Q: Can you spot our
new Premier? A: That’s him front and
centre, just like today.
EVERYONE remembers the hair. A big, ginger cloud curling madly
around Nathan Rees’ freckled face, it made the 17-year-old stand out from the
crowd at Northmead High in 1985.
Classmate Manny Chetcuti, who now lives in California, recalls watching Rees’ orange
mane bounce over the hurdles at athletics carnivals, where he invariably came
first. Rod Bradbury, who still lives in western Sydney, recalls it whipping in the wind as
Rees raced up the wing on the hockey field. In the class photo, the hairdo is
like a beacon: front row, centre. Three spots away sits his girlfriend, Stacey
Haines.
There was a sense of entitlement about the young Rees — but he
was also widely regarded as a decent fella — so much so, that when Rees
decided to nominate for the position of school captain at the beginning of their final year, nobody stood against him.
“He was elected unopposed,” remembers Bradbury. “Everyone liked
him, I guess.”
Twenty years later, Rees — now with his hair cropped conservatively,
the orange hue slightly faded — came around for a cuppa at Ray Jackson’s Waterloo home one Sunday
evening in 2005. Jackson
thought it might be his lucky day. The Aboriginal elder had been lobbying for a
reopened inquest into the death of Aboriginal boy TJ Hickey, and was used to
getting the brush-off from the office of NSW aboriginal affairs minister Milton
Orkopoulos, so he was amazed when Rees — who was Orkopoulos’ chief of staff —
and Warwick Neilley from the Premier’s office dropped around for a chat.
When the men arrived, it was clear they didn’t want to talk about
TJ Hickey. “Nathan’s reply to that was it was time to move on,” Jackson says. “He dismissed it out of hand. Then we got into this crass
discussion about the Aboriginal Housing Company.”
The Housing Company is a long-time annoyance for the government —
it runs the troubled Redfern community known as The Block, which is slated for
redevelopment — and Housing Company boss Mick Mundine differs with the
government’s plans for the site.
According to Jackson,
Rees and Neilley had come up with a nifty solution to the problem — a coup.
“What it boiled down to was would I be interested, obviously with
the government’s under-the-covers support, in challenging Mick Mundine and
taking over the company,” Jackson says, adding he promptly kicked the men out.
“I was incensed,” Jackson
says.
Rees says he doesn’t recall any suggested coup and says he always
tried to respect opinion leaders and elders. Working on the area makes him feel
“morally compelled” to try to address such problems as literacy and health,
he says. “It’s an area that for too many years governments haven’t got right.
I think governments have tried a lot of things often with the right intention
but none of them have worked to anything like the degree I would have liked. So
it’s a clear priority.”
When Rees was elected to the NSW Parliament in 2007, he had one
clear priority: ask Stacey Haines to marry him. She had remained his
girlfriend, bar the odd wobble, since schooldays and Rees had been waiting for
the right moment. There was a brief window of opportunity before then premier
Morris Iemma named his Cabinet the following week — Rees knew he had a good
chance of being made a minister, and didn’t want anyone to think he was
proposing either because he’d had a rush of blood to the head, or because he
thought it was a good look to be married. Especially not Stacey.
“I didn’t want my proposal to be misinterpreted by anyone, least
of all her, so it didn’t occur in a period when anyone could say: `That’s just
him being a politician’,” Rees says. He’s always been careful to say he and
Haines have “had our up and downs”, and admits they split up at one point,
but when asked to describe his fiancee, he gets all emotional.
“Oh, I’ll cry if you make me go through all that,” he says, then
promptly chokes up. “I’m not kiddin’, I’m crying. She’s the most generous and
decent and loving person I’ve met in my life.”
Everyone who talks about Rees mentions four qualities: determination,
decency, intelligence, and mongrel. “He doesn’t suffer fools” is a common
theme — which, as always when that phrase is used, means he has a tendency to
be rude.
“You Greens just belong in the caves,” he once told Greens
leader Ian Cohen in a parliamentary lift, after Cohen suggested Rees (then
Water Minister) drop plans for a desalination plant.
Even Rees’ friends call him stroppy. “He’s no shrinking violet,
let’s put it that way,” one says. “He was the staffer you went to when you
needed heads knocking together,” another says. In the aboriginal affairs and
health portfolios, which he handled while working for a string of ministers,
stakeholders describe him variously as blunt, impatient and “completely bloody
rude”.
Of the dozens of friends, associates and colleagues interviewed
for this story, all said he was personable in private life — but could be
seriously prickly in a work environment.
Parramatta Lord Mayor Paul Barber, who has known Rees for a
decade, has had some bruising encounters with him over heritage and other
issues. “A few times he’s given me — I won’t call it a gobful, but — a
strong indication of how he felt,” Barber says, “but I respected that.”
“And that’s why he’ll be an effective premier. He won’t take any rubbish
from his team. They’ll perform or they’ll just be replaced.”
Among senior Labor figures — and across the factions — there is
admiration for Rees’ guts in taking on the premiership at such a depressing
moment.
Former Whitlam government minister and Labor left stalwart Tom
Uren, who has been close friends with Rees’ mother Frances for years, was
touched in August when Nathan Rees came to the 150th anniversary party of Parramatta Park, where Uren is chairman of the park
trust. It had recently become clear Rees was willing to take the premiership if
Morris Iemma stood aside. “I told him I thought it was a courageous decision,
and I hope he gets a fair go from the NSW party,” says Uren, 87. “I’m not
saying this to be boastful, but I told him I was proud of him. I chose the word
`courageous’ carefully — if I didn’t have so much faith in Labor, and in
Nathan’s ability, I would have said `foolish’.”
Rees has heard the same comment from dozens of people in his first
fortnight — but he’s pleased the adjective is `brave’, not `stupid’. “They’re not saying: `You guys can’t do it’,” Rees says.
So does he feel courageous? “You never know how you’ll react to
these situations until you’re thrust into them,” he says. “I guess my
instinctive reaction has just been to get on with the job. There’s no time for
self-indulgence.”
Some Australian politicians slowly round their vowels in public
life, ending up sounding like BBC announcers, but Rees — like deputy Prime
Minister Julia Gillard — has preserved a no-frills accent. “We’re going to
get cracking,” he keeps saying, “we’ll have a red-hot go.”
But that doesn’t mean he pretends to be stupid, or plays down his
education or taste for the liberal arts.
Even when the most prosaic parts of politics are under discussion,
Rees can find a literary allusion. At the press conference on Matt Brown’s
sacking, Rees was quoting The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, one of the authors on
whom his honours thesis focused. “I don’t want anybody saying: `I saw Goody
Proctor dancing with the devil’,” Rees said — he wanted any suspicions of
misconduct raised with him directly. “It’s a different show now and we will
hold our parliamentarians accountable,” he said. “Politics isn’t what it was
20 or 30 years ago and there is an old guard that doesn’t realise the rules
have changed.”
An old friend of Rees, Catholic priest and arts funding activist Father Arthur
Bridge, always laughs
when Rees is portrayed as westie-made-good.
“He might give the image of the simple garbo but he’s far from
it. He’s a very articulate, interesting man with a good degree of
sophistication,” says Bridge, who went on the hustings with Rees in the 2007
campaign.
Born in 1968 to Labor activists Frances and Darryl Rees, Rees was
a bright kid who did well at school, but “wasn’t real studious” until about
the last eight weeks of Year 12, when he suddenly realised things could be ugly
if he didn’t work hard. His mother, a solid left-wing supporter who worked for
ministers including Tom Uren, has described him as a handful, but Rees says he
“didn’t have a lot of detentions, I left all that behind in Year 8 or
thereabouts. I don’t think I’m the only 14- or 15-year-old that was hard work
for mum and dad”.
He won the role of Noah Claypole in a school production of Oliver,
and was startled to see his character described in the program as
“Undertaker’s Pimply Apprentice.” Until then, Rees hadn’t thought of himself
as pimply. “It was a shock to the system, as you can understand.” After a
massive effort at the end of Year 12, involving up to eight hours’ study a
night, he got a “reasonable HSC, but once I’d done it, the notion of doing it
again filled me with horror”.
That meant university was out for a while, so he began a
horticulture apprenticeship with Parramatta Council, then became a greenkeeper
before beginning an Arts degree at Sydney University with the aim of becoming a
teacher, working nights as a garbologist. In 1992, a car accident ended his
dreams of Olympic cycling. “It was about seven on a Sunday morning in February
and a driver saw me coming, did a u-turn and just wiped me out, broke my
shoulder.” Was he angry? “You get pretty fatalistic about these things.”
Cycling continued as a hobby, and is part of the reason Rees has
never got a driver’s licence. During his apprenticeship he lived only a few
minutes’ walk from work and, while living in the Blue
Mountains during his degree, he was close to the train station.
But once the chances of serious competitive cycling faded, Rees’
focus became work in the department of Veterans’ Affairs. He’d decided he
couldn’t afford another year at university doing a teaching diploma and instead
became a base-grade clerk at the DVA, a job he’d been inspired to take by
listening to the stories of his grandfather Arthur Mervyn, a World War II
veteran who had ended up in an iron lung after serving in Papua New Guinea, and
the numerous Korean War and Vietnam vets with whom he worked at Parramatta
council.
“That was where I realised the effect that war has on people’s
lives,” he says. “It was my first white-collar job, and a massive eye-opener
for me. I was very, very lucky that a couple of senior people in the
organisation must have identified something, and went out of their way to take
a few risks to support me.”
A passion for government work was born and, in 1997, he joined the
family business — taking a job as a Labor adviser in the office of then health
minister Andrew Refshauge, where Frances had also worked. Over the
next decade, he moved on to jobs with successive health ministers Craig Knowles
and Morris Iemma, then as a premier’s adviser to Bob Carr and Iemma again. All
those ex-ministers speak highly today of Rees’ handling of tricky issues such
as Carr’s 1999 drug summit and the subsequent trial of a safe injecting room at
Kings Cross. Former deputy premier John Watkins describes him as having
“enormous moral courage. He stands up for what he believes in”.
Balancing the opposing views on drug control, “all completely
valid”, was a particularly keen experience for Rees, who had undergone his own
personal epiphany on the merit of “harm minimisation” several years earlier.
“Someone close to me admitted to me that they had a serious drug problem. I
had previously expressed very conservative views on how society should deal
with that issue, all of a sudden when it affects someone close to you, it’s
about them, and what measures do you want in place to make sure they’re looked
after,” Rees says.
Rees spent a year as chief of staff to aboriginal affairs minister
Milton Orkopoulos, leaving to work for Iemma just days before Orkopoulos began
co-operating with police on child sex allegations that later saw the politician
jailed. By 2007, Rees was himself in Parliament and a few days after the election
Iemma made him minister for water and emergency services.
That partly explains one of the reasons it took Labor so long to
axe Iemma — Rees had a deep sense of loyalty to Iemma, who had effectively
brought Rees into parliament. When preselections for western Sydney seats in the 2007 election were being
decided, the party’s Left-wing local baron, federal MP Laurie Ferguson, decided
who were to be the candidates. Rees’ name was not on his list — even though
Rees was convinced he had the support of local branch members.
Rees, according to observers, was furious that Ferguson had backtracked on an earlier
commitment to support him, and went to see the MP in his office, telling him
words to the effect: “Mate, you need to know I’m not one of your stooges. I’m
not just going to drop off.”
Before long, Rees had some heavyweight backing of his own: Iemma
and Left faction leader Luke Foley, who persuaded party bigwigs, including
secretary Mark Arbib and deputy premier John Watkins to back Rees. They took
the issue to the party’s national executive and Rees was duly preselected as
the Toongabbie candidate.
“It was a major shift in the power of the Fergusons in that part
of Sydney,”
one senior Labor figure says. “For a young guy to stand his dig and not be dissuaded
took some chutzpah.” Another laughs when asked how Ferguson reacted. “He wasn’t very pleased,
let’s put it that way.”
It’s one of the sad twists of politics that Iemma’s prescience in
injecting fresh energy made it possible for him to be axed. The Rees front
bench includes six ministers from the same round of preselections; four chosen
by the national executive at Iemma’s urging (Jodi McKay, David Borger, Phil
Costa and Rees himself) and two elected by rank-and-file members in the same
round (Michael Daley and Verity Firth).
Directness and cut-through have long been marks of Rees’ style,
says parliamentarian Meredith Burgmann, who has known him since his
adolescence. “Nathan was always technically regarded as (in the) soft Left
(faction) because of his mother’s connections, but I don’t think he ever really
regarded himself as a factional person,” Burgmann says. “I’m a fan of
Nathan’s. I think he’s brilliant.”
One old political friend of Rees says he has all the political
brutality of Paul Keating, but lacks Keating’s conscious charm. “One of
Nathan’s problems is that he doesn’t flick the switch to vaudeville. He’s a
no-nonsense bloke and he never went out of his way to cultivate the colleagues
in the caucus.” That was deeply annoying to the senior strategists who were
trying to persuade Rees to take over the premiership from February until
September — they wanted him to start a campaign of wooing his comrades with
lunches and dinners. Rees just wasn’t interested. “He never went
out of his way to flatter anyone or stroke egos or ingratiate himself,” one
Rees backer recalls.
Long lunches might not be the best way for a health nut like Rees
to do business, anyway — the pinstriped crowd at upmarket Italian lunchery
Beppi’s were startled one day to see Rees getting a little shabby over a few
glasses of grappa across the table from Frank Sartor, prompting nudged remarks
about how Labor has changed. A generation ago two senior ministers would have
drunk the joint dry before they showed even the slightest hint of inebriation.
There was no honeymoon period for Rees as Premier; as the factions
recalibrated and Rees installed his Cabinet, a new breed of disgruntled
outsiders began sniping. “Rees is a puppet of the factions, just like Iemma.
The difference is that everyone loved Iemma. The difference with Nathan is that
nobody has any loyalty to him, really,” says one.
Rees’ handling of the Matt Brown affair — swiftly sacking the
exuberant police minister after the underpants dance was revealed — brought
schadenfreude and admiration in equal measure.
“Rees has just gone from being red hot to having a red-hot poker
up his a***,” said one disaffected Labor figure after the Matt Brown affair.
But Rees’ allies saw it as a good opportunity for Rees to show
voters his mettle. “I don’t think it hurt Nathan,” one Labor powerbroker
says. “It hurt the Labor brand but Nathan handled it brilliantly and
decisively.” After Rees’ first fortnight, senior Labor
figures are more optimistic about the party’s fortunes than they have been for
a long time.
“We have a long way to go,” says one, “a long, long, long way
to go. But there is a ray of light.”
Source: The Sunday Telegraph 21st September 2008