later reduced to $1.5 billion); building a light rail project many believe the city does not need, and which is likely to blow out to as much as $3 billion and be delayed a year.
The biggest internal criticism of Berejiklian, however, is that she has failed in her two years in office to create a narrative — to declare what she stands for. Focus groups show that voters think the government’s priorities are light rail and stadiums, when in fact these are nowhere near the biggest projects the Coalition is undertaking.
So far the slogan pushed out by Berejiklian in advertising is “Let’s get it done NSW” — hardly one of the great campaign slogans. A series of policy backflips upon reaching office have also not helped in establishing a theme. “You tend to criticise me for not throwing to vaudeville…” she responds. “I’ll always keep it real. I’m not a bells-and-whistles type of person and I’m very outcome-focused.”
On the light rail project, the premier gets tetchy again. “I want to ask you about the light rail,” I say.
“Mm hm. You going to ask me about all the other projects as well?”
What about the fact that the Spanish contractor on the project, Acciona, was seeking an extra $1.2 billion from the NSW government for failing to disclose the amount of work required to rip up and replace power lines under George Street in the CBD? “I say to everybody: walk down George Street now and people are saying to me how good it’s looking and people can see literally light at the end of the tunnel.” Not an easy message to sell to the businesses that have had to shut up shop on the route because of the length of time it has taken to complete the troublesome project. The Australian reported nine days ago that the Berejiklian government was preparing to pay Acciona hundreds of millions of dollars to draw a line under the affair.
Berejiklian clutches her mocha and insists we walk up the stairs to her office (she always does this, she says, and she is very disciplined in her eating habits, admitting to having been a chubby kid). I’m to spend half an hour with her in her office. There she asks me my opinion on several issues and each time I give an honest answer, she slaps me down. I mention this later to a minister who says that is what happens to him. I conclude it must be difficult to advise her.
Berejiklian is into hierarchy and structure. She won’t cop a piece of public service advice in her in-tray which is not signed off by someone with the rank of deputy secretary at least. Some staff have complained of a lack of access to her. Others have left the office. Berejiklian is said to sign off on every press release that goes out in her name and insists they be sent to her days in advance so she can edit them.
On the road with Berejiklian, we go to a Smith Family Christmas Appeal event at Liverpool West Public School. “I want to congratulate all of you for working so hard during the year and for trying your best,” the premier tells the children. “Because that’s what all of us hope to do, isn’t it, working hard and doing our best? Now put your hand up if you speak a language other than English. That’s like me. Put your hand up if you learnt English when you came to school. That’s exactly like me. That is amazing. Well done,” she says, acknowledging that growing up, Armenian was the first language in her family home.
Later, in the car, where the premier listens to SmoothFM, I ask her if she’s ever wrong. “Yes, of course,” she says — and then she turns around and adds, “But not often!”
Contrary to her often friendly public face, this premier likes to put people in their place. Once, when she was transport minister, we met for coffee and she told me she did not really want to meet; it was just one of those things she had to do in the job. At least she’s honest. As treasurer and then premier she would frequently take press gallery journalists out for lunch. The journalists would challenge each other to actually “get a yarn” out of her, so cautious was she about revealing any information. To ensure there could never be a whiff of favour, she would eschew the offers of media companies to pay for those (mostly dry) lunches, insisting on paying personally.
Not that there are question marks over her. Just that she’s diligent to the point of driving her colleagues mad. I once wrote a story about a staffer who left her office after having been asked by the premier to draft a letter to a Year 11 student three times. Talk about sweating the small stuff.
Her sister Mary says: “She’s not the flamboyant leader. She’s humble, she’s honest. She’s hard-working. There’s not more of a story to her. That’s her. That’s who she is. I find it very difficult when she’s criticised because she’s a geek. She embraces it, she doesn’t care and I think for me that sort of angle is quite difficult to accept sometimes because we know how dedicated she is. She’s the biggest change-maker NSW has seen in a very long time.”
Berejiklian is also known by her colleagues as something of a conflict avoider, although she hasn’t really avoided any conflict with me. Later, I ask her about her comment that I haven’t written anything nice about her in eight years. “I think that’s a statement of fact,” she laughs.
The motivation for politics came at a young age. Arsha Berejiklian recalls how the principal of the Peter Board High School telephoned her and said, “Your daughter, she’s going to be somebody.” When Gladys was about 16 she was sent by her school to Canberra for a week to attend parliament. Says Mary: “She came back very inspired; that was her turning point. She got into the Young Liberals and it continued from that point onwards.” A former schoolmate, Anna Henderson, recalls: “I do remember a conversation I had with her once. She was going to be the prime minister of Australia and I was always going to be a minister. I said, ‘I’ll be your treasurer’.”
Berejiklian learnt to practise politics at a young age, doing homework for the tough kids as part of a “protection racket” to avoid getting hassled as a “nerd”, she says. “I was in fear quite a lot in high school. It was just the threat of getting bashed up. I used to write to the local members when I was 14 or 15 and I started the protest movement at my school because the government at the time wanted to close my school down. Because I was a goody-goody everyone noticed.”
Arsha says Gladys deserves a medal because “she never missed school, not since kindy” for being sick or any other reason. Afterwards, when I reflect to Ehssan Veiszadeh, the press secretary, “What about how she didn’t take a single day off school?” he shakes his head and says, “I’m not surprised.”
Gladys looked after her sisters Mary and Rita while their mother worked night shifts as a nurse; Krikor was a welder who worked on the Sydney Opera House. Mary, Rita and Gladys shared a bedroom while renovations were being done to the family’s Ryde home. “She was a placid, harmonising kind of sister and Rita and I were the younger ratbag sisters,” recalls Mary. “I remember we got chickenpox and we wanted her to hang out with us. We jumped on her and rubbed ourselves on her. She didn’t get chickenpox. This girl is an enigma. For us, we got to stay home but that would have been a nightmare for her. She loved school.”
Berejiklian went to public school — a fact that she doesn’t play up — and was also school captain, which led to the unflattering title from a former staffer that she was the “head girl of NSW”.
Does she feel any community tut-tutting that, like former NSW premier Bob Carr and former PM Julia Gillard, she doesn’t have a family? If you haven’t had children, the argument goes, how can you understand the everyday concerns of middle Australian voters, the juggle with childcare, finances and education? Labor leader Michael Daley, by contrast, has children and stepchildren.
“I think firstly I do have a family and, secondly, I don’t think people mind,” Berejiklian says. “People don’t really notice. They might, but in my experience people appreciate what you bring to the job and I always get a comment about my work ethic, which I’m proud of.”
People say you’re married to the job, I reply. “Well, probably. It’s probably not a term I would use but I’m not going to pretend that… at the moment in this role my job is like 24-7 so I don’t really do much else, but I don’t mind.”
She told me in an interview in 2010: “I think if I do get married, if I do have kids, that’d be great, for me. I don’t find the need to have a handbag, put it that way.” And she really hasn’t.
Former schoolmate Anna Henderson keeps using one word to describe Berejiklian — “conscientious”. And a former ministerial colleague once joked to me that her need to keep with order and structure meant that even if there was a fire Berejiklian would still stick to all her scheduled meetings before dealing with it. Berejiklian’s answer, her colleagues say, to defeat or setbacks is to “work harder”. That is, visit more towns, more seats, stay in the office later. After the Wagga Wagga by-election — an absolute shellacking — Berejiklian said publicly she needed to “work harder”. But how could she possibly work any harder?
One minister says: “She’s got a real inner toughness and that will help her a lot in the campaign.” But over the past few months more than one minister has privately sniped that she’s “not a leader” and cast her as a “hardworking technocrat”. Her predecessor, Mike Baird, says: “I think in politics it’s very rare to have someone with the… best motivations. This is about the people of NSW and nothing else [for her]. She has the capacity to do the hard work and the proven track record.”
If Berejiklian wins this election, she will be the first woman premier to win an election in NSW (Kristina Keneally lost for Labor in 2011). But she does not call for a Labor-type quota system to get more Liberal women into parliament. She says of the debate over whether the party preselects enough women: “This is an equal challenge for all parties. The best contribution I can make to the debate is to be a strong premier in Australia’s largest state. Actions speak louder than words.”
Lately, Berejiklian has come under fire for not allowing pill-testing at music festivals following a spate of drug-related deaths. For someone who never dabbled in marijuana as a young person (even the good Christian Baird has ’fessed up to that), Berejiklian’s stance is perhaps not surprising. The word is that she’ll stick to her guns because she doesn’t believe young people should experiment with drugs, full stop — a position that has copped criticism from the chattering classes, academia and even physicians. But her strategists believe that in middle-class land, where the marginal seats are, her strict no-drugs position plays better.
When I put to her that a lot of leaders probably take something “medicinal” to cope with the demands of the job, she says she won’t even take Panadol. You like to tough it out? “Yeah I do. I do like to tough it out. I shouldn’t admit that, but that’s probably a bad thing… I like to get to the root cause — deal with the reason rather than cover it up. I don’t like to sugarcoat stuff, I’m extremely practical and extremely outcome-focused.”
Outcome-focused. Again, it’s the language of a technocrat. But whatever electoral pain she might be in for, it seems the premier is ready to cop it. Is she reconciled to the possibility of a loss?
“I don’t think about it. I can’t think about it.”
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