Joan Kirner obituary

 Extract from The Guardian

Community advocate who later became the first female premier of Victoria and the champion of generation of Labor women
• Joan Kirner, former Labor premier of Victoria, dies aged 76

Joan Kirner on the beach near her home in Williamstown in 2004. Photograph: Fairfax Media/Getty Images

Gay Alcorn

Monday 1 June 2015 21.54 AEST 

Joan Kirner was a good friend of Julia Gillard and the two, though a generation apart, had much in common. Like Gillard, Kirner faced a particularly kind of scrutiny that seems to accompany the first female anything.
Kirner became Victoria’s first female premier in August 1990, and only the second in Australia – she was pipped by Labor’s Carmen Lawrence in Western Australia by just a few months.
She was a member of the socialist left faction, as was Gillard, a working class girl from Melbourne whose passions were public education and encouraging and cajoling progressive women to enter politics. As a co-founder of Emily’s List in 1996, one of her many proteges was Gillard, who knew Kirner’s son David at university and became a close family friend.
A generation of Labor women – and women of all political stripes – owe much to Kirner, a mentor, good-humoured, always gently spoken in public but a terrier for what she believed in. That persisted long after she left parliament in 1993. She was ill for several years, and was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2013. She died on Monday aged 76.

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Joan Kirner on 9 August 1990 – her first day as premier. Photograph: The Age/Fairfax Media via Getty Images

Kirner, born Joan Hood, never aimed to be a politician. She became prominent as a formidable parent advocate for state schools after taking her son to kindergarten to find there was a just one teacher for 50 children. Kirner got angry and started to organise, becoming president of the Australian Council of State School Organisations.
Like so many other Labor politicians of her generation, it was Gough Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975 that shifted her focus from community activism to politics. She was elected to Victoria’s upper house in 1982 and moved to the lower house representing her beloved Williamstown in 1988. She was the minister for conservation, forest and lands – where she oversaw the formation of Landcare – and then education minister, a portfolio she had always wanted.
In 1990, Kirner was deputy premier to John Cain, a Labor hero who had brought the party back from the wilderness in 1982 but whose government was flailing. The state was mired in debt and recession, the government had lost the confidence of business, and was seen to be slow to curb spending. To further add to the humiliation, Victorians were leaving the state to move to Queensland.
Cain resigned and Kirner was elected leader and premier. Kirner once reflected in an interview that she at first doubted whether she should take the job. “For years, I had been saying to other women, ‘When you get the opportunity, grasp it!’, and here I was doing the classic female bit.”

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Joan Kirner in 1990 during children’s week in Melbourne. Photograph: Impressions/Getty Images

Much of the media found it hard to handle Kirner, who was either labelled a “Mother Russia” firebrand in the pocket of unions or an frazzled housewife out of her depth. The Herald Sun’s cartoonist Jeff Hook consistently drew her as a harried overweight homemaker in a polka dot dress.
Kirner recalled that the caricature did hurt, and she asked Hook why he persisted. ‘Well Mrs Kirner, I know how to draw Henry Bolte and I know how to draw Bob Hawke, or John Cain or Paul Keating,” Kirner recalled Hook explaining, “but I’ve never had to draw a woman in power before and I don’t know how to draw you.”
Kirner says that, after that, she stopped taking personal attacks personally. Under immense pressure, she just got on with it, and there was something about Kirner’s grit that won respect. Even though Labor was never going to win the 1992 election, she was more popular than Liberal leader Jeff Kennett, who would win in a landslide.

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The official parliamentary portrait of Joan Kirner painted by Annette Bezor.

She is credited with trying to improve the economy while premier. She reined in some spending and took some difficult decisions such as selling the State Bank. But it was always going to be too little, too late.
Kirner’s political achievements were significant, but her personal influence makes her a revered Labor figure. It was Kirner who moved in 1994 the resolution to entrench Labor’s affirmative action rule to require women to be preselected in 35% of winnable seats. She was the inaugural co-convenor of Emily’s List, which promotes and mentors progressive women politicians. One of them was Gillard, who has called Kirner “pivotal” to Emily’s List, as well as a friend and mentor. In turn, Kirner was livid at some of the sexism Gillard endured.
Kirner never gave up on causes she cared about, once saying that one of her mother’s favourite phases when faced with an obstacle was, “we’ll see about that”. She fought for abortion rights for more than 30 years.
In 2008, walking with the aid of a stick, Kirner stood in line in state parliament to ask a minister to sign her copy of the Abortion Law Reform Bill, which effectively legalised abortion in the state. “This is a fantastic achievement in the history of the rights of women in Victoria,” she said.
She was there again at Daniel Andrews’ campaign launch last year. She looked frail, but she wasn’t going to miss the possibility of a Labor victory in Victoria. And Labor is unlikely to forget Joan Kirner.
She is survived by her husband Ron and children Michael, David, and Kate.
• Joan Kirner, politician, born 20 June 1938; died 1 June 2015