The access thus granted to friends and family also made possible the book’s most significant revelation:that after the party’s defeat in 2019,was in part due to the discovery that her daughter Anna,then 18,had suffered through serious and multifaceted mistreatment in a long-term abusive relationship.
Thoughtful self-possession emerges as a Plibersek family trait in Margaret Simons’ biography.Alex Ellinghausen
That sudden walking away has long mystified many and disappointed Plibersek’s legion of fevered supporters,for whom she is the best leader the ALP is yet to have. Anna’s situation was part of the story,but not the whole story. Supporting her daughter was a crucial part of a momentous decision,says Plibersek,but being a present parent for her son Louis,then nine,was also significant.
“I’ve had a front row seat for a long time,” she tells Simons. “I know what it entails to do the job properly ... I love my job but I had to make the decision on what was right for us,what kind of parent I wanted to be.”
Plibersek is clear that she would have been the winner over Anthony Albanese in that vote:“We’ll never know. It’s history. But I am pretty confident that if I had run,I would have won.”
The true triumph of the Plibersek story laid out here is that what might have been in no way diminishes the impressive fact of what was,is,and could be. She emerges as a woman with an unstinting dedication to family and the people around her,and a politician of great skill and serious policy focus. There’s also a counter here to the saw that bemoans the lack of “real-life” experience in the career politician. It’s also a life enriched by the perpetual re-reading of Jane Austen;Elinor Dashwood,she of sense rather than sensibility,is a particular inspiration.
Tanya Plibersek:On Her Own Terms by Margaret Simons and,right,Plibersek in the House of Representatives during her first term as an MP.Belinda Pratten
The Plibersek Simons describes,in rich and broadly sourced detail,may have spent a working life in politics,but it’s a life that reads as a determined and empathetic progress driven by family and progressive conviction,one free of the cynical calculation normally associated with the political professional.
This is an impressive piece of biography. Simons does not go in search of Plibersek,rather she comes to the page in confident possession of a substantial reservoir of fact from which she winnows an essence of her subject. It positively transformed my previously hesitating opinion.
Tanya Plibersek has been led by example,grounded and inspired by the grittily determined and hard-working lives of her immigrant parents. Josef Plibersek arrived,aged 21,from Slovenia in 1953,obliged to work where and how the Australian government determined. Fetching up somewhere between Menindee and Broken Hill,“he was given a tent,a billy,some flour,sugar and a rifle so he could hunt rabbits to sustain himself”.
The sense of remote loneliness is beyond imagining. On his first night he found a large spider in his tent. His daughter remembers the story,“she tears up recounting it”. Spiders were good luck in Slovenia,so Josef carefully picked it up and placed it outside the tent. “He thought the attitude he displayed to the spider would set the pattern for his attitude to his new country,” Plibersek says.
This thoughtful self-possession emerges as a family trait,one tested by the violent death of Tanya’s brother Phillip in 1997 while she is in the thick of a tightly contested pre-selection battle for the safe Labor seat of Sydney. Shattered,she persists and wins.
Simons observes:“There are those in the Australian Labor Party who doubt Plibersek’s toughness,even her commitment. For them,this is an answer.”
Plibersek’s other answer to the doubters comes in the substantial body of her policy work. She has been a driver of transformative change,seeing through long-term reform projects in childcare and shifting the political and cultural approach to violence against women. Both will be enduring testaments to her policy and political capacity,and perhaps give a sense of an imbalance in Australian political life:that changing the substance of the country in the often-hidden work of profound social change counts for less than the braggadocio of leadership contest.
This book makes the case for the primacy of policy in politics and of caring in life. Leadership by any other name.
Tanya Plibersek:On Her Own Terms byMargaret Simons is published byBlack Inc.,$34.99.
Jonathan Green is the author ofThe Year My Politics Broke (MUP). Margaret Simons is a guest at and writers festivals.
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