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.

Andrew 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, foot-stamper, 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.

“People want decisions and outcomes and actions. But that needs to be driven through a model of more consensus than less.”

A Whitlam-era child

Andrew Barr was four when his family moved 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.

“I very strongly believe in the power of education to change lives.”

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 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 non-academic 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.

From there he went to Lake Ginninderra College, and then to ANU, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Policy Studies) in 1995 – economics, economic history, and political science, leavened by philosophy and sociology.

His interest in politics and economics came from his family circle. His father was rising through the ranks of the Treasury when Paul Keating was Treasurer; the Barrs went camping with economist Ken Henry, later Treasury Secretary, and his family; and his parents had Henry and other Treasury economists over for dinner.

Andrew became involved in politics at ANU: he was treasurer of the ANU Students’ Association and on the board of the ANU Union – and joined the Labor party. When he started university, in 1992, Paul Keating – “a little bit of a hero” – had just become Prime Minister, in the December 1991 election.

“The political creature was forming in that environment, but it was fun,” Mr Barr remembered. “I was being intellectually challenged through the academic pathways; you’re in amongst thousands of people your own age.”

Although the Whitlam free tertiary education policy changed his parents’ lives, Mr Barr supported Labor’s reintroducing tertiary fees and establishing the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) in 1989. As a pragmatist, he believed the deferred tax arrangement would allow even more people to go to university; the money raised was used to expand the number of universities in Australia from 17 to 37.

“Ironically, the now Prime Minister [Anthony Albanese], who’s a little bit older than me, would have taken the opposite view. So, most of my time was disagreeing with the left of the Labor Party over the Higher Education Contribution Scheme.”

Labor changing

Labor, in fact, has changed significantly over the decades, Mr Barr believes. It is socially progressive; it used to be the party of white Australia, and quite homophobic. “It is not anymore, and I’m glad,” Mr Barr said.

He remarks that the party’s economic position has also changed over a century from democratic socialism to a more social democratic position. Its original platform called for “the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution, and exchange”; Gareth Evans altered the socialist objective in the early 1980s, inserting the words “to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features”.  

“Where we are now is somewhat different from elements of the Hawke-Keating period. But mostly, if you asked the party’s critics who are to the left of the party, they’d say it’s still a social-democratic civilizing-capitalism sort of party, as opposed to overthrowing the system … I don’t know that there are many people in the Labor party now who would look to Marxist or Communist values. But equally, not every element of the neoclassical, small-l liberal economic agenda is as embraced as it might have been during the Hawke-Keating period. But a lot of it is just an evolution. The economy has changed. Australia’s position in the world has changed. Australian society has changed. So political parties have to adapt.”

After graduating from ANU, Mr Barr worked for Annette Ellis in Federal Parliament and then-ACT Opposition leader Jon Stanhope before entering the private sector in 1999 as a media analyst and account manager. In 2002, he returned to political life as senior adviser to John Hargreaves MLA, and became his Chief of Staff in 2004 when Hargreaves became minister for transport, territory and municipal services, multicultural affairs, and housing.

In 2004, Mr Barr won preselection on the Labor ticket in the Molonglo electorate, but missed out. He was elected to the Legislative Assembly in 2006 after the resignation of Labor MLA Ted Quinlan, then-Deputy Chief Minister and Treasurer. Mr Barr was re-elected to the seat of Molonglo in 2008 and 2012. After a major redistribution of electoral boundaries, he was elected to the seat of Kurrajong at the 2016 and 2020 elections.

When Jon Stanhope resigned in May 2011, Mr Barr was appointed Deputy Chief Minister in the cabinet of new Chief Minister Katy Gallagher. When she resigned to run for the Senate, Mr Barr was elected Chief Minister, on 11 December 2014. He led ACT Labor to its fifth and sixth consecutive general election wins in 2016 and 2020.

Stresses of the job

Andrew Barr has been in the ACT’s top political job now for eight years – a position with responsibilities that bring their share of stresses and unexpected dilemmas. The two biggest crises of Mr Barr’s chief ministership were the bushfires of 2019/20 and the COVID pandemic.

People, he remarks, had seen a little bit of him by that time: then “I went from the guy who’s on the news a bit a few times a week to every bloody day! I don’t have an education background in firefighting and bushfire management, nor do I in pandemics. So, they both required getting across entirely new issues for me. I’m very comfortable talking about the economy – I have 30 years of that. So, I think it was good for me to have challenges in areas that you’re not necessarily familiar with. It allows you to grow in the job a bit.”

The sheer diversity of the job is one of the greatest challenges, Mr Barr believes. He gets to dabble in the international space – trade missions to New Zealand, Fiji, and Singapore this year – aided by the diplomatic presence in Canberra.

At a national level, he works with other states and territories (notably, on the pandemic management). He is on the Council of Capital City Lord Mayors, engaging with other major Australian cities. He deals with local matters in Canberra. And as Treasurer, he is involved with ACT and Commonwealth budgets.

A vision for the city

Mr Barr says he wants to transform Canberra from a large country town to a small to medium-sized city, “a bigger, more engaged, better city to live in”.

“Some people won’t agree that’s what we’re creating, but my retort to that is people vote with their feet, and the ACT has been the fastest-growing state or territory for 30 years now. Most of that time, I’ve been the Chief Minister. People can choose to live in a number of different places; many of them are choosing to live here.”

Most of the people he went to school or university with left Canberra, he notes, because it did not offer them either the career, the lifestyle, or the entertainment they wanted; he wants Canberra to be “a place that young people will want to come and live in”.

He is very proud of his administration’s social policy work, such as LGBTI issues (the ACT had the biggest ‘yes’ vote for gay marriage of any jurisdiction) and drug law reform (decriminalising cannabis in 2020, and harder drugs this year).

On the economic side, he points to his tax reforms (some not universally applauded, he admits), such as the switch from stamp duty to land taxes. He wants to deliver city-shaping infrastructure projects. Light rail has been a major defining feature of the past five years, but he is also determined to build the new Canberra Theatre precinct and to redevelop the Canberra stadium. Under him, too, universities have grown.

The two biggest issues coming the ACT’s way in 2023, Mr Barr predicts, are putting in place the voluntary assisted dying scheme – a process that will run through the whole year – and the referendum on the Indigenous voice to parliament towards the end of the year. His goal is for the ACT to once more have the highest ‘yes’ vote in the country.

“These are perhaps more issues in health and social policy, issues that will touch on most people – and most people will have a view on both,” Mr Barr said.

Housing and infrastructure are also priorities for next year.

“We’ve got a city that’s growing fast. So, we’ve got infrastructure to build, and we need more houses.”

Future plans

There are fewer than 700 days until the next ACT election; Mr Barr intends to stand again.

“The last few years have felt a lot like most things have had to be on pause,” he said.

Due to COVID and a difficult relationship with the Morrison Government, he had not been able to make the progress he wanted to make on his party’s commitments, or on issues that inspired him to be in politics. The change in federal government has made things easier.

Mr Barr knows he is in the second half of his career. “I will not still be chief minister after 25 or 30 years.” But he does not intend to step down as chief minister in the foreseeable future.

“You’re not in this job forever. Most people I know who have gone into it have had a list of things or many things they want to do; there will never be a time that you’ll have ticked off everything on your list. … I’m not going to get it all done, and so there’s a sense that there are still things that I want to do… I’ll be in my early fifties, so I think I’m not quite done yet.”

By the end of this term, Mr Barr will pass Jon Stanhope’s record of nine years and 188 days as the longest serving chief minister in the ACT.

“The ACT has such a short political history that nine years, by the standards of the jurisdiction, is not excessively long or Menziean…” (Robert Menzies was prime minister for 18 years).

Mr Barr says he is less fixated on days in office than on elections won: “That tends to be how you go into Labor Party folklore.”

Nevertheless, he may not win in 2024.

“So, you’ve got to rethink – you get a four-year contract – but to narrow it all down, I’m definitely going to have another career after this. I’m not the sort of person who could just retire aged 51.”

Would he move into federal politics?

“Politics forces you to think in four- to five-year cycles, so you can’t get too far ahead of yourself. I’m not angling for it, but it might happen. I wouldn’t rule it out, but I’m not going to challenge anyone’s preselection. It’s not going to be an ugly fight for it, but if a vacancy arose at some point in the future, beyond the next Territory parliament …”

If he left politics, Mr Barr says he would have to “dabble in a few different things” to find an interesting career.

“I haven’t excessively dwelt on it, but you need to be able to pay the bills and do something you’re passionate about. I suspect I might be able to structure something that gives me a bit of both.

“I’ll always be someone who will be engaged on certain causes. Now, a number of the causes that I’ve been engaged on, we’ve had wins on. We get marriage equality done; I’ve done a lot on the law reform side; I hope we get the voluntary assisted dying stuff done. [Later that week, the Senate passed the Territory rights bill.] I’m a republican, so there’s unfinished business in that regard. I can see myself still being involved in social movements and campaigns.”

But come what may, Mr Barr is determined to do two things: “To get as much of my list of things I want to get done, done. And, if at all possible, to retire from politics on my own terms. That may not happen, because for a lot of politicians, it ends up going two ways – you’re voted out, or you’re carried out in a box. I hope neither. I hope I can get a third pathway.”

Mr Barr encourages anyone interested in becoming involved in politics to do it.

“But go into it with your eyes open. Know that it’s demanding, and that you’re in the public eye, and you have to make certain sacrifices. But being involved and serving your community – decisions are made by those who turn up – and so being in politics and turning up is a really good starting point.”

– Nick Samaras and Nicholas Fuller

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