Wyatt Roy: Bipartisan young gun uniting economics with social justice
Scott Hamilton
Author, researcher and policy advisor. Adjunct Associate Professor Monash Uni. Renewable Energy | Climate Change | Water | Renewable Hydrogen | Renewable Ammonia | Renewable Metals | Politics | #bipartisanship
Liberal National MP Wyatt Roy was assistant minister for innovation in the Turnbull government. He was the youngest person ever elected to federal parliament and the youngest minister of the crown. When we caught up with him recently, he shared his ‘behind the scenes’ work on bipartisanship and making good public policy.
We began by asking him about his ‘log cabin story’
It wasn’t expected that I would go into politics at all. My family were sort of swing voters. Just not that interested in politics. My dad had voted for Hawke and Keating. Yes, but a classic ‘Howard battler’.
What happened was, I was helping out a mate of mine called Pat, who passed away a few years ago. Pat had Spinal Muscular Atrophy, a progressive disease that gets worse over time, and I was his participation assistant at university.
The one thing I was a was good at was economics and my economics teacher said to me, you understand economics but you also understand social justice — because she had seen what I was doing with Pat. ‘Few people really understand both,’ she said, ‘and if you put the two together, it’s a cliche but you can make a difference and you should get involved in politics.’
I went to a meeting of the Sunshine Coast Young Liberals and I remember sitting there thinking this is all a bit boring and a bit unusual. I very politely said ‘This is how you could do things differently and make it more interesting’. On my second meeting, three people were running for president of the branch. Two people got one vote, so they each voted for themselves, and I got every other vote.
Within eight months, it was voted best branch, and I was encouraged to run for preselection. I think 70% of my preselectors were over 70, as Longman is demographically one of the oldest electorates in the country. I’ve always found that older people are the most willing to give a young person a go. They have a level of healthy cynicism about politics. There is an underlying vein just beneath the surface that we can do things differently.
‘I was 20 and looked about 12’
I was elected for the first time in 2010 representing the federal electorate of Longman, which is between the Sunshine Coast and Brisbane. I was 19 years old when I was running for parliament and I had just turned 20 when I was elected.
The expectation was that a lot of people would say, given my novelty, ‘That’s very nice, just sit over there and be quiet’. The truth is I had exactly the opposite experience. This is not true everywhere, but with the overwhelming majority of my colleagues, there was a real willingness to have a different perspective. That was the case on both sides of parliament, and not just the major parties.
People recognise, either openly or begrudgingly, that parliament works better if it is more representative of the Australian people. I think people respected the way in which I approached my role there. I had a voice and wanted to be heard, but I never took the view that I was the smartest person in the room. It is common for politicians to think, ‘I’m the smartest person in the room and you all have to agree with me. Let me tell you how smart I am.’ But that doesn’t really work. Politics should be a contest of ideas, and if you listen to your colleagues, and have empathy for where they’ve come from, you can find a lot of consensus.?Fine to question their means, but you should never question their motives.
Working constructively with the other side
I had my 21st birthday in parliament and then, in Malcolm Turnbull’s government, I was made assistant minister for innovation at the age of 25. My big reform package was the National Innovation and Science Agenda, which was 24 policies across nine government departments to help transition the Australian economy.
Labor MP Ed Husic and I became great mates and we still are. We found an area of policy that we were interested in, which was innovation and technology. Well before anybody else picked it up, we agreed we would work constructively together in that space. We would agree on the opportunities, agree on the challenges, and where possible agree on the policy, but also compete on the policy. And we openly said that that was what we were doing. Our approach created a big opportunity for lasting reform.
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I’ll give a practical example. There is a program called the Defence Parliamentary Exchange, where MPs are given the opportunity to spend time with the defence force in different parts of the world. I have been to Iraq, Afghanistan and some of the biggest military exercises in the world. And I can tell you, there is nothing like travelling with the military — they have one team — very different from politicians of different political persuasions.
Travelling together gives you an opportunity to know somebody at a human level. It’s much harder to have a tribal reaction. You might disagree publicly but you would respect each other. Ed and I travelled together more than others and within the innovation space, we were able to go deep on important questions of policy.
This is an excerpt from an article first?published in The Mandarin (Premium) on 15 May 2023. By Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells
Scott Hamilton?and?Stuart Kells?are Melbourne-based authors, researchers and policy advisers. They are researching the history of bipartisanship in Australia.