Exclusive: Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk – “I desperately wanted children”
In her most personal interview ever, the Queensland Premier talks to Michelle Endacott about a deep personal tragedy, fighting off sexism and how she’s making history.
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is still strapped tight into a lifejacket as she clambers down from a defence force helicopter and into the midst of almost inconceivable devastation.
The aftermath of Cyclone Debbie lays strewn around her, destruction on a massive scale. In late March, the storm ripped through the state and Annastacia has flown in to find locals still in a rescue centre, unsure if their homes are intact or if animals left behind are safe.
“The huge tailwinds of the cyclone were behind us and, as we flew in, all we could see was this sea of water engulfing Proserpine,” she recalls.
Her activity and obvious concern during the cyclone and its after-effects gave this embattled politician a much needed boost in opinion polls, but now the Queensland Premier is facing a different threat – a state election which will see her in the fight of her political life.
In recent months, her government has been savaged by critics who accuse her of preferring to review rather than do – but she is quick to hit back with a long list of new teachers, doctors and policies.
Today, Annastacia, 47, is determined to make this a poll to remember. Personal interviews are few and far between for political leaders. Most prefer to talk policies. Yet the Premier has invited The Weekly into her home to share a revealing story of tragedy, sexism, bullying and a political baptism of fire. Hers is a state forged on mining, farming and battling big disasters, so it’s heartening it’s onto its second female Premier – and from the notoriously blokey Labor Party to boot.
In an historic first, her Cabinet has more female ministers than male.
Add in a public war of words with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull – the Premier called him “arrogant and disrespectful” in a stoush over the treatment of Queensland – it’s going to be one hell of a run to the election.
Annastacia has been in Parliament for 10 years and Premier for two. Yet her biggest ordeal – even harder than feuding with a Prime Minister – came just before she assumed office.
In 2006, she was 36, a senior media adviser in the Queensland government and ready for motherhood. She was 11 weeks pregnant when she began to feel ill.
“We were up to thinking about names and booking the hospital … I was devastated,” she says.
“I had a total miscarriage, so didn’t need more surgery. I don’t think it really hits you until years later.”
Month after month passed with no sign of morning sickness, so Annastacia began IVF, feeling confident that, after two surgeries for severe endometriosis, it would work. After all, she had blitzed school and university, been married to her second husband, political staffer Simon Every, for three years (an earlier marriage to journalist George Megalogenis in her 20s ended after two years). The IVF was simply to be the next hurdle.
“It was all very rushed – all the appointments and needles,” she recalls. “Every time you go, you think it is going to happen this time and there is the hope and the expectation.
“I don’t think I did tell anyone – with the morning appointments you can hide it from people. Honestly, maybe half of me thought I’d fall pregnant naturally if the IVF didn’t work. If I didn’t have my nephew and nieces now, I don’t think I would have got through it.
“I can’t believe I actually did any of my jobs because it [IVF] was completely draining.”
Annastacia tried IVF “probably about seven or eight times – I can’t remember now. When I suddenly came to the realisation that it was never going to happen,
I actually felt depressed.”
We always hear success stories, but rarely the figure that for women aged 35 to 40, there’s less than a one in four chance of a baby after each IVF cycle.
Each failure broke Annastacia’s heart just that little bit more. And today, an impossible question – if she had to choose between being Premier or having a baby, which would it be?
“I love my job … but I would have done anything to have a family, anything,” she says.
Infertility is tough on any marriage and she says it is one of the reasons her marriage to Simon ended in 2009.
Australia has had seven female premiers. In a telling statistic, perhaps linked to the 18-hour days needed to rise to the top or maybe a coincidence,
three have no children.
Creating a family
Annastacia’s home is in the south-western suburbs of Brisbane and across the road from a pretty bush reserve, with glimpses of the Brisbane River. Today, it is bustling with her supportive extended family, including her three sisters (though one prefers to stay out of the limelight so isn’t in our photos), four nieces, one nephew, two dogs and her loving, newish partner Shaun Drabsch.
Her sisters all live less than 10 minutes’ drive away and she dotes on their kids – their photos cover her fridge and a canvas print of them adorns the hallway.
Nephew Harry, seven, has tumbled in still in a rugby uniform and niece Evelyn, four, tells us her aunt is the “boss of Queensland”.
Sister Julia, 36, says, “At school, we had to write about an influential female, and I chose ’ Staysha. I wrote her career ambition was to be Prime Minister, but we ended up with a Premier. It was bound to happen.”
Annastacia met Shaun, 55, when they worked in government together two decades ago and they’ve been friends ever since – but that turned into something more in 2014 when both found themselves single.
Shaun reveals, “We started going out together for dinner, catching up and talking about things. We both worked in politics, so we’d talk about policy and that sort of stuff. It was a nice courtship, actually.”
In a refreshing twist, Shaun says he’s taking on the biggest load at home. “I’m doing my work, consulting, in a way which allows me to be at home to look after the dogs and be there for Annastacia when she needs me,” he says. “The most important job is Annastacia’s job and that is how I manage it.” Shaun is a director at the high-profile consulting firm PWC and the dogs are Chloe, who Annastacia says she brought home soon after losing the baby, and groodle puppy Winton – named after the Queensland Outback town – who the couple made part of their lives just five months ago.
Fleeing war
Perhaps Annastacia’s strength isn’t surprising as she comes from resilient stock. During World War II, her Polish grandfather was interned in a German labour camp and her grandmother forced to work on farms occupied by the Nazis.
Her dad, Henry, was born in that brutal camp, where even innocent toddlers starved. So, eventually, when they all landed in a gum-tree fringed migrant camp in Wacol, Brisbane, they knew they were lucky. Henry was just three, but their little family had survived Hitler.
Henry, now 70, tells The Weekly, “My parents thought they were in heaven. There was food and meat, and warmth – and they were safe.” It was a poor but loving upbringing. “The area we lived in was greatly disadvantaged, so I think I was ‘Labor’ from when I was in primary school,” Henry says.
He was a schoolteacher and had four daughters with his Queensland-born wife, Lorelle, when he stood for election in working-class southwest Brisbane.
Annastacia was in Year 9 at a Catholic school and recalls being oh-so embarrassed as her dad drove around the streets in an old truck, loudspeaker on the back to drum up support, while she handed out how-to-vote cards. Her father was elected, went on to hold ministries in Primary Industry and Fisheries, Natural Resources, Mines and Water, and his seat, Inala, became one of the safest Labor seats in Queensland.
By the time Henry retired in 2006, Annastacia had become a dynamic policy adviser and was finishing her law degree. She was elected with 76 per cent of votes (after preferences) in what is believed to be the first father-daughter transition in Australian political history.
So why did she stand? “My grandparents came to this country with absolutely nothing and all they wanted was a better life for future generations,” she says.
“In the Labor Party, one of our basic values is about opportunity – you can grow up anywhere and achieve in the highest office in the state.”
Annastacia spent nine years as an MP, including three in Opposition
(see box, opposite), before leading the party to a surprise victory in 2015. It was in Opposition that Annastacia says she faced sexism and bullying, including nasty remarks about her physical appearance and a comment that she should change her voice to sound less Australian and “more Margaret Thatcher” – but she won’t name names.
“In Opposition, I faced schoolyard bullying in Parliament. My understanding is that the Premier of the day told the MPs not to talk to any of us [Labor MPs].
“So I’d hop in a lift and say hello to people who wouldn’t even respond – they would put their heads down.
“I am walking around Parliament House trying to do my job and they can’t even say hello as you walk past.
“Well, of course, it makes you feel awful – that you weren’t credible and that you weren’t accepted.”
The then Premier, Campbell Newman, denies her claims. “She wasn’t bullied by anyone in my team,” he tells The Weekly.
What are documented in Hansard are sexist taunts made in Parliament in 2013. After Treasurer Tim Nicholls said of Annastacia it was his “first time with the Leader of the Opposition and I am excited by it”, Education Minister John-Paul Langbroek jumped in with “it won’t be a one-night stand”.
The Minister formally withdrew this statement, but it still hurts to this day. Undaunted, Annastacia went on to win the “unwinnable” election of 2015.
On day one of power, she says she stopped the sale of the state’s power assets, telling The Weekly, “The public do not want their assets sold. They made that clear at the last election.”
In fact, selling off part of the railways probably lost Labor the 2012 election, which was a political bloodbath.
Today, the repetitive war cry from the Opposition is that the Premier is a “do-nothing” bogged down by bureaucracy – they point to 145 reviews, inquiries, taskforces and new offices since she took office.
Annastacia fires back with her own numbers – 4000 new teachers and teacher aides, more than 1000 doctors and $20,000 for companies creating new jobs for young people in the regions, where the mining downturn has forced many out of work.
And in Parliament in May, she formally apologised to Queenslanders who had been convicted under past gay sex offences. “It should have been done a long time ago,” she says.
“I had people come up to me and say, ‘We left the state because we were being hounded because of our sexuality. Now we have come back.’”
Just days before The Weekly goes to press, the Premier announces plans to build a $46.7 million counterterrorism facility in Wacol, just a few kilometres from the migrant camp where her dad and grandparents found “paradise” after the war. Could there be more concrete proof that Australia is the land of opportunity – from penniless to power in just 67 years and a stone’s throw.
In Opposition, I faced schoolyard bullying in Parliament.