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Plibersek was elected to Federal Parliament on October 3, 1998, along with 15 other women including Julia Gillard, Nicola Roxon, Anna Burke, Cheryl Kernot (as a Labor MP) and, on the Liberal side, Julie Bishop. Fourteen years later, despite the encroachment of the Greens into inner-city politics and a rising Liberal vote due to wealthy people settling in places like Balmain, Sydney is still safe for Plibersek. In the 2010 federal election, she won 67.07 per cent of the vote after preferences were distributed. She is so popular in Sydney that, according to a colleague, people who are not party members work for her on election day. "The seat is absolutely safe as long as she's the member," says a federal colleague. Since 2007, Plibersek has held the non-cabinet portfolios of Housing, Status of Women, Social Inclusion and Human Services. In December last year, she was elevated to cabinet. She asked for the $51.1 billion Health portfolio, she says, because "if we get it right we can literally improve the lives of millions of people". As a junior minister, she pulled off two impressive feats - the $1.1-billion National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness, and the $44.5- million National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and Their Children. The homelessness approach is "more sophisticated and more ambitious than you would see around the world", says Tony Nicholson, executive director of the not-for-profit organisation Brotherhood of St Laurence, which works with disadvantaged people. "There was a lot of emphasis on housing people permanently, not just transitioning them through temporary housing," Plibersek explains. "It went hand in hand with investment we did in 21,000 affordable housing units, because you can't fix homelessness if you don't fix affordable housing." Karen Willis, director of the NSW Rape Crisis Centre, which under the National Plan to Reduce Violence received funding of $12.4 million to take over the national crisis telephone counselling line previously managed by Lifeline, says they were "devastated" when Plibersek left the portfolio. "Tanya was marvellous," says Willis. "She had a good understanding not just of the horrors of violence, but of the causes and the impacts; she understands trauma and the need to have highly qualified counsellors." In her first few months in health, Plibersek presided over an expansion of the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program and included boys in the Gardasil immunisation program, and it was she who got Labor's long-standing policy of means-testing the private health fund rebate through Parliament. The problem with the immense, complicated and fast-growing health system is that its structural components tend to reduce the capacity for creative change. And the rapidly approaching tsunami of ageing baby boomers will put pressure on the universal health system. "Tanya knows this," says a colleague, who says she is totally committed to maintaining universality. Will Plibersek have scope in Health for really big reform? The consensus among bureaucrats I spoke to was: no. "There's no money and no time," says one. So it was quite stunning when, at a hurriedly convened press conference at the Sydney Dental Hospital on August 29, Plibersek announced that two days earlier, cabinet had approved a $4.1-billion meanstested dental care program for children and low-income adults. "We'll have a generation of
kids for whom going to the dentist will be as easy as going to the doctor," Plibersek announced. The scheme won't start until 2014, its funds have yet to be found and it was odd that the Prime Minister was not there for a social-reform announcement of this magnitude (Gillard was in the Cook Islands for the Pacific Islands Forum), yet it was undoubtedly a major coup for the Health Minister. To understand Tanya Plibersek, says her husband, you have to understand her relationship to Jane Austen. To say she is a fan is like saying the sky is blue. Elinor Dashwood, the heroine of Sense and Sensibility, is Plibersek's favourite character: "I admire her ability to carry on despite her sadness and loss," she says. Austen provides "insights, advice and cautions for a young lady legislator", she told the Jane Austen Society of Australia in Sydney in 2007. "I thank Jane Austen for the merciful release from melodrama she has provided in Elinor: for demonstrating that strong feelings need not be on constant display." It seems strange, this attachment by this left-wing daughter of Slovenian peasants to the genteel worlds depicted by Austen. But Plibersek is drawn to old-fashioned notions of kindness and gratitude and, she tells me, "a strong sense of responsibility"; the idea of "service" is what drives her. This is the person who left a welcome note on the desk of Queensland Labor Senator Claire Moore on her first day in Canberra in 2002, the person who visits a homeless man who now has a place to live thanks to her reforms. Austen would recognise this person, for whom feelings of sadness and loss are never far away. The quality people most talk about when describing Plibersek is her calmness. "She doesn't panic when things go wrong," says Lynelle Briggs, the former CEO of Medicare. Plibersek's composure is one reason for her huge popularity on the ABC's Q&A program. She, along with Malcolm Turnbull and Christopher Pyne, is the show's most invited guest. "People appreciate that she keeps her cool even when the debate gets heated," says Peter McEvoy, the program's executive producer. "Her responses aren't glib or pre-packaged - when she answers a difficult question you can see she's wrestling with the difficulties." On a Q&A program in October last year, she told fellow panellist and former ALP heavyweight Graham Richardson, with characteristic calmness, "I hope when I retire I never make a buck trashing the Labor Party." Yet her serenity on camera belies what she describes as an utterly "nerve-racking" experience. On Monday nights, "I hear the music and I feel sick and nervous in the same way as when I am on," she tells me. She continues to do it, not because it's enjoyable - it isn't - but "it is a great opportunity to talk about what we are doing". Plibersek is regarded as one of the government's best communicators, able to convey complex issues in easily understood language. "She has great presentational skills," says Deputy Prime Minister and Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan. He also praises her "great grace and temperament". There is never a raised voice or even a frown. Rather, says fellow minister Kate Ellis, Plibersek is the one to lighten the mood with a joke if a colleague is downcast, perhaps because of a bad poll or other political setback. But Plibersek also provokes extreme reactions in people. Some use words like "adore" and "love" to describe their feelings for her. Her childhood mentor Hazel Wilson, now 85, says,
Page 1 and 2: Cool, calm, elected Sydney Morning
Page 3 and 4: The Plibersek family in Parramatta
Page 5: Like his future wife, he also escap
Page 9 and 10: leading bureaucrats before being he

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