Minister presided over changes to Australian welfare system
JOCELYN Newman, at the height of her political career, was described as the most powerful woman in Australia and the Minister for Courage.
She overcame two major cancer operations and the death of her husband Kevin to preside over the federal government’s biggestspending department, Family and Community Services, and major changes to Australia’s welfare system.
The Tasmanian Liberal senator was an ideological mixture. Her conservatism fitted the Howard government’s views on selfreliance and mutual obligation. Critics felt she lacked empathy for the desperate.
Yet she was a founding member of the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL), pioneered women’s shelters and once applied for a job with Gough Whitlam.
And while her steely blue eyes and school mistress manner earned her a reputation for iciness, she liked a joke and the odd melodramatic gesture.
Jocelyn Margaret Newman, who died on Easter Sunday following a long battle with Alzheimer’s, was born in Melbourne on July 8, 1937.
She graduated in law from the University of Melbourne, where she won a Miss University quest.
At the age of 24 she married Kevin Newman, a young army officer whom she met on a blind date at an army dance.
They had two children, Campbell and Kate. In March 2012 she was at Campbell’s side when he led the LNP to a crushing win over Labor to become Queensland’s premier.
For 14 years she was an army wife, learning firsthand of the difficulties of service life for families.
Kevin Newman entered federal politics in 1975 when he won the Bass byelection with a 17% swing, a watershed result that presaged the Liberals’ return to power under Malcolm Fraser. He was a minister throughout the Fraser years.
During her life as army and politician’s wife, she was largely a stayathome mother who still, at various times, worked as a lawyer, farmer and boutique hotelier.
Kevin Newman left politics in 1984 and two years later she became a senator.
Within two years she was in the shadow ministry as defence science and personnel spokeswoman, a position she used to champion better conditions for service men and women.
She also pulled a stunt that embarrassed the Hawke government. She armed a staffer with a distinctive red suitcase and booked him on to a flight to Canberra. Just before the plane left, he cancelled his flight but, in breach of security regulations, the case went to the capital.
Newman steadily accumulated responsibilities, including status of women and veterans’ affairs. In 1993 she went into shadow cabinet as spokesman for family and health. That year she had an operation for uterine cancer.
A year later she found she had breast cancer.
At a dramatic news conference, which she opened by brandishing a bread knife, a gift for a journalist whose coverage she did not like, she announced she would be standing down from the shadow ministry because of the cancer and went on to talk of another disease, the one afflicting her party.
Liberal leaders were in danger of being torn down unless the party developed the habit of loyalty, she said.
Next day she voted in the party room meeting that replaced John Hewson with Alexander Downer and then went into hospital.
She was back inside five months, more quickly than she wanted, when Downer made her an offer she could not refuse — defence.
But when John Howard came to power in 1996, he made her social security minister, a portfolio later morphed into the even wider Family and Community Services.
The massive, sprawling
$55 billionayear Family and Community Services consumed Newman’s attention.
She oversaw the establishment of a corporatised Centrelink, which took over responsibility for paying all federal government pensions, benefits and allowances and affected the lives of more than 6 million Australians, with its myriad teething problems.
In some ways, she was a hardliner in a hardline government — setting up a hotline to ‘‘dob in a dole cheat’’ and trying to change the support system for homeless youth, which she said mainly benefited ‘‘middle class runaways’’.
She argued strongly for the need to end welfare dependency and critics said Centrelink’s rules and penalties were harsh and unfair.
Early in 2001 she stepped down from the ministry, and quit politics the following year.
She had had more health problems in the preceding year. But the biggest blow was her husband’s sudden death in 1999.