For the first time, Tanya Plibersek reveals the grim trauma behind her decision to not contest the Labor Party leadership.
the May 2019 federal election, the Labor team entered a collective depression. It took the party at least six months to rally. Yet, straightaway, there was to be another contest. Bill Shorten stood down from the leadership on election night. A new leader had to be chosen under the rules that divide the vote, if there was more than one contender, between Labor parliamentarians and the broad ALP membership.
In the following days Penny Wong, leader in the Senate and a key figure in the left of the party, backed Albanese. Bowen and Chalmers stepped back, and Albanese became leader of the Australian Labor Party unopposed. ‘That’s absolutely what people who like to background against me would say. We’ll never know. It’s history. But I am pretty confident that if I had run, I would have won.’Plibersek told the media and some friends a few more stories about what had happened on that Monday morning. Louis – nine years old – had crawled into his parents’ bed and been surprised to find his mother there. She had hardly been at home during the campaign – or for the previous gruelling six years of deputy leadership.
In my last interview with Plibersek, I asked her again about the claim that she didn’t have the numbers in 2019. “That’s absolutely what people who like to background against me would say. We’ll never know. It’s history. But I am pretty confident that if I had run, I would have won.”The full story of that decision was not Tanya Plibersek’s to tell. It belonged to her daughter, Anna, who was 18 years old at the time of the 2019 election. Her story appears here for the first time.
On the day of her interview with me, she had spent an hour on the phone to a survivor of sexual abuse who was due to appear in court the next day. Anna was able to help. It drains her, but “this is what I do now. This is what I do with what happened to me. I try to use it.” Anna recalls: “I experienced pretty much every kind of abuse you can think of. It was emotional, it was physical. It was even financial, as much as you can be financially abused as a teenager. He tried to stop me talking to my friends. I lost so many friends.” She tried to appease him. She made excuses. She loved him.“I was so manipulated. I wasn’t myself. I lost myself.” She doesn’t want to go into further details. The court process was traumatic.
It was during this time that Anna saw her father cry for the first time in her life. Her mother, she says – with just a hint of an eye-roll – “Cries all the time. Happy, sad, she cries. Mum crying doesn’t mean anything special, but Dad doesn’t cry.” But at this time, having his daughter hurt, being unable to fully support her, Michael Coutts-Trotter, jailbird, senior public servant, living evidence of the capacity for human redemption, broke down and wept.Anna had finished telling me her story.
The day in 2019 that Plibersek announced she would not be a candidate for the Labor leadership, she took Anna out to lunch. “We celebrated, Mum and me. I remember how nice it was. Just going out for lunch in the middle of the day.”
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