Warrior of the right says her detractors have got it wrong

Talk about a baptism of fire. No sooner had Amanda Stoker been named as the federal government’s new Assistant Minister for Women than she was being trolled by two of the nation’s most admired women: sex abuse survivor and Australian of the Year Grace Tame and comedian-cum social activist Magda Szubanski.

Someone less sure of their ­beliefs, not so precociously self-confident, might have taken a step back. But that isn’t Stoker’s style at all.

She took them both on, rejecting the criticism she was the wrong woman for the job and that the last person Scott Morrison needed to fight his corner on ­gender values was a God-fearing, 38-year-old culture warrior who is stridently pro-life, renounces voluntary euthanasia and believes that sex reassignment therapy for transgender teens should wait until they turn 18.

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“It’s about conviction,” she is explaining over an afternoon cup of tea. “Why be in politics if you are not going to do something and say something meaningful?”

So Stoker told Szubanski and the other “retweet advocates” where to get off after they swung behind Tame in slamming her ­appointment.

Two weeks on, and the row is still playing out online and in the news media. “I look at Magda’s Twitter feed and she looks like she’s got some real problems with people of faith … she’s making some assumptions about what’s motivating people,” Stoker tells Inquirer.

As for Tame’s claim that she had backed a “fake rape crisis tour” by controversial men’s rights activist Bettina Arndt, she insists that too is a misrepresentation, confusing her condemnation of Arndt being de-plat­formed with support for what she had to say — which is a different matter entirely.

What didn’t make headlines was what went on behind the scenes after Stoker made good on a public commitment to reach out to Tame. She is scrolling through her phone, trying to find the message thread on her Instagram account.

“Where are you Grace? Messages, messages … here we are,” she says, opening the file. “It’s dated the 31st of March and I said, ‘Hi Grace, Amanda Stoker here. I wondered if you would like to meet to discuss ways we could work together on women’s safety. Is there a day or time that suits you? My office is in Brisbane but I can find a location convenient to you if you let me know what works.’ ”

No reply.

Stoker followed up on Wednesday this week, asking again whether they could catch up because she would “love to have your input”. Still no response.

Her take out? “It tells me it was a bit of a cheap political shot. But it probably means she didn’t know my history, either.”

It’s quite some story, and not at all what you might expect given the splash Stoker has made since entering the Senate in 2018 via the casual vacancy created by the departure of then attorney-general and leading Liberal moderate George Brandis to London in the plum post of Australian High Commissioner.

She might look and sound as blue-blooded as the navy dress she is wearing, her hair primly bobbed, eloquent and whip-smart, but this purported soldier of the Christian Right hails from a working class background in Campbelltown in Sydney’s outer west and says her values are grounded there as much as they are in the Bible.

Her father, Mark, ran a plumbing business from home while mum Connie juggled part-time work as a pharmacy assistant with keeping the books and looking after little Amanda and sister Susan, 14 months her junior. Both their grandfathers were staunch Labor men.

They were baptised Anglican, but the family weren’t church­goers. Everyone was busy. Amanda’s marks earned her a place at the selective Hurlstone Agricultural High School at Glenfield and then a full scholarship to study arts-law at Sydney University.

At the height of Australia’s last recession in the early 1990s, when Bob Hawke and Paul Keating were calling the shots in Canberra and Mark Latham was the local Labor MP, she vividly recalls sitting on the lino at home, listening to her mother plead on the phone for more time to pay a bill. “I remember thinking, it just doesn’t make sense to me that people who work this hard, who are good people, who do the right thing … that they are finding it so difficult. That sort of stayed with me.”

At uni, she found the Liberal Party, religion and her husband, Adam. They married in 2005, not long before she graduated with honours and secured a sought-after clerkship with Brisbane-based High Court judge Ian Callinan. The couple moved north and decided the sunny Queensland capital was for them. Stoker became associate to local Supreme Court judge Philip McMurdo and, intent on a career at the bar, signed on as a prosecutor with the Commonwealth DPP before entering private practice. Phew. She was yet to turn 30.

One of the things to understand about Stoker is that she is a relentless networker. She now counts as friends progressive-minded McMurdo and his wife, Margaret, a fellow judge who went on to head the Lawyer X royal commission in Melbourne. Stoker is proud of the work she did as a barrister to represent women subjected to domestic violence and sexual harassment, often pro bono, and pointedly says Tame might have taken that on board before she went after her.

Old guard LNP powerbroker Gary Spence is a mentor, and she speaks admiringly of David Goodwin and his mother, Jenny, boss of the party’s women’s section. Both are identified with the emergent Christian Right of the LNP and figure in a revolt against the party organisation that threatens to impact on Stoker’s position on the LNP Senate ticket. “They’re lovely people,” she says of them.

Having cut her teeth in the snakepit of Liberal factional politics in NSW, her early moves north of the border were calculated if not a touch presumptuous. She and Adam, also a lawyer, had barely settled in when she shot up her hand for preselection in the then state seat of Cleveland ahead of the 2009 Queensland election. The couple even moved to Thornlands, near the end of the commuter line, to establish their local credentials. To no avail.

“I was a bit of a clueless kid having a go,” Stoker says. But courtesy of Spence, doors opened. She became Young LNP treasurer and was brought on to the state executive and the kitchen cabinet of the president’s committee as the party’s honorary legal adviser. In 2013, just before she became pregnant with Mary, now 7, the first of three children, she made it onto the Senate ticket in the unwinnable No 6 spot.

It’s fair to say that few in the LNP saw it coming when the newly-minted senator delivered a tub-thumping speech to an anti-abortion rally in Brisbane in March 2018, after she clinched Brandis’s position. “I was surprised and people involved in the preselection were surprised as well,” says Graham Young, a ­former vice-president of the pre-amalgamation Queensland Liberal Party who has worked with Stoker through his think tank, the Australian Institute for Progress.

“I didn’t know she had any particularly strong views on abortion,” he says.

Until then, some in the LNP regarded her as a moderate in the Brandis tradition, a proposition she laughingly rejects: “George ­always regarded me as too conservative for his liking.” But suspicion lingers that her perceived embrace of the Christian Right — on the march in the LNP through David Goodwin’s insurgent efforts — was more about the numbers than conviction, and she deliberately courted controversy as a culture warrior to raise her profile. As one bemused parliamentary colleague notes: “You wouldn’t want to get between Amanda and a microphone.”

Stoker dismisses such talk, of course. “I think that’s a narrative that suits a current political competitor,” she says. It’s as close as she will go to addressing the hard-fought preselection contest with sitting senator James McGrath for the No 1 spot on the LNP ticket, which guarantees the lead candidate six more years in parliament. Under party rules, second place goes to the Nationals — former cabinet minister Matt Canavan in this case — while the third-placed contender will have to slug it out for a quota with the Labor No 2, One Nation and the Greens.

History is on the side of the LNP No 3 to get up, as has happened at every federal election for past 30 years with the exception of One Nation’s Queensland breakout in 1998. But you can see why neither Stoker nor McGrath, 46, a gifted campaigner who worked on Boris Johnson’s London mayoral campaign in 2008 and was credited with engineering Campbell Newman’s thumping but short-lived 2012 state election victory, would want to take the chance.

Vendettas and agendas of all kinds are swirling round the contest ahead of D-Day on May 1 at the LNP State Council, a super-panel of about 360 voting delegates drawn from senior ranks of the organisation, federal and state MPs, endorsed local government councillors and party grandees.

If Stoker goes top of the ticket, it will demonstrate the clout of the Christian Right group that is backing her and set the scene for an organisational purge at the LNP State Convention in July.

Stoker says she’s in no one’s pocket and professes to draw support from all sections of the party. “I am a classical liberal with the ordinary conservative view that says social change should happen incrementally. I don’t think that’s a wild perspective,” she insists.

But that’s not how McGrath’s supporters see it. Colourful and at times zany, he is respected and well-liked. When not in Canberra, he roams regional Queensland clocking up points with the LNP rank and file, who like that he lives in a converted winery two hour’s west of Brisbane and works out of an office in Nambour, north of the capital. While both sides say they are confident of their numbers on State Council, the truth is no one can say for sure which way this opaque and unpredictable instrument of the LNP will lean.

“It’s James on the road versus Amanda on Sky,” says one party identity who is friendly with both of them. The truly bizarre feature of the contest is that all concerned are barred from speaking publicly about it by hardline party rules that are a focus of the internal unrest.

Thus, the outspoken Stoker can propound on why she opposes abortion: “It’s not pro-woman to take people who are vulnerable, people who are finding themselves in an unexpected place and tell them the only thing we can offer you is help to kill your baby”; she can decry voluntary assisted dying: “It’s a cop-out. If we do what should on palliative care, this would not seem like an attractive option”; and she can argue there is a “world of difference between ­acceptance and affirmation” of teenage gender transition.

But this champion of free speech is suddenly tongue-tied when asked about being gagged by her own party. “I have feelings about that,” she admits, choosing her words carefully. “I can understand the reasons for the rule, but it is unusual.”

Associate Editor

Brisbane

Jamie Walker is an Associate Editor of The Australian, based in Brisbane. In 30 years on the paper he has served as Europe Correspondent (1998-2001), Middle East Correspondent (2015-16) and managed domestic bur… Read more

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