NEWS
Meet the Chief
A
ndrew Barr’s colleagues and staff refer to the Chief Minister as “Chief”. I have met “the Chief” many times, but I had never sat down to get to know the man beyond the public persona. When I met him in his office recently, I was keen not only to hear about his political career and ambitions, but to explore his formative years, and discover the ideas and influences that shaped the man who, by the end of this Assembly term, stands to become the ACT’s longest-serving Chief Minister. The key to Mr Barr’s success may be his ability to negotiate and to govern by consensus. In his time as the ACT’s seventh Chief Minister, he has never commanded a majority of factional backing within the Labor party. “I’ve always had to negotiate, and that means you tend to then be more centrist, to see things from other people’s perspectives; you’ve got to win support for everything,” he said. “You’ve always got to negotiate. That impacts on the political leadership style and approach.” The numbers show the importance of striking a balance in the government ranks. There are 25 Members of the Legislative Assembly: his government has 10 Labor and six Green MLAs; his cabinet has six Labor and three Green ministers. (The remaining nine MLAs, the Canberra Liberals, form opposition.) “The responsibility I have is to hold all of that together, to work with a spectrum of politicians from another party, a spectrum of my own. You don’t get to just stamp your foot and be authoritarian… “By nature, I’m not an ideological zealot, footstamper, tantrum-thrower, authoritarian-type leader. I’ve got strong views on particular things, and my colleagues know when I’m particularly passionate or engaged on an issue that we’re going to talk about it. I’ll try and convince them. But I don’t know if there’s much room in Australian democracy for hard-line and authoritarian.”
A Whitlam-era child Andrew Barr was four when his family moved 4
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to Canberra in 1977. He was born in Lismore; his mother was in high school when he was born, his father in his first year of university. They married in December 1973, and he was born the following April. “The life chances of teenage parents from country NSW in the 1970s weren’t so great,” Mr Barr said. But Gough Whitlam’s Labor government abolished university fees in 1974, making education free and accessible for many – including Mr Barr’s parents. “It was ingrained in me by my parents that they wouldn’t have been able to go to university if it hadn’t been for the Whitlam Government; that opportunity opened up the pathway for me and for my younger brother,” he said. His parents graduated from the University of New England – one doing classes in the morning, the other in the afternoon, taking it in turns to look after the baby – and came to Canberra to work, his father in the Treasury, his mother as a teacher (with a diploma from what is now the University of Canberra). It is, he says, “a very familiar story – lots of young people came to Canberra for a public service position”. When they arrived in Canberra, his parents rented in Macgregor, then bought their first place in Flynn. Mr Barr’s school education was a story of two halves, he said. “All of the creative, free-spirited stuff was in primary school.” Missing the age cut-off for the local primary school, he went to the AME School (now the Steiner School) in Weston, from 1978 to 1984. It was progressive, perhaps 30 or 40 years ahead of its time: education was freeform, based around students’ interests and goals, and students called teachers by their first names. After a year at Turner Primary in 1985, Mr Barr went to Lyneham High School (1986–89), “then amongst the most conservative high schools in Canberra”. Its educational policy was based around streaming of students, who were assessed against their known academic ability and put into one
Photo Kerrie Brewer
Growing up in Canberra as the son of teenage parents, Andrew Barr has been a Member of the ACT Legislative Assembly since 2006 and Chief Minister since 2014. CW publisher Nick Samaras sat down with “the Chief” for a one-on-one chat to learn more about the person behind the big job.
ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr: “I very strongly believe in the power of education to change lives.”
of nine classes, from 701 (the Lyneham enriched academic program) at the top to 709 (the learning assistance program) at the bottom – “a very different education philosophy from what I had come out of,” Mr Barr said. Because he did not have much history in the public system, he was put into 707, “down the nonacademic path”. His mother, a public school teacher, would not stand for that. She had what Mr Barr called “a massive fight” with the school, and he was put in 703, and did “reasonably well” at school. It was at Lyneham that Mr Barr had his first experience of politics, “probably the first lesson in how you can change things if you are unhappy … there is a democratic process to fix it”. The school had a strict uniform policy, which Mr Barr fell foul of. On a freezing Canberra day, he was sent home from an extracurricular activity (a history lecture, he thinks) because he wore a woollen jumper, rather than the regulation cotton sloppy joe. As a teacher, his mother knew students could not be excluded from education based on what they wore; she took the school to task, and young Andrew was reinstated. He ran for school captain and the school board on a platform that students should not be excluded from education based on their uniform. He was then in Year 9, aged 14.
