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Family first … (from left) Tanya Plibersek, daughter Anna, husband Michael Coutts-Trotter and sons Louis and Joseph. Photo: Courtesy of Tanya Plibersek The night before the ballot, Whitlam telephoned some voters in a last-ditch effort to help Loukas. "Most of the people he rang did not believe it was him," Plibersek tells me. She is proud of the fact that Margaret Whitlam voted for her. "I split the Whitlam household," she says with evident enjoyment. Plibersek was born in 1969 and grew up in Oyster Bay, which was then a bush suburb filled with fibro cottages and returned-soldier housing. "The roads were unpaved. Kids played in creeks, catching tadpoles and riding their bikes," Plibersek recalls. "Few families had TV sets or cars until much later. Mum washed by hand, with a scrubbing board. The baker and milkman called daily." Her father, Joseph, had built the family's first house himself, returning at weekends from the Snowy Mountains where he, like thousands of other migrant men, was employed on the nation-building hydro-electric scheme. But when Tanya was born, the adored little sister to her older brothers Ray, 12, and Phillip, 10, the family moved to a larger place in the same suburb. Joseph Plibersek spent the rest of his working life as a plumber at Qantas, while his wife, Rose, maintained their home. The family was incredibly close; they spoke Slovenian at home, and the parents could scarcely contain their pride in their clever children. Both of Tanya's parents had been peasant farmers in Slovenia. Her mother, Rosalija Repic, worked as a farm labourer from the age of 13 after being kicked out of home by an abusive stepmother. Tanya is still overwhelmed by her mother's bravery: she escaped to Italy, applied to emigrate and, in her early 20s, with no English, travelled alone to Australia and worked as a domestic and in factories until, one night at a Slovenian dance at Paddington Town Hall in December 1956, she met Joze Plibersek. There is a family photo that shows Joze, aged about 10, barefoot, standing beside a bullock hauling a wooden plough steered by his father. The boy's job was to feed and take the farm animals out into the fields before trudging seven kilometres down the mountain to school.
Like his future wife, he also escaped - to Austria - and after being detained for some months was accepted as an immigrant to distant Australia. On May 9, 1953, along with other displaced persons, he sailed from Bremerhaven in Germany. On arrival he was sent to work as an indentured labourer on the Broken Hill railway. Joze and Rosalija became Joseph and Rose; they married in May 1957 and over the next 12 years had three children; when Joseph died, aged 80, in April, he had lived long enough to see his youngest child sworn in as a cabinet minister. Tanya Plibersek's involvement in politics began when she was 14. Genevieve Kelly, formerly Rankin, a campaigner against the Lucas Heights nuclear plant and a former mayor of Sutherland Shire, remembers Plibersek from when she was still at Jannali Girls High in the mid-1980s, organising her friends to go to the massive Palm Sunday peace rallies. She joined the Labor Party when she was 15, encouraged by Hazel Wilson, a Sutherland Shire councillor and Labor Party stalwart who lived near the Pliberseks and who heard a young Tanya present at an International Youth Year event. "We need you," Wilson told the schoolgirl. Ray Plibersek says no one else in the family joined the party but he remembers his parents voting for Gough Whitlam, and Tanya has memories of them "loving" Whitlam, Al Grassby and Bob Hawke. Tanya remembers sitting on her father's lap watching TV when she was three or four and recognising Gough and Margaret Whitlam stepping off a plane. "Dad, he's a good man, isn't he?" she somewhat precociously said. And the kids talked politics with each other. "Phillip, the scientist, was very pragmatic," says Tanya. "He was in favour of uranium mining and Ray was against. Phillip favoured the third runway and wanted a T-shirt that said, 'I ❤ airport noise.' " Ray discouraged Tanya from her youthful infatuation with Margaret Thatcher. While Tanya thought it was great that a woman was prime minister of Britain, Ray said to her, "Let's look at some of her policies and see what we think of them." Plibersek studied communications at Sydney's University of Technology (UTS), intending to become a journalist, but the ABC knocked her back for a cadetship. She was then elected women's officer at UTS and ran a campaign on women's safety, and when she graduated in 1993, she took a research job in the domestic violence unit of the NSW Ministry for the Status and Advancement of Women. She stayed less than a year, frustrated with the seeming lack of commitment to the issue by John Fahey's NSW Liberal government. She got a job researching and writing speeches with Senator Bruce Childs, convenor of the ALP's Left faction, during the Keating government's second term. Plibersek says she did not see the job "as a stepping stone for myself" into politics, but she did rejoin the party that she'd left in 1986, disgusted by ALP policies on uranium and land rights, signing up at the Kings Cross branch, which was then in the heart of the electorate of Sydney. And so, as the result of "a list of coincidences", as she puts it, Tanya Plibersek was sitting pretty when Peter Baldwin announced his retirement.
Page 1 and 2: Cool, calm, elected Sydney Morning
Page 3: The Plibersek family in Parramatta
Page 7 and 8: kids for whom going to the dentist
Page 9 and 10: leading bureaucrats before being he

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