Penny Wong by Simons Margaret;

Author:Simons, Margaret;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty, Limited

10

PENNY WONG FAILS TO SAVE THE WORLD (PART 2: CLIMATE CHANGE)

One image of Penny Wong has fixed in the minds of journalists who reported on the United Nations Climate Change Conference – the Copenhagen Summit – in December 2009. She was with Kevin Rudd, holding a media conference in the early hours of the morning after all-night negotiations in a windowless room. The process had been, at best, only a partial success, and a devastating disappointment to Rudd, who had hitched many of his hopes for change on this event. Penny was swaying on her feet. She had snatched minutes of sleep on a blow-up mattress in a corner of the conference centre. The journalists thought she might faint. They stopped their questioning long enough to offer her a chair, which she declined.

Penny Wong spent two long years and eight long months as the minister for climate change. The portfolio was about the exercise and limitations of government power, and the shifting dynamics of geopolitics. It was a portfolio that involved the tide of human history and the future of the planet – that focused on the ‘greatest moral challenge of our generation’, according to Kevin Rudd. And all of this was winnowed through the limitations of human capacity.

At its most basic, there was the need to sleep – at least sometimes. There was the need, in the maelstrom, to find time to think. Time to think is a scarce asset in government and under the pressure of the media cycle. Yet thinking time, says Wong, allows you to ‘settle yourself … to determine what is urgent, and what is important. To be creative and think laterally, creatively, about how to get around obstacles.’ Kevin Rudd, she believes, did not give himself enough of it. ‘Woven through those needs, those limitations on the doable, there are the other weaknesses of human beings – their egos, ambitions, capacities for greatness and for panic – the future of the planet tangling on the wreckage of politics as usual.

During Penny Wong’s time as minister, climate change became the most toxic issue in Australian politics. It was crucial in the demise of both Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull as leaders of their parties. It went on to be a key factor in the second rise of Rudd, the defeat of Julia Gillard by Tony Abbott, and the second fall of Malcolm Turnbull – this time as prime minister.

Because climate-change policy was so determining of the political trajectory of the Labor government, just what happened and why during Penny Wong’s time as minister has been reported, chewed over and analysed by many both inside and outside parliament. Climate-change policy features prominently in the memoirs, often self-justifying, of Labor’s Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan and Greg Combet, and the Greens’ Christine Milne. Each gives a very different view of who said what and who was to blame. Penny Wong emerges well from both Gillard’s and Rudd’s accounts, although they are poisonous about each other and agree on little else.

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