The Rise of the Ruddbot by Annabel Crabb

Author:Annabel Crabb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781921825620
Publisher: Schwartz Books Pty. Ltd.
Published: 2010-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

ALSO STARRING …

FREAKISH POWERS OF A FORMIDABLE OPERATOR

Some people are born with an innate ability to sing; some to paint, or dribble a basketball. Such is the randomness of creation’s miracle. But what are the odds that Penelope Ying-Yen Wong, born in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, on 5 November, 1968, would enter this world with a God-given knack for politics?

She was barely eighteen when she seized control of the campus Labor Club at the University of Adelaide; her methodical destruction of the existing power structure there gave an early glimpse of her freakish powers.

Colleagues now describe her as ‘relentless’, and this word sums up her progress through the federal parliamentary Labor Party, of which she has been a member for just five years. She is calm, groomed, and virtually unflappable. She has a sharp intellect. She is a forensic Senate operative in the John Faulkner mould. She is a lesbian. She is a practising Christian.

And now she is one of Kevin Rudd’s most senior cabinet ministers, charged with driving an international consensus on climate change and a domestic consensus on water management. It’s a huge ask, by anyone’s standards.

Penny Wong did not always intend to be a politician, even if it looks that way in retrospect. Her initial plan was to be a doctor, and to work for Médecins Sans Frontières; she won a spot in medical school in 1986, deferred it, and then left for an exchange year in Brazil, where she volunteered at a hospital – and quickly changed her career plans.

‘There was a bit of a problem with blood’, she explains briskly.

This is an important revelation, as it might be the first and last recorded example of squeamishness in Penny Wong.

Arriving at the University of Adelaide in 1987 as a first-year arts student, the politically conscious Wong dabbled with a couple of environmental groups and the left-wing group CISCAC – the Committee in Solidarity with Central America and the Caribbean. (This group was founded and run, incidentally, by fellow arts student and enthusiastic campus Trotskyist David Penberthy, who has since moved to the beating heart of Australian conspicuous consumption – Sydney – where he edits the Daily Telegraph.)

Pragmatic Wong, however, was never going to be a very committed Trotskyist. In 1988 she swivelled her gun turrets towards the Labor Club, which had been colonised two or three years earlier by George Karzis, a cheerful right-wing headkicker who has since worked in senior advisory roles for state and federal Labor politicians.

‘I ran it as a non-factional group’, recalls Karzis from his Adelaide legal office, breaking off to laugh uproariously before adding: ‘That is, there was no other faction than mine.

‘Penny arrived in 1988. By the following March, she had organised the numbers and there was the largest ever Labor Club meeting – the Union Theatre was packed to the rafters. It was an unfortunate display of branch stacking – by both of us. She was trying to take the club over and I was trying to defend it. And she won! I have to concede, I backed the wrong horse.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.