Speaking for Myself Again Four Years of Labour and Beyond

By Cheryl Kernot

Cheryl's struggle to be heard and taken seriously for her intellectual contribution mirrors the struggles of many women. She gives her perspective on why the Labor experiment didn't work. She challenges the shallow media interpretations of how 'good' and 'successful' politicians should behave and how politics should be conducted. this is the story of a woman, who was also a politician. As one leading Australian politician once told her, 'Don't be scripted by mugs, love!'. She's ready to admit that she was and the rest is history. In her own words, 'I want my knowledge of recent history to rank alongside the mythologies for women to understand. they are wondering what happened.'
Cheryl's struggle to be heard and taken seriously for her intellectual contribution mirrors the struggles of many women. She gives her perspective on why the Labor experiment didn't work. She challenges the shallow media interpretations of how 'good' and 'successful' politicians should behave and how politics should be conducted. this is the story of a woman, who was also a politician. As one leading Australian politician once told her, 'Don't be scripted by mugs, love!'. She's ready to admit that she was and the rest is history. In her own words, 'I want my knowledge of recent history to rank alongside the mythologies for women to understand. they are wondering what happened.'

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
• Release date: Sep 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780730493563

Cheryl Kernot

Cheryl Kernot (BA DipEd) entered politics in 1979. She became Senator (Australian Democrats) for Queensland in 1990 and was leader of the Australian Democrats from 1993 until 1997 when she resigned from parliament to contest a marginal seat for the Labor Party. She was elected as the Member for Dickson (1998). She served as Shadow Minister for Regional Development, Infrastructure Transport and Regional Services and Shadow Minister for Employment. Ms Kernot was defeated at the November 2001 elections. She lives in Queensland.

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CHAPTER 1

The Decision

Someone sent me a black condom in the emotional days following my resignation from the Democrats and the Senate to join the Labor Party in October 1997. The message accompanying it was: ‘For use when the Labor Party fucks you over!’ At one level I was offended by this; it wasn’t just that nearly all of the other two thousand-plus messages were positive, it was because it was graphically confronting. It made me move outside the enveloping comfort of the initial euphoria and optimism surrounding my decision and deal with the possibility of a hostile culture.

I refused to believe it would happen.

Yes, I was taking a risk. But surely I was bringing to Labor stores of goodwill, the hopes and support of so many people, women in particular, and my political skills, which had been on public show for four years as Leader of the Democrats. I firmly believed Labor was getting a reasonable asset in the agreement, and that because of that I would be welcome. I was reassured on this point by those involved in the details of the decision. And beyond that I thought I could look after myself, speak up for myself.

The thought of moving to the Labor Party had been subtly taking shape in my head for a while. Labor senators and ministers—Bob Collins, Bob McMullan and Peter Cook, amongst others—would often chat with me on the way out of Question Time as the exit to the ministerial wing took them past my seat. I recall their saying that I asked the most consistently challenging questions, more so than the official Opposition, and that they were sure Labor would always welcome me on their team. And I specifically recall Bob Collins saying that he and Bob McMullan had spent much of Question Time one day discussing the 2 per cent poll increase the Democrats had recorded in that week’s Morgan poll. Both acknowledged the significant influences behind such a shift. To the general public a 2 per cent change in polls does not seem much at all, but to practising politicians it means a lot of people have found a reason to move their vote. We are always keen to know why.

The Democrats had celebrated their twentieth anniversary as a political party at their National Conference in Canberra in January 1997. A keynote speaker, the Canadian professor Ken Carty, who had been present in Australia to observe and analyse every federal election for the past twenty years, used his speech to extol the success of the Democrats as a minority party. But he also confidently predicted that they would remain an upper house party for the foreseeable future. I felt conscious disappointment when he said that, because it conflicted with the desire of many Democrats, me included, to run serious campaigns for lower house seats. Successfully improving legislation by amendment was satisfying, but the real agenda-setting for the country happened in the House of Representatives. And I found it increasingly frustrating to have the Democrats’ role constantly reduced by the press to simply: ‘Will you be blocking this?’ The spoiler’s role. The potential conflict role. Such lazy straitjacketing of a party with good ideas to contribute to public debate.

When the Democrats were working on Labor government legislation the starting points were usually quite similar. So it was relatively easy to amend legislation, to genuinely improve it, and in so doing to increase representation for those community groups without a serious voice in the two traditional parties: environmental groups, gay and lesbian groups, consumer groups, the disabled, amongst many. For the first couple of years when I was Leader of the Democrats and in constant negotiation with the Labor government and Labor ministers, I didn’t find myself questioning my role or the role of the Democrats because the outcome, although a compromise, was generally acceptable.

As a result of working with him in detailed negotiations on superannuation, the 1993 Budget and other pieces of economic legislation, I developed a professional respect for and friendship with the Treasurer, John Dawkins. He paid me a great compliment in coming to my office, before the official announcement, to tell me of his decision to leave politics. This was at a time in his career when most men would find it difficult to walk away: he was exercising immense economic power as Treasurer of the nation. But John and his wife, Maggie, had a new baby daughter, Alice, and he wanted to be around them more. So many male journalists asked me what I thought the real reason was for his resignation, because this reason, this willingness to let go of power, defied their entrenched thinking about how politicians should behave. They were suspicious. And they were wrong. I would be glad of John Dawkins’ friendship when I was in his party much later on.

Kim Beazley was not involved in any of the early discussions with me. These tentative soundings were taken by both Gareth Evans and John Faulkner.

I had a lot of contact with Gareth in his role as Leader of the Government in the Senate. Negotiations with minority parties were his responsibility in the first instance. And he often held working dinners to keep lines of communication open and, no doubt, to strategically assess the relative ease of passage of proposed key pieces of legislation.

I hadn’t previously known Gareth particularly well, but working closely together on the Mabo legislation and its successful outcomes had forged a strong friendship between us and mutual intellectual respect. At a dinner at Canberra’s The Lobby restaurant, he suggested to me that I would really enjoy seeing things I felt passionate about translated into an agenda for action by virtue of the power of being a minister. He said that based on my performance in the Senate he thought I would make a first-class minister. He made much of his experience of the difference in outcome and personal satisfaction between developing and implementing policy and legislation, as opposed to amending them. Gareth had a reputation for laying on the charm, but I knew this wasn’t an attempt at flattery; it was a serious proposal for me to consider.

At around the same time I used to walk at night for exercise around the perimeter of Parliament House with a number of walking partners from both Labor and the Liberal Party. Minister for the Environment John Faulkner was one of my favourites. One night on a particularly long walk down past old Parliament House we were discussing mutual difficulties and frustration; for me, keeping the Democrats united; for him, his frustration within Labor on some key environment debates. John expressed the view that the Democrats were not a centre party; that most were Labor leaning, but that one or two at that time were naturally Liberal leaning. We discussed the tensions resulting from this.

Eventually, cautiously and because I trusted his discretion, I told him of Gareth’s suggestion to me. I wanted to test it against John’s overt sense of practical reality. After consideration and discussion with me he said that on balance it would be a good thing for Labor. He ventured that I might like to be a minister for the environment but having observed the emotional brawling of forest debates I couldn’t say I was keen to take that on. He talked about positive aspects of ministerial power on other walks over quite a period of time. And soon after, Gareth raised with John his previous discussion with me.

Although these initial conversations took place quite some time before the 1996 election, my immediate response was that I felt I had a moral obligation to lead the Democrats into that next campaign as there were new Senate candidates in Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria whose campaigns I was expected to substantially assist and the Greens were mounting yet another challenge to become the larger ‘balance of power’ party. I did not believe I should leave the Democrats in those circumstances. And I believed in what I was doing. I still believed in third party politics.

I stayed on and led the Democrats to success in the 1996 campaign and I felt a personal satisfaction in doing so. The party had devised an intelligent and positive campaign and secured an increased primary vote of 10.8 per cent, (up from 5.31 per cent), new senators in Western Australia and Victoria and double the votes cast for the Greens. I felt then, as I still do, that the Democrats are decent, almost unfailingly earnest people with a role to play in Australia’s political process. It was the election of the conservative Howard government and my experiences with their agenda and subsequent negotiations on that agenda that made me question whether that role was still the right one for me.

Much later, in February 1998, when I gave the Heffron Lecture at the Randwick Labor Club in Sydney, Gough Whitlam gave me a copy of a speech he had made in March 1994 at Old Parliament House where he had said:

ON SATURDAY FORTNIGHT the Liberals will gain a prima donna [Bishop], next Saturday Labor will gain a star [Lawrence]. We all admit there should be more women in all public posts. What is to happen to Cheryl Kernot? As a Democrat she cannot be a member of the House of Representatives, she cannot make policies, she cannot take decisions, all she can do is advise and warn.

Well, not exactly all I did, Gough! But the sentiments captured some of the flavour of my thinking at a purely theoretical level.

At the practical level when the 1996 election was looming, the Democrats’ campaign preparations began to focus on a GST response. Clearly the GST was shaping up as the issue that would strongly influence the outcome of the election. Strategist Stephen Swift had already formed the view that the language used in any Democrat response would have to give the impression that the Democrats were at least keeping the door open on further discussions with a Coalition government, if elected. This strategy was in direct response to the tendency of the media to take more notice of the Democrats in a potential power-broking role.

Many senators and some party officials expressed discomfort with this strategy, not the least because it had the potential to go against balloted party policy which supported a change in the tax mix, but not a consumption tax per se.

Weighed against that was the reality that the Democrats were always reliant on media attention. Thus the strategy came together in my accepting an invitation from Jeff Kennett to discuss the very notion of keeping the door open.

I felt comfortable with saying the Democrats were keeping the door open on tax reform generally but that they were yet to be convinced that a GST was the predetermined answer to all tax reform questions. Despite the helpful efforts of community-based agencies like Australian Council of Social Services (ACOSS) I don’t believe Australia has ever had that debate. When the media and business agree on an agenda it’s hard for other voices to get equal space.

Of course John Howard won the 1996 election and when Parliament resumed on 30 April it took some getting used to players in the two major teams now sitting on different sides of the Chamber after thirteen years. I looked on from the same vantage point in ‘Democrat Corner’.

As the Howard government’s interpretation of its self-proclaimed ‘mandate’ emerged more clearly I began to feel uncomfortable with the prospect of starting negotiations on practically anything. I was vehemently opposed to the sale of any part of Telstra (and so were 70 per cent of those who voted for the Senate). I felt that funding for environmental protection and planning should be considered a core budget responsibility, not something afforded only by the sale of a valuable public asset.

I was an Australian first and foremost and thought that the constant arguments about states’ rights were nonsense. In my view people have rights, not states. To the extent that states were a constitutional reality and unlikely to abolish themselves, I believed there was a primary role for the Commonwealth to set national standards and frameworks and for these to be implemented by the states in meaningful partnerships with local government. The quality of health services and environmental protection should be experienced as uniformly as possible by all Australians and not be held hostage to the predispositions and competing political agendas of state premiers and state governments. You should be able to experience clean air, unpolluted water and protected national parklands wherever in Australia you live.

I was supportive of the important role of unions and collective bargaining in our political system as a balance against the excessive power and questionable practices of some employers; I felt strongly about the role of government in providing decent service levels in education, health, communications and housing—in which 70 per cent of Australians were not able to exercise the economic choice that allowed others to use private systems. I was not ideologically obsessed about the private sector always being more efficient than the public sector, or vice versa. As far as I was concerned there was room for both and for partnerships between both.

There was plenty of evidence of the efficiency of some publicly owned, corporatised entities. Efficiency can often be achieved by a simple change of management rather than the sale of successful publicly owned assets. Ask Australians in 2002 as they endure long queue times for simple telephone inquiries, press an ever increasing number of digits which reroute them and talk to pre-programmed mechanical voices whether they think customer service is a high priority of most privatised and even corporatised agencies. What’s more, as we all know, ‘efficiency’ became code for job shedding.

The Howard government’s first Budget had all of these conflicting values writ large. There was to be a 1 per cent Medicare levy surcharge for those earning over $50 000 who did not take out private health cover; the environment would only be funded by the partial sale of Telstra; public dental health services would no longer be funded; operational subsidies for community-based long day care centres would be removed; almost all previous employment programs designed and funded by Labor governments would be abolished irrespective of their success, and the private sector would take over the role of the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES).

There was lots more in the fine print, but the fundamental shift towards advantaging the private over the public sector, the ‘rational’ unsympathetic view of mass job shedding, the devolution of core functions to state governments, the acceleration of a privatisation agenda … it was all there. And I didn’t like it. I genuinely feared it would change Australia for the worse; not economically in the first instance, but in our underpinning philosophical values.

And then, added to all of this, there was the matter of the complexity of the Senate’s numbers and balance of power. Governments, of course, like to win majority votes and have their bills become law. To win a vote in the Senate required 39 votes as there were 76 Senators. The Coalition had 37 senators, so required two more votes to pass legislation.

That was the smallest margin since way back in 1980 when the Democrats had begun to exercise the balance of power in the Senate. So what had changed in 1996 was that there were now several options for those two votes: two of the seven Democrats, two Greens, two Independents, maybe one Green and one Independent. After the election the government had lots of combinations to play with and pit against each other.

It was a position the government shamefully exploited, especially when, on the first day of sitting after the winter break, Senator Mal Colston dramatically resigned from the Labor Party, but stayed on in the Senate as an Independent. What’s more, he became the Coalition’s nominee for Deputy President of the Senate. In nominating and voting for him for this position the Coalition knowingly broke the Senate convention that the Deputy President (and Chairman of Committees) would come from the Opposition, the President having been elected from the government ranks. I’ll never forget the smirks on the faces of many Coalition senators anticipating the disruption they would cause. Perhaps they hadn’t quite anticipated the absolutely bitter and vitriolic consequences they unleashed. Those consequences would end up ensnaring the reputation of the entire parliament and further fuelling public anger and cynicism.

Following their election campaign success the Democrats were keen to be seen as the responsible balance of power option, but as they were implacably opposed to the sale of Telstra, the government obviously looked elsewhere for its two votes.

What was also new to the mix was the willingness of Senators Harradine and Colston to cross-trade on issues. This meant, for example, that Senator Harradine would vote for a government bill and months down the track the cross-trading deal would emerge. As a socially conservative Tasmanian Independent, he would usually support government measures on social policy if he was promised either a reduction in or the complete cessation of Australian aid funding for family planning centres in developing areas of the world. Another one of his favourite tactics was to vote for government legislation if he had extracted action on censorship of X-rated videos. This became a recurrent feature of life in the Senate throughout 1996 and 1997.

The Democrats did not cross-trade votes, preferring to treat each issue individually on its merits. As the government presumed they would have Senator Colston’s vote on most issues in return for their sponsoring of him as Deputy President, the preferred two-vote option emerged. Senators Harradine and Colston voted for the sale of Telstra in return, they said, for a guarantee of regional jobs for their states. Too bad about the rest of the country! (Subsequent events show that those ‘guarantees’ were diluted to begin with and lasted in reality for a couple of years only.) But the cost was the loss of the first third of Telstra contrary to the wishes of two-thirds of the Australian people as opinion polls consistently attested.

I was surprised that Prime Minister Howard, who made much of his Christian beliefs and tag of honesty, would even contemplate overriding convention to embrace Senator Colston, let alone continue to support him as Deputy President in the face of the investigation into his alleged travel rorts and subsequent criminal charges. And I was naively surprised that his government, even after a convincing win, was prepared to do ‘whatever it took’ to achieve its ends. I had vivid memories of sitting in the Senate for six years and hearing the scorn poured by Liberal speakers upon the Labor Party, when former Labor senator Graham Richardson’s book, Whatever It Takes, was derided as some sort of manifesto for Labor Party behaviour. Such convenient hypocrisy. And from those who filled the front pews at the church service which marked the beginning of each parliamentary year.

There was also, throughout 1996, Peter Reith’s industrial relations ‘reform’ with the Democrats on that legislation. What I learnt from this was that once you open the door to even preliminary discussion the enormous expectation is that you will compromise. And yet to refuse to listen can be very easily misrepresented as obstructionist.

All of these events had long-term influences on me; when I finally decided to leave the Democrats I did not even consider keeping the seat (and the salary) as others had done. I was elected as a Democrat and should be replaced by a Democrat. I would seek fresh election as a member of the Labor Party. Secondly, after about a year of constant argy-bargy and cross-trading from Senators Harradine and Colston I began to lose faith in the legitimacy of the balance of power. Equally I felt increasingly passionately opposed to the values the Howard government was imposing on Australia, especially the championing of individualism. In my view this cut fundamentally across the building of community and undermined the egalitarianism I valued so much as part of our Australianness.

As 1996 became 1997 I felt more and more uncomfortable in my minor party role. I found myself becoming more reluctant to be even-handed in my comments on the government. I felt that was dishonest to myself and to the