The Fights of My Life

mind.

1

THE END

Alone, I opened the heavy soundproof door to the empty Cabinet Room. I wanted one last look around.

I felt reconciled to the changes I was confronting. My time as a Cabinet minister would end within hours, my time as a member of parliament was almost over, and the Labor Government, of which I was a member, faced certain electoral defeat.

Like many of my ministerial colleagues, I had spent so many hours, so many long days and long nights, in that windowless room. My preparations for Cabinet meetings often started on Sundays with as many as ten submissions, some of about eighty to a hundred pages each. On Monday nights, dinner was provided in an area outside the Cabinet Room before we started the meeting at 6.45 p.m. There would be no advisors present. Cabinet ministers were rightly expected to have done the work beforehand. We needed to be able to make our arguments and defend our positions on our own.

This room is where I had thrashed out the contentious carbon pricing policy that had so dominated recent politics. It is where the decisions that shape our nation are debated and decided. It is a room that is home to power in our Australian democracy. It truly is an inner sanctum: a still, silent chamber in the heart of Parliament House, situated on the land axis that Walter Burley Griffin had plotted on the bush landscape when he planned the nation’s capital.

I have always liked the Cabinet Room ceiling the most. In the middle it is laminated with a beautiful, intricate timber mosaic depicting the Australian bush. Gazing up during some idle moments in a meeting, I liked to spot the cicadas among the eucalypt leaves.

The first time I visited this room was in 1988, as a young union official with the Waterside Workers’ Federation. It was a meeting with Prime Minister Bob Hawke to discuss waterfront restructuring, when Parliament House was new, freshly commissioned. Bob showed us the little buttons under the lip of the huge, oval-shaped table, located directly below a small, square, white timber inlay on the table surface. In those days, if you pressed a button an attendant would emerge through a door with a cappuccino in hand. Bob thought it was a hoot, and so did we. We all pressed the nearest button. Pretty soon Tas Bull, John Coombs and the rest of the hard, tough wharfie union officials were sipping cappuccinos while we debated waterfront work practices with the Prime Minister.

Two decades after that first visit, I was privileged to serve as a Cabinet minister in a Labor government that introduced reforms to make Australia a better and fairer nation. The Cabinet Room was where the Gillard Government’s school reforms were debated—billions of dollars in extra education funding with a strong focus on the needs of disadvantaged students and schools. As we discussed the criteria for matching school funding to the needs of individual students, I remember thinking about kids going to the schools I had attended as a child, and how this would give them better chances in life.That was immensely important to me. Even though the Gillard Government’s school funding changes were not contentious in the Cabinet, these were some of the most emotional discussions we had inside that room. Each and every one of us was proud to be in a Cabinet putting in place a set of education reforms that would help overcome the entrenched disadvantage and inequality generated by a market economy. It was hallmark Labor reform.

In that room, we made decisions on healthcare reforms, dramatically boosting surgical and community health services, improving the availability of important pharmaceutical drugs to people who until then couldn’t afford them, making decisions to extend dental treatment to teenage kids whose families could not afford to go to the dentist. We engaged in long discussions about strengthening economic growth, boosting productivity in our economy, investing in infrastructure, in transport and communications systems, and in better skills and training for the workforce, all aimed at generating the wealth and opportunity that was needed to create a fairer society.

I was particularly proud of the decision of the Gillard Government to establish the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. This is a matter of pure justice. It will ensure that victims of appalling abuse have a chance to tell their stories. It will expose how institutions failed those children, not only at the time of the abuse but in the decades afterwards, as the victims had to cope with the legacy of pain. It will help bring perpetrators of abuse and those who have protected them to justice.

These were all reforms fundamental to Labor’s values. It had been a privilege to serve as a Cabinet minister, to contribute to great and enduring changes to make our country better, but Labor had destroyed itself in government.

Cabinet is the highest level of executive power and authority in Australia’s system of government. As prime minister, Julia Gillard had been a very effective Cabinet leader.Yet now all the power had drained away from her. It was 26 June 2013 and in a couple of hours another chapter in the Kevin Rudd – Julia Gillard struggle would be written. Kevin Rudd was set to return as prime minister exactly three years after having been deposed.

In a series of discussions over the previous fortnight, Julia Gillard had asked me to stand for the leadership. She was prepared to stand down as Labor leader and prime minister and swing her support behind me against Rudd, believing this would give the Labor Party a better chance in the election that loomed. I had anticipated this proposal for a long time, felt it growing as a ball of tension inside me for possibly more than a year. It presented me with a gutwrenching, difficult decision that would determine my future, one way or the other.

I love the Labor Party. In my world, the Labor leadership is a pinnacle of achievement, an immense honour. Ordinarily I would grasp an opportunity like the one Gillard was offering, fight to make it a reality, and use it to pursue progressive change, a fairer and more decent society. The imperative for a decision came over the weekend, ahead of the last sitting week of parliament before the 2013 election.

Because I had thought about this so much for so long, it was not as difficult to reach a conclusion as I had anticipated. Personally, after thirty years full-time as an activist in the labour movement, I thought it was time for a different phase in my life to begin. I was dog-tired after so many years fighting for the cause, and a couple of debilitating health problems had been focusing my mind on leaving politics for many months. I had prioritised my work over my family and personal life, to my detriment and to the detriment of those close to me, for far too long. I needed to attend to my own wellbeing.

At a political level I also thought it was too late to institute a manoeuvre like this, to spring a new leadership candidate on the caucus and the community. The momentum for Rudd’s return was too strong. And I was fed up with the disloyalty and the disunity within the Labor caucus, the sheer, ruthless bastardry. I’d had a gutful of the caucus members who thought it legitimate to denigrate their colleagues to journalists, to undermine their own political party and leader in the media, all from the safety of anonymity.

For both personal and political reasons I decided against Julia’s proposal. And, having decided against it, I resolved that it was time for me to leave parliament altogether. I still had passion for the great cause of the labour movement, for the good fight, the fight for fairness and justice. But I understood from my experience that unless I was in the best of health, possessed of the most positive and determined mindset, and with strong personal support, I couldn’t responsibly stay in parliament and play a senior role in the necessary rebuilding of the Labor Party.

Every day I attended parliament I was conscious of the immense privilege it was for someone like me, who started out in Rooty Hill in western Sydney, to serve as a senior member of a Labor government, translating Labor values into action. I was always conscious of it. So now that it was ending, I wanted to spend one last time in the Cabinet Room on my own just to look, to remember. I wanted to reflect on the honour I had experienced there. Every opportunity I’ve had, I’ve owed to the unions and Labor. I felt it very strongly. The gravity was compounded by my decision to knock back the chance to stand as leader.

I had waited until no-one else was around, and then went in. There was a feeling that afternoon throughout all of Parliament House that everything was about to shift. I had informed my staff of my intentions. It was a quiet but emotional meeting with them. As a consequence of my decision they were about to lose their jobs, and I was pretty torn up about this. I also felt a profound sadness for the Labor Party, which at times in its history has been its own worst enemy. There were lots of whispered conversations. There was an air of gloom.

I lingered in the Cabinet Room for ten minutes or so, my mind drifting over events, feeling proud of what had been achieved. As I closed the Cabinet Room door and headed off to the leadership ballot, I reflected upon the long and difficult, but immensely rewarding, years behind me.

2

THE BEGINNING

In 1966 a small primary school on the semi-rural western fringes of Sydney was celebrating its centenary. I was eight years old, anxious and nervous. Chosen to speak on behalf of the children of Eastern Creek Public School, my task was to deliver an address welcoming a distinguished visitor, the Honourable Robert Askin, and reflecting on the school’s history and achievements. This was my first brush with public speaking—and my first encounter with a significant political figure. It was not an easy experience. Shy by temperament and isolated by family circumstance, speaking to an audience that included the premier of New South Wales was a task seemingly designed to cause me intense discomfort and distress. Those sensations were something of a shortcoming for someone heading for a life of political activism.

Over the decades since Eastern Creek, I have delivered hundreds of speeches: addressing mass meetings of striking workers, presenting submissions to industrial tribunals, spelling out the bottom line in negotiations with employers, speaking in parliamentary debates and international forums, delivering rallying cries for the faithful, denouncing political opponents, and advocating for those without power in our society. Yet for a long time public speaking remained a frightening experience for me. It was an obligation to be endured, rather than a talent that came readily.

It was my father who coached me to deliver that first speech as an exercise in bringing out his withdrawn son. He was also very shy, and had forced himself to speak publicly at local Rotary meetings, drawing on the books of the American self-improvement writer Dale Carnegie, because he wanted to play an active role in his community. I was proud of this about my father and I wanted to be like him. He drilled me to learn the discipline needed to overcome shyness and to stand up to achieve things. It was hard work. We rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed. In the end, I delivered the short speech perfectly—so perfectly it’s a wonder I can’t still recite it today—yet I was utterly terrified with every word.

My life as a political activist, a trade union leader and a Labor politician has been a vocation but it was not preordained. I did not set out on this path from the outset. Time and again I needed to find the courage to take on the fight, and the story of my formative years is one of a number of painful transitions. My father played a critical role in my development—first by his presence and then by his absence. My fundamental values come from my family, my mother and father and their parents.

Five years after that primary school speech, my father died. We knew this terrible event was approaching, and that had generated anxiety and insecurity in the lead-up to it. When his death came, it precipitated significant change in our lives. We were thrust from a semi-isolated existence into a wider world. Without this event, my life would likely have unfolded in a different direction, probably into winemaking.

Following the shock of Dad’s death, further shifts were to come, the result of internal changes of heart and external changes in direction. Navigating these early transitions was how I found my way. I learned about the fear of financial insecurity, the fundamental value of work and opportunity, and about social class and the nature of power in modern Australian society. Justice and fairness became my passion, which gave me an appetite for social and economic reform, and a commitment to the role of unions and the Labor Party in protecting the vulnerable in society. It is why I committed to a life of political activism, to the great cause of the labour movement, because I believe wholeheartedly that the best thing about Australia is our capacity to look after each other, to stand up for basic decency.

Minchinbury

It has been written that the past is another country, where things are done differently. My childhood is not so much another country as a small island, a time and place separate and self-contained, yet also part of the larger whole. While it has receded over the years, it remains ever-present, an emotional touchstone.

I grew up on Minchinbury Estate, a 300-acre winery owned by the Penfolds Wine company, where my father worked as a winemaker. This was not only a workplace and a home; for a boy it was also an entire realm: a collection of paddocks, gardens, creeks, vines, livestock, sheds, cellars hewn out of the rock, and all the agricultural and industrial paraphernalia of winemaking.

We were part of the wider community of Rooty Hill on Sydney’s western fringes. Back then it was a district of working-class housing plots, small farmers, market gardens and migrant settlers from postwar Europe, a poor and ethnically diverse area. At the time, the Housing Commission was planning and developing new public housing at nearby Mount Druitt. As I grew up in the 1960s, there was an awareness of the great social and political changes taking place in Australia. Yet while it was not completely isolated, for me Minchinbury was a place apart, a site for my own adventures where I could roam alone or work as my father’s helper in the winery.

Penfolds bought the estate in 1912, and Minchinbury Champagne, made according to the French méthode champenoise, became one of the company’s bestselling brands. Penfolds continued making champagne along with other table wines at Minchinbury until 1978, when it closed the winery.¹ Some of the historic buildings and cellars were heritage listed but they were destroyed by fire in 1987.These days the estate is long gone, subdivided for housing, and Minchinbury is now a City of Blacktown suburb, south of Rooty Hill between the Great Western Highway and the M4 Western Motorway. The suburb has streets named after my family—Combet Place, Tod Place and Ivan Street, to name a few.

When I was growing up, you turned off the Western Highway and entered the property through an archway. Near this entrance was an aircraft ploughing nose first into the ground with the reassuring sign, ‘Don’t Crash, Drink Penfolds’—a marketing gimmick referring to the (possibly apocryphal) story that Rooty Hill had been the site of Australia’s first plane crash. You reached the winery at the end of a long road lined with olive trees that had been planted by Leo Buring.

The cellars and older parts of the winery had been carved out of stone, and there was a large factory-style building for wine production. It had ancient stairways and passages, ladders ascending to lofts, dimly lit underground cellars with musty nooks and crannies and rows of shaking tables, spiders imported from France that ate insects attacking the champagne corks, and numerous oak casks, large and small, with scents of vintages past. Outside, the winery was surrounded by tall palms, which were many decades old, hedges, and walls covered with ficus climbers.

My family had an association with the wine industry and Minchinbury that spanned generations. My great-grandfather Alexandre Ivan Combet was a French immigrant. He had learned about wine and champagne making near Lyon while training as a seminarian with the Marist Brothers. Seeking life as a missionary in the South Pacific, he sailed to Sydney, ending up at St Joseph’s College at Hunters Hill, which in those days had a vineyard. His letters home reveal a struggle between the lure of ordinary married life and devotion to his calling. Ultimately he fell in love with a nun, Marie-Antoinette, who had also travelled from Lyon.They left their orders, moved to the Hunter Valley and married in 1902.

Alex Combet planted vineyards and worked in winemaking in the Hunter before the family moved to Minchinbury around 1919. He became head winemaker in 1941 and, in the French tradition, passed on the skills to his son, my grandfather Leon Ivan Combet, who took over as manager and head winemaker in the late 1940s. In his retirement my great-grandfather returned to the Hunter region and started a wine bar near Cardiff, where I was to eventually establish my parliamentary electorate office.

When I was born in 1958, my father, Ivan Louis Combet, known as Tod, was also a winemaker at Minchinbury. We—my father, mother, older sister Jennifer and I—lived in a cottage just inside the arched entrance on the Great Western Highway. My mother, Aida Nardi, was the daughter of a cattle farmer from Nimbin in far northeastern New South Wales. She had come to Sydney at the age of seventeen and worked as a secretary in a bank before marrying my father and settling at Minchinbury. Her father was the descendant of Italian immigrants who had come to Australia in the late nineteenth century, and their passage was a remarkable story.

They were among a group of poor peasant people from northern Italy who bought tickets in a settlement expedition to what was supposed to be a thriving new colony in the South Pacific. They were all promised new lives in a southern paradise, pre-purchasing land as part of the deal. Instead they found themselves victims of an elaborate scam, a shipload of people abandoned on an island inhabited by cannibals off the coast of Papua New Guinea, their life savings gone. More than a hundred people in their number died from disease and starvation. Eventually the NSW colonial government sent a rescue vessel, bringing the survivors to Sydney in 1881. They were settled on the NSW north coast near Woodburn, south of Lismore, in an area on the Pacific Highway now known as New Italy.² They were economic refugees looking for a better life, but they were exploited and mistreated and then rescued by an Australian government. My mother’s family eventually settled around Lismore. Mount Nardi near Nimbin bears their name.

I spent the first thirteen years of my life growing up on Minchinbury, roaming the property and wandering through the estate. An abiding memory is the smell of the winery, the yeast, the fermentation of grapes.This was a constant, lovely smell as I grew up. Whenever I visit a winery now and encounter it, I feel as though I am home. It’s the same when I drink sparkling red wine. Sparkling burgundy was a speciality of my father’s and I developed an early taste, surreptitiously sneaking mouthfuls when I could.

Fifty or sixty people must have worked at the winery but my sister and I were the only children about the place. My grandfather agisted cattle in the paddocks, and they needed to be mustered and dehorned. Our family also had a dairy cow, chooks and fruit trees. We sold some of our eggs to the Ah Canns, a Chinese family of market gardeners on the other side of the Western Highway.

When I was about ten, my father almost shot me dead with a double-barrelled 12-gauge shotgun. One evening around dusk, we’d gone out on the estate to hunt Indian mynas and starlings, which had a habit of eating the grapes. I had a .22 rifle and Dad had the shotgun. I was looking out for birds about three metres in front of him when I heard the deafening blast of the shotgun right behind me. The pellets passed so close to my head that I could feel the breeze in my hair. The water tower in front of me was peppered with them. When I turned around my father was white with shock. He’d accidentally touched the trigger while raising the gun to aim at a bird. A few centimetres lower and he would have blown my head off.

Neither of us spoke. It was one of those moments in life you remember with crystal clarity. For my father it was an echo of a terrible family tragedy when, decades earlier, his own father had accidentally shot his brother Louis dead while they were climbing through a fence on a farm in the Hunter Valley.

While shooting birds that could harm the crops was essential, Dad developed an interest in keeping birds. It started when I was about seven or eight years old. We built large aviaries and bred pigeons, which I sold to a bird distributor in Parramatta. Then we moved on to peacocks, parrots, canaries and finches. I have retained the interest in finches throughout my life. I love them, especially the native Australian Gouldian finch, which displays vivid yellow, red, black, green and purple plumage. It is endangered, and I am proud to serve as the patron of the Save the Gouldian Fund. My interest in breeding finches has been regarded as quirky in my adult years, but it has been a way of maintaining a connection to childhood and my father. Now that life as a parliamentarian is over, I intend to breed Gouldians again.

Starting at Eastern Creek Public School was terrifying. I had not previously encountered other children of my own age and was very shy. Nonetheless, I pretty quickly made a best friend, Greg Withers. We were vastly different personalities and totally opposite builds. Greg was an outgoing and gregarious kid, short and stocky with sandy hair, full of audacity and ideas and forever looking to compete. I was and remain tall, skinny, dark-haired and reserved. Yet despite appearing an odd couple, we forged a close friendship that has lasted a lifetime. We both did well academically, vying to outdo one another.

My friendship with Greg had actually been organised by my father. It was part of his efforts to bring me out of myself, but it also reflected his ethos of helping people in the community. Greg’s family situation was terrible. His mother had died and his father was susceptible to alcohol. His 83-year-old grandmother had moved to Rooty Hill to look after Greg and his father. She and my father cooked up a scheme to get us together, organising for Greg to visit Minchinbury, and we became firm friends. In this way Dad helped a family in difficulty while also helping me with my shyness.

From 1970, Greg and I went on to Rooty Hill High School, which was a pretty tough place. There were kids from socially disadvantaged circumstances in Mount Druitt and from the ethnically diverse families in the surrounding area. It was a postwar melting pot, where kids from numerous ethnicities were socialised as Australians. Aboriginal kids were treated very badly, victimised and beaten up, seen as the bottom of the heap. There were a lot of fights and a smattering of ‘sharpies’ targeting kids like Greg Withers and me for our longish hair.Their regular advice to us was, ‘Get your hair cut, cunt, or we’ll punch your face in.’

Even after starting at school I spent large amounts of time alone, heading out into the paddocks every day after school until dinner. Weekends were also spent out all day, wandering the property, exploring, checking out creeks and dams, poking around in sheds, climbing trees and kicking a footy. Eventually Mum and Dad bought me a dog, Snudge, for company, and a transistor radio. I listened to 2SM for the Top 40, but carefully preserved the transistor battery for my principal obsession: Frank Hyde’s rugby league broadcasts every Saturday and Sunday afternoon at three o’clock. St George were well into their eleven-year premiership winning streak, so unsurprisingly I became a dedicated fan even though my family and I could not get to a game. We would watch television, but only the ABC News because Dad controlled what we watched very tightly. He was suspicious of its influence. On Tuesday nights, though, Dad would go out to a Rotary meeting and Mum would let us watch The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Dad moved to the position of assistant manager at Minchinbury and then to head winemaker and manager on his father’s retirement. In this position he had significant responsibilities, and he worried constantly about the progress of each vintage. He remained socially aware, strongly believing he had a duty to be part of the community. Accordingly, he was always active in Rotary at nearby St Marys, and my mother in the women’s service voluntary organisation Inner Wheel. A lot of time in our household was spent organising fairs and fundraising for community work.

Socially my father may have been a member of the managerial class but economically our circumstances were modest. We were not poor, but we were not particularly well off either. We lived in a company home and my parents did not have significant capacity to save.The material side of family life in the 1960s was characterised by a great deal of thrift. For most Australians it was an era that predated modern consumerism. We didn’t have that much to do with the retail world and it was unheard of to go out for dinner. Sometimes we would go into Sydney for a picnic at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair, but visits to the city were rare until my father became ill and we had to travel regularly to Sydney Hospital.

Reflecting on those years highlights how much has changed in Australia over the last half-century and the importance of economic growth for the welfare of ordinary people. In 2010, Australia’s annual economic output was worth nearly $62,000 for every man, woman and child in the country, making this one of the richest countries in the world. Back in 1960, Australia’s economic output per head of population was just under $23,000 (still in 2010 dollars).³ In two generations our standard of living has nearly trebled. Despite this, the trend in the distribution of income in Australia has performed a U-turn over those two generations. The Labor MP and former economics professor Andrew Leigh has shown how the fairness of Australian society, as measured by a range of indicators of wealth and incomes, improved from Federation until the 1970s but then the pattern reversed, with the gap between those on low pay and those at the top of the labour market widening steadily since the early 1980s.⁴

Occasionally we got to see what it was like at the top end of society when the Penfold family visited the winery. Jeffrey Penfold Hyland was the bigwig, and he sometimes brought his family to the estate on the weekend for a barbecue.This caused considerable stress for my father, because the place had to be in top shape and we had to hurry around like serfs making it so. Once, I managed to pilfer some of the most wonderful gourmet sausages the Penfold Hylands brought from Double Bay—I’d never tasted anything like them.

If things were modest at Minchinbury, they were positively Spartan at Nimbin, where my maternal grandparents had their farm. I started going up there for school holidays when I was about eight. My parents would put me on the train at Central Station for the fourteen-hour trip to Casino, and my uncle Andrew Nardi would pick me up in his Holden ute to take me to the farm. Going in to Central Station was a real treat. I was allowed to have a meat pie!

Life in Nimbin was frugal and largely self-sufficient. There were no luxuries—no electric hot-water system, no shower. A wood-fuel stove was the only way we got hot water for a wash. Even then, we didn’t get much, because the only water available was what came off the roof and into the rainwater tanks. This was well before the counterculture that gravitated to Nimbin in later decades. My grandfather Angelo Nardi was one of twelve children, descended from the poor Italians who had migrated to Australia in such unusual circumstances. He married Blanche Cullen, a primary school teacher of Scottish heritage. He was smart and worked hard, starting in a trucking business and cutting timber, saving enough to buy a farm.

They milked their own cows, grew their own vegetables, picked bush lemons, slaughtered their own cattle for meat and made soap from the fat—and it wasn’t perfumed! I don’t often remember them shopping for food, but I remember vividly their reticence to spend money. My grandfather did his own blacksmithing, toolmaking, timber cutting and turning, fencing, and cattle mustering, dipping, castration and dehorning. It was bloody hard work but I loved it. We were up at dawn for breakfast, then farm work like mustering the cattle for dipping or branding or sending to the abattoir, and back for lunch by 11.30. We’d listen to The Country Hour at noon on ABC radio, then head back out to cut timber or burn off blady grass.

There was also a large vegetable garden to attend to, and Pa grew bananas and mangoes that needed picking as well. He even had a coffee bush. We’d pick the beans when they were ripe, peel them, ferment them, then dry and roast them. When the mangoes were in season, there were mountains of them. I loved eating them but as my grandparents didn’t want them to be wasted we had to eat them all. It was impossible. After a while I couldn’t eat anymore. Then one year my grandmother ate so many mangoes she suffered a bowel blockage from all the fibre and was rushed to hospital. I still find it hard to throw out food, but I’ve never taken it to my grandmother’s extreme.

When I did get a spare moment, I’d saddle up Smokey, a small, cantankerous horse with a mind of its own, and ride up into the hills, enjoying the spectacular scenery and the views to Blue Knob, and the solitude. I liked spending time by myself and, although I grew up to work in busy social environments, I have retained a solitary bent, drawing sustenance from spending a certain amount of time alone or with just family and close friends.

On a couple of occasions I’d help Pa and my uncle slaughter a bullock. Killing the animals frightened me. It was an awful job. They were huge beasts and they weren’t stupid—they knew something bad was going to happen. Pa and my uncle would stun the bullock, then cut its throat. The heart still had to be beating when they cut its throat so it would bleed out properly. There was a lot of thrashing and bellowing as the throat was cut. They then had to get the hide off the carcass and pull the guts out. They would cut the meat into pieces and put them in the freezers. This had to be done quickly because of the blowies but, even so, the whole thing took hours. As a boy, I felt a responsibility to be there and take part even if I didn’t want to. The gender divide on the farm was absolute. It was a patriarchal world, and slaughtering cattle was a man’s job.

It’s also how I learned to swear. People have often remarked to me about how much I swear, and that’s where it comes from—growing up on farms. My father and the men in my extended family used to swear a lot. Any bullock that resisted mustering was a ‘bloody bastard’, and if I got in the way I was told in no uncertain terms to ‘get the fuck out of there’. My father had a colourful turn of phrase