Why Tanya Plibersek’s new job feels like ‘coming home’

Can I talk to you about maternal guilt for a minute? Can I tell you that the minute your baby slithers out, you feel this torrent of love and responsibility for this tiny squish? You get knocked sideways by all those feelings. Then you do your absolute best to protect and defend.

Minister for Social Services Tanya Plibersek during a group photo after a swearing-in ceremony of the new ministry at Government House. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Doesn’t work out too often. That’s when the guilt kicks in.

And so it is with Tanya Plibersek, mother of three, Labor member for the seat of Sydney for 27 years, and our newest minister for social services – which some commentators have described as a sideways move. Yes, it’s true that Australian politicians, in general, are not that great at pushing family violence to the top of the national agenda. Sure, everyone gets all appalled and outraged when another photogenic white woman gets murdered but, in general, it’s all chat, notes to grieving families and little if no action.

So this move might be sideways for some, maybe. Sure, this is a blessed escape from the toxic environment portfolio. That’s among the toughest portfolios for Labor ministers to navigate – progressive voters, regressive miners – a constant struggle between dollars and minds. A surefire way to burn up any liberal credibility you might have.

I guess that could happen in social services. Voters will be annoyed she doesn’t immediately magic billions out of the air to raise the rate for those on welfare, even though it’s Treasurer Jim Chalmers who holds the hose.

But here’s where I think she will make an enormous contribution for reasons well beyond politics: family and domestic violence.

We don’t really know much about the private motivations of our politicians. How they got there, where they are going. What they really think.

As far as I can tell, there has never been a minister for social services whose child has been a victim of abuse by an intimate partner. Now we have one. Resorting to terrible cliches here: mothers will do anything to protect their children. Anything.

Anna Coutts-Trotter, the eldest child of Plibersek and her husband Michael, a senior NSW public servant, was abused by her former boyfriend. I’m not going to go into appalling details here, but let me just say that the arsehole was convicted of assault.

But at the time of the abuse, Plibersek didn’t even know it was going on. She knew nothing. She became a politician to make feminist change but she didn’t see what was happening with Anna, who was 17 years old and living at home. That’s not unique to her. Mothers want to know everything about the lives of their children. My god, we try.

Anna Coutts-Trotter, the eldest child of Plibersek and her husband, a senior NSW public servant, was abused by her former boyfriend.Credit: Louise Kennerley

Now, Plibersek is desperate to make change.

“It makes me sad I never made a safe enough world for my daughter and her generation,” she says. “It makes me so sad.”

She didn’t. We didn’t. None of us did. The guilt is real.

But that daughter now runs The Survivor Hub, founded in 2021 with three others. Brenda and Anna currently run it together. It’s peer support for those with lived experience of sexual assault. If good can come out of stinking adversity, this is it.

And that’s my prediction. It’s also Plibersek’s prediction. She’s just one day in the job, so, like a typical politician, she can’t promise anything.

“But something like this supercharges your motivation,” she tells me on Tuesday morning.

Turns out Anna has already been on the blower this morning having a chat. (But resisted the urge to give her mother advice. I should send my kids round to her place to provide lessons on how to nag mothers. Freaking experts.)

A few months ago, they went together to a domestic violence conference, held in Plibersek’s seat of Sydney, a wild mother-and-daughter activity. Family violence was not then in the Plibersek portfolio but she went from commitment both to Anna and to the cause. “She gives me the best insights into how generations younger than me feel and behave.”

Everything Plibersek has done in her life points to being able to make this a gigantic shift. She got involved in politics because she was a feminist. Gender equality, land rights (as we used to call it in the olden days) and nuclear disarmament. At university she ran to be women’s officer at UTS, so she could do something about gender-based violence.

She was minister for women when the first national plan to address violence against women and children was mapped out in 2010. It launched the next year when she was minister for human services, followed by social inclusion and health, until the Coalition took over and we ended up with a man who claimed to be minister for women – “claim” being the extent of his actions.

But for Plibersek, the possibility of change is very real: “Getting this portfolio is like coming home.”

Check out her Insta account and you can see she’s spent months gallivanting across the nation to campaign for her beloved ALP. In April, our Mike Foley thought it was 53 seats not out. I live in her electorate and saw her outside one of those markets where every single voter looks Green as. Despite her absence from her own seat, the electorate of Sydney is now the safest in the country, says The Tally Room’s election analyst Ben Raue. She’s knocked David Littleproud’s Maranoa off its perch.

“And she had a 5.1 per cent swing to her. Not too shabby.”

A swing towards any politician is always a comfort for the contender. But I’m more comforted by the news that a woman whose child has experienced sexual assault, who understands what needs to be done and has the capacity to do it, is now in charge of the portfolio where those needs can be met.

Jenna Price is a regular columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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