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depth of my parents' sorrow better. It's made me more tender and gentle with them, even
when they drive me crazy."
Seat of power … Tanya Plibersek during Question Time at Parliament House in February. Photo: Fairfaxsyndication.com
Her brother's murder occurred just a few weeks before the ALP preselectors in the safe
federal electorate of Sydney were due to choose their candidate to replace sitting member
Peter Baldwin. Baldwin, who'd been a minister in the Keating government, had thrown NSW
Labor into a tailspin a few months earlier by announcing he would not re-contest the seat.
Tanya Plibersek had been a front-runner to replace him but now she was immobilised with
grief. "I didn't think about anything," she tells me. "I didn't think about dropping out, I didn't
think about continuing, I didn't think about anything."
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She lost "stacks of weight", says a friend. But there was a deadline: a candidates' forum just
three weeks after Phillip's death. She went. "People were very kind to me and I didn't see a
point in not doing it," Plibersek tells me with tears in her eyes. "It was just a matter of
whether I could, and I found that I could - so I did." People at that meeting remember her
saying that her brother would have wanted her to continue.
"Had it all, Sydney did," recalls a Labor Party official who was in the thick of it. The lack of
notice, the absence of a succession plan, the strict continuity rules of party membership
governing eligibility to vote all combined to ensure this rare rank-and-file preselection
contest was wide open. "There was no time to branch stack," says one of the numbers men.
In the end there were nine candidates, eight women and a man in a wheelchair who, in the
words of one of the operatives, "made merry of the fact that the ALP had affirmative action
for women but not for disabled people".