Page 84 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 13 December 2016
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I think of myself as a social policy person. I always have. But the reality is that for the past 10 years my career has mainly been in innovation, industry, science and research policy. I recall in 2006 when Kim’s beloved portfolio was returned to him in opposition how I tried to move with the housing and urban development portfolio I had become engrossed in. That did not work out and I stayed with Kim who reassured me, “Rachel, industry policy is social policy,” for what can be more important to a person, apart from their family, than having a job, the dignity of work, the capacity to support one’s self and one’s family, a source of identity? A decent job offers all these things. The longer I worked in the portfolio, the more I came to see that this was true. It is why the labour movement fights to secure local jobs and jobs for the future underpinned by science and technology.
As anyone who followed my campaign would know, I grew up in O’Connor, walking and riding my bike to local public schools: O’Connor cooperative, Turner primary, Lyneham high, and Dickson College. I had an excellent public education and I believe that every child deserves the same opportunity I had.
But I was also conscious that I started life with some advantages that my classmates—not all my classmates shared. My parents were academics who had moved from the UK for better opportunities here. We were materially quite well off. Although we were pretty much the last household of my acquaintance to get colour television, that was not because we could not afford it. My parents just did not see the point.
But, more importantly, we were educationally advantaged. I am the fourth generation woman in my family to go to university. My great-grandmother studied medicine in order to become a psychoanalyst. Her daughter, my grandmother, was a doctor. On the other side of the family, my dad’s mum also had a degree. It was just assumed and expected that my brother, stepsister and I would go to university. But we were raised to understand that good fortune brought with it responsibility, a kind of intellectual noblesse oblige. It was assumed we would use our university education to do something good for the world, not just to enrich ourselves.
This expectation was, if anything, reinforced by my understanding that one of my grandparents, my paternal grandfather, had quite a different story. Grandpa Ben was born in 1905 in Hackney, London. His earliest years are somewhat shrouded in mystery but we know he had an older sister, Lily, with whom he remained close throughout their whole lives. They appear to have been raised by their mother, Mary, without much help from their father, who appears in records variously as William or John.
When Ben was almost 10 years old, his mother became ill with TB and he was removed to a children’s home, while Lilian was taken in by a neighbour. After his mother’s death, Ben spent some years in a children’s home before being discharged into service at age 14. At 16, Ben returned to Hackney to make his own way in the world. He took whatever work he could, but he often went hungry. It was becoming involved with the Communist Party and the broader socialist and labour movements that encouraged and enabled Ben to educate himself as well as to become an accomplished chess player.
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