Reflections On Leadership, Love And Survival

The Hon Anna Bligh – Queensland Premier September 2007-March 2012 – was the first woman to be elected a premier of an Australian state. Having spent over 17 years in the rough and tumble of the Queensland parliament – seven of them as either Deputy Premier or Premier – Anna Bligh knows something about hard knocks and high walls. In 2011, Bligh led Queensland through the devastation of Australia’s largest natural disasters. Her party then lost the 2012 State election and Anna stepped down to start a new life, only to find herself diagnosed with cancer. All this is now laid out in her just published memoir Through the Wall and, to discuss her book, Anna Bligh addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 22 April 2015.

REFLECTIONS ON LEADERSHIP, LOVE AND SURVIVAL

ANNA BLIGH

Thank you very much Gerard for that introduction and the invitation to join yourself and members of the Sydney Institute. Gerard is right; I’m not a stranger to the Institute having address the Institute in 2011. On that occasion, I was staying in Woolloomooloo and it started pouring with rain. I got a cab at 5.20 expecting to be here well in time, but an hour later I was still on College St and had to get out of the cab, in the rain, and walk several blocks to make it and was late. Some of you, I know, were here on that occasion and when I saw the blustery weather today I thought there must be something about the combination of Anna Bligh and Gerard Henderson that offends the gods. The skies have opened on both occasions.

As many of you will know, there is a plethora of political biographies weighing down the shelves of Australian bookshops and it’s reasonable for you to ask why someone would want to add another one to that groaning pile. I was not particularly interested in writing a standard political biography. I think the record of my time in government, and in politics, is well known and already much written about and commented on. I didn’t feel the need to add to that record. So this is not a political biography in which you will find a lot of salacious political gossip. As I’ve said in the book, if you’re looking for that you should put the book back on the shelf.

I’ve also written that those who have conspired against me or who betrayed me, or who have conspired with me against others, can all relax. This is not a book which will be betraying secrets. This book is very much a personal reflection on the personal lived experience of leadership. I was approached by Harper Collins to write a book that was of a much more personal nature. To reflect on my own experience and to share that personal experience in a way that perhaps is not so common in political memoirs or writing. So that’s what I set out to do.

I was interested in the approach from Harper Collins because it was something that perhaps did add to the broad record of what it is like to have a political career in the public life of our country. The book also attempts to answer some of the most common questions that have been put to me by people who talk to me about my experiences in politics and public life. What is it like to be in a position like that? What does it feel like when you have to confront those really big choices and decisions? How did you feel when people were protesting against you? What was it like when you had to make those decisions during the flood? So I’ve tried to capture as I’ve said that lived experience.

In my experience of leadership at the most senior political levels, leadership is not a normal life. It is a life in which you have to be driven, you have to have very healthy doses of ambition and have a very clear understanding of the goal that you want to achieve. With very rare exceptions you don’t end up running this country or running one of the states of Australia by accident, and certainly that doesn’t happen to you if you are a woman at this particular point in history.

We all know that leadership demands strength, courage and endurance. It requires vision; it requires that sense of looking over the next horizon and the ability to inspire people to come with you on the journey. But it also requires a certain doggedness and a great deal of energy. This book is not a standard political biography, nor is it a full and comprehensive biography of my life, I didn’t set out to do that either. But it was not possible as I started to write the book to reflect on the choices that I made that lead me into that life of politics and into public life, and into senior and more senior positions, without also reflecting on some of the forces that formed me. What made me decide to put my hand up for these jobs, what was it that drew me to an interest in politics, to the particular side of politics that I chose? And what is it about my early childhood and some of the early forces in my life like Catholicism that helped to shape me into the person that ultimately put their hand up for what was a very big job and have to jump some very big hurdles to get there?

So the book does reflect on the role of adversity and the role of failure in forming leaders, in forming the sort of resilience and ability to get back on the horse that you will find common among all leaders. Whether they’re leading the corporate world or in the political world or on either or both sides of politics. Many of you will have formed your views of me by the very extensive television coverage during those extended floods and disasters that Queensland experienced so catastrophically in 2011. Disaster became quite etched in the minds and of the feelings of Australians, because the floods were protracted. They went for almost six weeks. Every time we thought they were getting better and we were getting over them they seemed to get worse. I felt that the rest of the country, while not personally affected, many knew people who were affected, many had relatives and families involved in the disaster.

We all got caught up with it a bit because it was January, and the television stations switched their summer programing to constant coverage. There were extraordinary images of what mother nature is capable of. Every time you thought you could never see anything more horrifying, there would be another image the next day that captured us all again. So it was a very big experience in Queensland, and it was a very big experience for me. It was also an experience that the whole country got caught up in at various points. For me, that was an extraordinary lesson in leadership.

It was not the first time I’d faced disaster. Queensland is a tropical state and I’d had as premier and in other senior positions faced minor flooding of a very different nature, in smaller towns, a number of times while I had been in politics. But I had certainly never faced anything of the size of those floods, nor had our senior emergency team and any emergency services around the country. Such a broad, extended experience over such a very long time. It meant that we had to not only manage the event and make the decisions necessary to manage it but, very quickly, the experience demanded a very different kind of leadership. I could physically feel the expectations of me changing. I could feel the public looking for something that perhaps we don’t look for very often from political leaders.

It’s almost as if, in political leadership, you are very conscious that the electorate, the public, don’t like to see their leaders get too far away from the lives that are lived by most Australians. Part of that is the way that we talk about what we do. The Australian community, in my experience and probably the experience of most other political leaders, does not really give you permission very often to speak in high and relatively lofty terms. The American community has much higher expectations that their president will get up every day and give something like the Gettysburg Address. It’s what they expect and they’re very comfortable when their President speaks in those terms. That’s not an Australian characteristic. But there are moments, and they came very early in John Howard’s Prime Ministership with the Port Arthur massacre, when the whole country looks for a certain shift and a certain lift in the nature of leadership.

That moment certainly came for me during those terrible Queensland flood disasters. I reflect on this in the book – what was it about those moments that drove those expectations and almost a hunger in the community for a different kind of leadership. I could feel the community almost giving me permission to speak and act in a way that was quite different, because of the very different nature of those circumstances. It was a moment where we all shared a common vulnerability and a common humanity. In those circumstances, bipartisanship very quickly rushes to the fore, party politics disappear and people look for something very different in the public leadership of the event.

In reflecting on leadership generally in the book I have touched on some moments in my own leadership journey which are very common to the leadership journey of everyone who experiences it. You might deal with those moments differently but there are some very common milestones. One of those is the moment when you are starting to emerge as a leader, when you are starting to move in a direction that’s different from your peers. You are being promoted at work, you’re being singled out as the person who should get the opportunities. You are being noticed in the political environment. The media is starting to take note of what you say, the profiles about you start appearing. As that starts to happen, you feel yourself physically separating from the herd. And we are pack animals.

We’re very comfortable in the herd. It’s a very warm and recognised and comfortable place. For every person who starts a journey towards leadership, there is a moment when you can feel yourself, physically and emotionally, separating. Your colleagues, your peers and your friends suddenly start to see you differently. They’ve actually felt you move past them. Some of them they will resent that, and you will feel it. They will start asking questions as to how come you’re getting that opportunity, or were picked for that opportunity, why the media are writing about you, why the boss is picking you. For many people, and I’ve seen it happen in politics and I’m sure it happens in the corporate world, as you go through that moment it’s a very uncomfortable moment. I have seen people go through it and then decide that’s actually not for them. They actually want to retreat and they like the comfort of the herd. And there’s nothing wrong with that. For me, that was a debate I had with myself and others had with me about ambition.

Obviously, when I reflect on leadership in the book I do so from a very female perspective. When I was sworn in as Premier of Queensland, the most common question put to me in the first 48 hours from the media, in almost every interview, was, “What do you think it’s going to be like doing it as a woman?” My response was, “I don’t know, I haven’t done it the other way.” I couldn’t answer the question. For many women, reconciling ambition with femininity is still something that they struggle with, and are very uncomfortable with. I certainly had to face that in myself and decide very clearly and explicitly that I did have ambition, that I thought it was actually a good thing not a bad thing, and that I could and would own it.

As I have said in my book, those people who can’t do that, who are unable to own that ambition will struggle if they are seeking to lead others. I don’t want to see the leader of my nation, or the leader of my state to be someone lacking ambition for my country. I want the leader of New South Wales to be someone who is ambitious. We all want to see that in our leaders, regardless of whether they’re from our side of politics or not. But it is an issue that many women struggle with and one that I’ve explored a little in the book.

Then there are those moments when the responsibility and the mantle of leadership can be felt very physically. You can feel the weight of it settle on your shoulders especially when thrown into a circumstance where a grenade flies in from left field. Where neither you nor some of the senior people around you have dealt with it before. There might be only one or two people with some expertise. You have to pull together all of the facts you can and there is a very short window in which you can make decisions. You can’t continue to research, you can’t phone a friend, you actually have to be the one that makes the decision How is it that you come to that moment? For me, and for many others, the best way to describe that experience is that you rely on what I call instinct. And instinct is a very difficult thing to define. In my experience, it’s the culmination of all of the layers that life has laid down in you over years leading up to those moments.

Many of those layers of life are laid down not in the political realm, not in the corporate realm, not in the realm of work. They are actually laid down in your personal life. You will have certainly heard a lot said of the characteristics that particularly male leaders have because of their experiences on the sporting field. That is a very important experience. As the mother of two sons, I have watched those boys learn things on the sporting field about themselves, about their capability, about their peers, about teamwork, that I could never have taught them at home by myself. The sporting field is a place where we learn leadership skills. Here we learn capability and we learn resilience. But there are many other parts of our lives where we learn those things. They are often deeply personal experiences and we often don’t realise how much those experiences are grounding us for much harder decisions, or much bigger decisions in other parts of our lives. Particularly for women, we need to find the language that gives us a way of talking about those experiences that also speaks to the development of strength, resilience and agility in our corporate, political, leadership roles.

For me, there have been the experiences I had as a young mother dealing with very sick babies. Going through those moments, how conscious I was at the end of them of what it was that my family and I had just lived through. Then I understood that I had actually gained something. And a sense that if I can do that, if I can go through that, if I can make the calls that have to be made, I can do other big things. And actually trusting that experience and relying on it when those calls came at a later time.

I come from a family of four and I’m the eldest. I do subscribe to the theory that where you come in the family can very much influence you. Certainly with my mother having three other children very quickly after me, I did take on some of those adult responsibilities of being Mum’s helper maybe earlier than I would have otherwise. My father struggled his whole life with very serious alcoholism. Which is a dangerous, uncertain and ever shifting world for a child to grow up in. When I referred earlier to adversity, I do think when you have miserable things in your childhood they can often be experiences that build resilience in you. And we can all think of examples of that. I very much felt that those difficult experiences forged a kind of strength in me that has never left me.

At school, the Sisters of Mercy were also an influence. There is no doubt that on the one hand they were very conservative, we had our uniforms measured from the knee and all of those things that you would expect happening in the convents of the 1960s and 1970s. But with another lens, what they were doing was quite unusual and almost subversive. In the 1960s, growing up on the Gold Coast most girls left school when they turned 15, many of them not even completing Year 10. There was not a lot of expectation that girls would finish Year 12 let alone go onto university. There was not a lot expected of girls.

The Sisters of Mercy would have none of that. Their approach was from a very religious framework – God gave you a gift and you’ve got a duty to use it. They really hammered into us that you had to be the best that you could be. And as I said, there weren’t many other influences in the lives of young girls at that time that did that. And I owe the Sisters of Mercy a great debt for drilling into me the will to strive for excellence, a belief that being a girl didn’t mean that I couldn’t succeed. And, as I said, it was almost subversive. Even just the examples that they set. It wasn’t easy being sent out, as most of them were, from Ireland away from their families to live in often quite lonely and harsh conditions, let alone teaching very large classes. They were examples of strong women – they ran the school, they had jobs, they went to work every day, they were opinionated, they were smart.

Without doubt, for me, the Catholic Church in the 1960s was an organisation going through substantial reform. Vatican II was very much the order of the day in the church that I attended. It was very much a church and an institution that was focusing on social justice on its role in creating a more equal and just society, and that without any shadow of a doubt influenced my political beliefs. I’m no longer a practising Catholic, and I’ve had my own arguments with the church on other matters. But the fundamentals that I was taught in that Catholic framework have informed my political beliefs, my moral values and have been very important in forming me as a person.

Then I went onto University. In the late 1970s, it’s fair to say that most of the campuses around the country were starting to become slightly more conservative places. That was not true in Queensland where we were in the midst of the Bjelke-Peterson years. As you would probably all remember, Joh Bjelke-Peterson was a very controversial leader. He almost seemed to make sport out of poking a hot stick into the eyes of young students and young radicals at the time. His banning street marches was a red flag to a bull. It was a very volatile political environment. I certainly am a product of those times. My view is that many of the things that I took on or tackled or dealt with as premier were informed by my experience as a young person growing up in a state like Queensland was at that time. With the Goss Government, the Beattie Government and the Bligh Government, each had a central mission was to modernise and transform Queensland to bring it into the twenty-first century, to create the sort of economy and society that other people in other states of Australia had taken for granted for a long time. And you’ll certainly see that in some of the things that I tackled.

I also have tried to be very honest about the nature of politics. It’s a very ruthless business, with some terrific highs and some awful lows. In my experience, people never ask me what was it like to win. We all imagine that that’s a great feeling. But people are intrigued by what it feels like to lose. People often ask me, what was it like to lose that election? As if I wanted to keep reliving the experience. But I accept that people are naturally curious about this, because it is a very big public failure, or loss. People are naturally curious about how you deal with that. And it is part of the role of political leadership. There have been political leaders in this country who happen to be at the right point in the political cycle, and who have the opportunity to leave politics at a time of their own choosing. For all the rest of us, and we are the overwhelming majority, the job is not only to win, but at some point you may have to confront the reality that you will also have to go down with the ship. And it’s a pretty tough thing to think about.

I try to be very explicit and honest about that. I did actually go and look at some other political biographies of people who’ve had pretty big losses. Many write as if it is “oh yes and then I lost the election”. Then they move right along. I can understand why that happens, because it’s not something you want to explore. I found that chapter quite difficult to write about. But I did it because people are very interested. I do worry sometimes that one of the things that discourages young people from entering politics or from contemplating a life in which they might take on a role of political leadership is the prospect that your losses and your failures are writ very large. That can be a very daunting and overwhelming thing to contemplate. So I do think it’s important to explore that.

Going back to early life, one of the best things that ever happened to me was while I was at university. I decided to run for President of the Student Union, I lost and I was 21 at the time. Running the campaign we had a great time, there was lots of fun, lots of hard work, lots of people working together late into the night, putting up posters all the things that happen on a university campus. I had not for one minute contemplated what it would feel like if I lost. And it had an absolutely devastating impact. We all think we’re very grown up when we’re 21. But I was still a very young person with not a lot of that kind of life experience. I thought I would never recover from it. It seemed such a public defeat. But I realised very quickly, literally within a week, that the people who loved me still loved me. I was in fact still the same person and everyone else had got on with their lives. Friends were still calling and my life had not changed very much at all.

It was a very powerful lesson that you can get back up, you can get on your horse again. When you look at very strong leaders, whenever you see them, I always think they are the people who know how to get back up on the horse. You can’t be a leader without taking risks. Every time you take a risk, there’s a chance you’re going to fall off the horse. Those early experiences of failure were, for me, critical in my leadership journey.

The title of my book refers to a recurring theme when I contemplate leadership. I try to look for those lessons that are as general as possible. I also reflect on the experience, at this point in history, of being a woman in that sort of public leadership. I was the first woman premier of Queensland. At that point, only a handful of women had been in positions of political leadership in Australia. Some of you might have seen a movie called Moneyball. It’s about a baseball team in America where the coach is trying to turn the game of baseball on its head. In doing so, he incurs the wrath of the baseball establishment. While he is bemoaning this to a friend, his mate tells him to get over himself. His advice is that the first one through the wall always gets bloody. Always.

And it struck me as a very powerful metaphor for anybody who is pioneering, or an entrepreneur trying to get people to think about something in a completely different way. You will get bloody as you challenge the status quo and the incumbents. If you are a woman, in what has been a very male dominated parliamentary environment in Australia, then you are going to get a few scratches and bruises as you make your way through that wall. But what strikes me is how often I am asked by young women, having watched what they saw happening to Julia Gillard, to myself and other women leaders, is whether or not I would advise any young woman in this country to put their hand up. And without hesitation I say absolutely, because I don’t want them to look at the bruises or the scratches that I might have got as I made my way through the wall. I want them to see the hole in the wall. And I want them to understand that every single time a woman goes through that hole it’s going to get bigger and it’s going to fall down.

We are not that far away from women in politics ceasing to be a novelty, or unusual, or the exception. And that has happened in a relatively short period of time, a blink of an eye. In the last 50 years in this country we have lived through the single largest movement of women from the private domestic sphere into the public world of work and decision making. It has happened at an unbelievably accelerated rate. For many of us, it’s taken our whole lifetime. When historians look back in 200 years time, that shift is going to seem to them, from the vantage point of history, as one of the most striking things in the last 50 years of the twentieth century.

This rapid and accelerated shift is changing everything. It’s changing workplaces, it is changing economies, it is changing social structures, it is changing family sizes and shapes. It is changing relationships between men and women and it’s changing our democracy. It is changing the shape and the feel of the public life of our country. But it is still a relatively rare phenomenon, and it does mean that the jury is still out on what kind of leaders woman make and whether having women in positions of leadership makes any difference at all. There is a very genuine curiosity about it. I have a curiosity about it. I am interested in watching how Julie Bishop is managing on the world stage. I am curious about how Gladys Berejiklian is going to go in her new portfolio. This is still unusual enough for us to be curious about how it will go.

We are already seeing women move into such roles, and we are going to see that novelty and that curiosity wear off. But what it means, meanwhile, for the women who are on the receiving end of it, is that you are never free of your gender. You are a woman premier. You are a woman politician. There is, as I say, nothing wrong with that when you are a first, but what I’m hoping for is that soon we won’t see the gender of our politicians, we will see their performance and we will mark them accordingly. I do note that in my home state of Queensland with the election of Annastacia Palaszczuk, Queensland has become the first state in the federation to elect a second woman leader. There is no doubt that when you are struggling and fighting and working for social change, wherever that campaign is waged, firsts are really important. Firsts challenge the status quo and make us take notice – “Oh, maybe it can be done differently.” But it’s the second and the third and the fourth that really entrench equality. Because it’s with the second and the third and the fourth and the ones after that that you start to move from novelty to normal. And I do think, as I said with the accelerated rate of women in senior positions that we are starting to move from novelty to normal.

Early on in my book I quote Anais Nin, who said “We write to taste life twice, once in the living and once in the retrospection.” And there is a bit of that in the book, as I relive some of the highs and the lows and try to give a sense, not only of what it was like to live in that public moment, but also to make the point that leadership and politics is a profoundly human business. Much of what happens behind the scenes or in the opportunities you have in those positions to meet so many members of the public is very emotional, and very emotionally charged. But it can often also be very humorous.

I’ll end my formal comments with one of the stories in the book that really touched me and brought home to me how important humour is, particularly in an Australian context, when you are facing trauma and catastrophe. It can make something that seems unbearable just a little bit more bearable for a moment. You will all recall that during the worst of those floods we had a terrible event in Toowoomba where you would have seen those swift water rescues in the main street, cars floating in mud, terrible images of children on the roofs of cars waiting to be rescued. And then the wall of water swept through the valley and took out a whole little town called Grantham; and almost every house in the town was washed away. And the people of the town, those that survived, were evacuated to a local church hall about 10kms away from their town. The town was sealed off as a crime scene while the police searched for survivors and those who didn’t survive.

I visited the evacuation centre as soon as it was possible to get in there, just 48 hours after this event. If you can imagine, it was an absolute trauma. A wave of water had washed people out of their houses, they’d watched their neighbours’ houses floating past them with their neighbours screaming and they couldn’t help them. A very deeply traumatic experience. I was in the evacuation centre, talking to an elderly gentleman. I said, “What’s your name” and he tried to say something to me. As he did, he just began to weep. Tears were flowing down his face and he couldn’t speak. A woman walked up and I couldn’t help but notice she had no teeth. She grabbed the man’s hand and said “Premier, this is my husband. We had less than two minutes to get out of the house and I had to make a choice. Whether I would go back for my teeth or get my husband out.” And she was holding his hand at this point and she said, “Right now I’m not sure if I made the right decision.”

It was obviously a long and strong marriage because the man just burst into laughter. It was one of those moments where you could say those sorts of things in a close relationship and suddenly it just brought happiness to his face for just a moment. He could talk to me about some of the things that he’d experienced. I thought what a powerful little moment that this woman had given back to her husband after such a terrible event. There are many other humorous stories about how people cope with disasters in the pages of the book.

So I hope that, in this book, I have given people a taste of what it’s like to live the public life that you see, and some of the comments I’ve made tonight give you some food for thought and I look forward to your questions and comments.