Penny Wong: Could Australia accept a gay Asian woman as PM? Many people have urged her to consider it over the years, including some of her closest allies and friends.
In this extract from her biography of Penny Wong, Margaret Simons considers the question everyone has been asking her
The question everyone asks when they know you are writing a book about Penny Wong is whether she will ever be Prime Minister, and if not, why not.
The simple answer is that she is in the wrong house – the Senate – when Prime Ministers must sit in the House of Representatives. But couldn’t she change house? The better answer is that she has never aspired to the job. Many people have urged her to consider it over the years, including some of her closest allies and friends. She has been entirely consistent, rejecting the idea in private as in public. Partly this is due to her fear of the impact of prejudice: she judges the nation not ready for a gay Asian woman as Prime Minister. There are two sides to this concern. On the one hand she fears the electoral impact – the percentage of Australians who would change their vote because of her. On the other side, she fears what it would mean for her personally. As she puts it, “Why would I do it to myself and my family?” But it is also a keen assessment of her own talents, limitations and abilities. She has learned to campaign, and to perform for the media and the public, but it will never be her natural or preferred game. It drains her. As Prime Minister, selling the government message and performing in public would be an unavoidable and dominant responsibility. Nevertheless, some wonder whether she will reconsider if the party’s success seems to depend on it, and when her children are older. Comments John Faulkner, phlegmatically, “How long are you going to condemn her to sit in Parliament?” Perhaps because she is different from other politicians, Penny Wong tends to be what one of her staffers described as “a floating signifier” – a symbol with no agreed meaning. She absorbs meaning as well as projecting it. In these populist times, people tend to see her as what they wish her to be, rather than what she is. Thus, she is popular – at least with lefties – without being populist. There is a cult of Penny Wong. There is a
Twitter account devoted to her eyebrows. She is assumed to be more conventionally left wing than she really is, and somehow above or outside the dirty business of politics when one of the central points of this book is that she is decidedly in the room, inside and of politics. One of the first things she published as an adult was the On Dit article in which she argued that professional political representation was the most important service. That remains her vocation.
Yet the cult of Penny Wong has enduring power because it is not built on fiction. Intellectually, Penny Wong is clearly head and shoulders above most of her colleagues. She is one of the most significant political talents of our times – or, as she might put it, “of our generation”. She is both principled and pragmatic. In all of Labor’s troubles since she entered the Australian parliament, Penny Wong has emerged from each stage with her reputation enhanced and her influence increased. Her political judgment has usually been acute.