Can you spot our new Premier?

Q: Can you spot our new Premier?  A: That's him front and centre, just like today.

EVERYONE remembers the hair. A big, ginger cloud curling madly around Nathan Rees' freckled face, it made the 17-year-old stand out from the crowd at Northmead High in 1985.

Classmate Manny Chetcuti, who now lives in California, recalls watching Rees' orange mane bounce over the hurdles at athletics carnivals, where he invariably came first. Rod Bradbury, who still lives in western Sydney, recalls it whipping in the wind as Rees raced up the wing on the hockey field. In the class photo, the hairdo is like a beacon: front row, centre. Three spots away sits his girlfriend, Stacey Haines.

There was a sense of entitlement about the young Rees -- but he was also widely regarded as a decent fella -- so much so, that when Rees decided to nominate for the position of school captain at the beginning of their final year, nobody stood against him.

``He was elected unopposed,'' remembers Bradbury. ``Everyone liked him, I guess.''

Twenty years later, Rees -- now with his hair cropped conservatively, the orange hue slightly faded -- came around for a cuppa at Ray Jackson's Waterloo home one Sunday evening in 2005. Jackson thought it might be his lucky day. The Aboriginal elder had been lobbying for a reopened inquest into the death of Aboriginal boy TJ Hickey, and was used to getting the brush-off from the office of NSW aboriginal affairs minister Milton Orkopoulos, so he was amazed when Rees -- who was Orkopoulos' chief of staff -- and Warwick Neilley from the Premier's office dropped around for a chat.

When the men arrived, it was clear they didn't want to talk about TJ Hickey. ``Nathan's reply to that was it was time to move on,'' Jackson says. ``He dismissed it out of hand. Then we got into this crass discussion about the Aboriginal Housing Company.''

The Housing Company is a long-time annoyance for the government -- it runs the troubled Redfern community known as The Block, which is slated for redevelopment -- and Housing Company boss Mick Mundine differs with the government's plans for the site.

According to Jackson, Rees and Neilley had come up with a nifty solution to the problem -- a coup.
``What it boiled down to was would I be interested, obviously with the government's under-the-covers support, in challenging Mick Mundine and taking over the company,'' Jackson says, adding he promptly kicked the men out. ``I was incensed,'' Jackson says.

Rees says he doesn't recall any suggested coup and says he always tried to respect opinion leaders and elders. Working on the area makes him feel ``morally compelled'' to try to address such problems as literacy and health, he says. ``It's an area that for too many years governments haven't got right. I think governments have tried a lot of things often with the right intention but none of them have worked to anything like the degree I would have liked. So it's a clear priority.''

When Rees was elected to the NSW Parliament in 2007, he had one clear priority: ask Stacey Haines to marry him. She had remained his girlfriend, bar the odd wobble, since schooldays and Rees had been waiting for the right moment. There was a brief window of opportunity before then premier Morris Iemma named his Cabinet the following week -- Rees knew he had a good chance of being made a minister, and didn't want anyone to think he was proposing either because he'd had a rush of blood to the head, or because he thought it was a good look to be married. Especially not Stacey.

``I didn't want my proposal to be misinterpreted by anyone, least of all her, so it didn't occur in a period when anyone could say: `That's just him being a politician','' Rees says. He's always been careful to say he and Haines have ``had our up and downs'', and admits they split up at one point, but when asked to describe his fiancee, he gets all emotional.

``Oh, I'll cry if you make me go through all that,'' he says, then promptly chokes up. ``I'm not kiddin', I'm crying. She's the most generous and decent and loving person I've met in my life.''

Everyone who talks about Rees mentions four qualities: determination, decency, intelligence, and mongrel. ``He doesn't suffer fools'' is a common theme -- which, as always when that phrase is used, means he has a tendency to be rude.

``You Greens just belong in the caves,'' he once told Greens leader Ian Cohen in a parliamentary lift, after Cohen suggested Rees (then Water Minister) drop plans for a desalination plant.

Even Rees' friends call him stroppy. ``He's no shrinking violet, let's put it that way,'' one says. ``He was the staffer you went to when you needed heads knocking together,'' another says. In the aboriginal affairs and health portfolios, which he handled while working for a string of ministers, stakeholders describe him variously as blunt, impatient and ``completely bloody rude''.

Of the dozens of friends, associates and colleagues interviewed for this story, all said he was personable in private life -- but could be seriously prickly in a work environment.

Parramatta Lord Mayor Paul Barber, who has known Rees for a decade, has had some bruising encounters with him over heritage and other issues. ``A few times he's given me -- I won't call it a gobful, but -- a strong indication of how he felt,'' Barber says, ``but I respected that.''

``And that's why he'll be an effective premier. He won't take any rubbish from his team. They'll perform or they'll just be replaced.''

Among senior Labor figures -- and across the factions -- there is admiration for Rees' guts in taking on the premiership at such a depressing moment.

Former Whitlam government minister and Labor left stalwart Tom Uren, who has been close friends with Rees' mother Frances for years, was touched in August when Nathan Rees came to the 150th anniversary party of Parramatta Park, where Uren is chairman of the park trust. It had recently become clear Rees was willing to take the premiership if Morris Iemma stood aside. ``I told him I thought it was a courageous decision, and I hope he gets a fair go from the NSW party,'' says Uren, 87. ``I'm not saying this to be boastful, but I told him I was proud of him. I chose the word `courageous' carefully -- if I didn't have so much faith in Labor, and in Nathan's ability, I would have said `foolish'.''

Rees has heard the same comment from dozens of people in his first fortnight -- but he's pleased the adjective is `brave', not `stupid'. ``They're not saying: `You guys can't do it','' Rees says.

So does he feel courageous? ``You never know how you'll react to these situations until you're thrust into them,'' he says. ``I guess my instinctive reaction has just been to get on with the job. There's no time for self-indulgence.''

Some Australian politicians slowly round their vowels in public life, ending up sounding like BBC announcers, but Rees -- like deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard -- has preserved a no-frills accent. ``We're going to get cracking,'' he keeps saying, ``we'll have a red-hot go.''

But that doesn't mean he pretends to be stupid, or plays down his education or taste for the liberal arts.
Even when the most prosaic parts of politics are under discussion, Rees can find a literary allusion. At the press conference on Matt Brown's sacking, Rees was quoting The Crucible, by Arthur Miller, one of the authors on whom his honours thesis focused. ``I don't want anybody saying: `I saw Goody Proctor dancing with the devil','' Rees said -- he wanted any suspicions of misconduct raised with him directly. ``It's a different show now and we will hold our parliamentarians accountable,'' he said. ``Politics isn't what it was 20 or 30 years ago and there is an old guard that doesn't realise the rules have changed.''
An old friend of Rees, Catholic priest and arts funding activist Father Arthur Bridge, always laughs when Rees is portrayed as westie-made-good.

``He might give the image of the simple garbo but he's far from it. He's a very articulate, interesting man with a good degree of sophistication,'' says Bridge, who went on the hustings with Rees in the 2007 campaign.

Born in 1968 to Labor activists Frances and Darryl Rees, Rees was a bright kid who did well at school, but ``wasn't real studious'' until about the last eight weeks of Year 12, when he suddenly realised things could be ugly if he didn't work hard. His mother, a solid left-wing supporter who worked for ministers including Tom Uren, has described him as a handful, but Rees says he ``didn't have a lot of detentions, I left all that behind in Year 8 or thereabouts. I don't think I'm the only 14- or 15-year-old that was hard work for mum and dad''.

He won the role of Noah Claypole in a school production of Oliver, and was startled to see his character described in the program as ``Undertaker's Pimply Apprentice.'' Until then, Rees hadn't thought of himself as pimply. ``It was a shock to the system, as you can understand.'' After a massive effort at the end of Year 12, involving up to eight hours' study a night, he got a ``reasonable HSC, but once I'd done it, the notion of doing it again filled me with horror''.

That meant university was out for a while, so he began a horticulture apprenticeship with Parramatta Council, then became a greenkeeper before beginning an Arts degree at Sydney University with the aim of becoming a teacher, working nights as a garbologist. In 1992, a car accident ended his dreams of Olympic cycling. ``It was about seven on a Sunday morning in February and a driver saw me coming, did a u-turn and just wiped me out, broke my shoulder.'' Was he angry? ``You get pretty fatalistic about these things.''

Cycling continued as a hobby, and is part of the reason Rees has never got a driver's licence. During his apprenticeship he lived only a few minutes' walk from work and, while living in the Blue Mountains during his degree, he was close to the train station.

But once the chances of serious competitive cycling faded, Rees' focus became work in the department of Veterans' Affairs. He'd decided he couldn't afford another year at university doing a teaching diploma and instead became a base-grade clerk at the DVA, a job he'd been inspired to take by listening to the stories of his grandfather Arthur Mervyn, a World War II veteran who had ended up in an iron lung after serving in Papua New Guinea, and the numerous Korean War and Vietnam vets with whom he worked at Parramatta council.

``That was where I realised the effect that war has on people's lives,'' he says. ``It was my first white-collar job, and a massive eye-opener for me. I was very, very lucky that a couple of senior people in the organisation must have identified something, and went out of their way to take a few risks to support me.''

A passion for government work was born and, in 1997, he joined the family business -- taking a job as a Labor adviser in the office of then health minister Andrew Refshauge, where Frances had also worked. Over the next decade, he moved on to jobs with successive health ministers Craig Knowles and Morris Iemma, then as a premier's adviser to Bob Carr and Iemma again. All those ex-ministers speak highly today of Rees' handling of tricky issues such as Carr's 1999 drug summit and the subsequent trial of a safe injecting room at Kings Cross. Former deputy premier John Watkins describes him as having ``enormous moral courage. He stands up for what he believes in''.

Balancing the opposing views on drug control, ``all completely valid'', was a particularly keen experience for Rees, who had undergone his own personal epiphany on the merit of ``harm minimisation'' several years earlier. ``Someone close to me admitted to me that they had a serious drug problem. I had previously expressed very conservative views on how society should deal with that issue, all of a sudden when it affects someone close to you, it's about them, and what measures do you want in place to make sure they're looked after,'' Rees says.

Rees spent a year as chief of staff to aboriginal affairs minister Milton Orkopoulos, leaving to work for Iemma just days before Orkopoulos began co-operating with police on child sex allegations that later saw the politician jailed. By 2007, Rees was himself in Parliament and a few days after the election Iemma made him minister for water and emergency services.

That partly explains one of the reasons it took Labor so long to axe Iemma -- Rees had a deep sense of loyalty to Iemma, who had effectively brought Rees into parliament. When preselections for western Sydney seats in the 2007 election were being decided, the party's Left-wing local baron, federal MP Laurie Ferguson, decided who were to be the candidates. Rees' name was not on his list -- even though Rees was convinced he had the support of local branch members.

Rees, according to observers, was furious that Ferguson had backtracked on an earlier commitment to support him, and went to see the MP in his office, telling him words to the effect: ``Mate, you need to know I'm not one of your stooges. I'm not just going to drop off.''

Before long, Rees had some heavyweight backing of his own: Iemma and Left faction leader Luke Foley, who persuaded party bigwigs, including secretary Mark Arbib and deputy premier John Watkins to back Rees. They took the issue to the party's national executive and Rees was duly preselected as the Toongabbie candidate.

``It was a major shift in the power of the Fergusons in that part of Sydney,'' one senior Labor figure says. ``For a young guy to stand his dig and not be dissuaded took some chutzpah.'' Another laughs when asked how Ferguson reacted. ``He wasn't very pleased, let's put it that way.''

It's one of the sad twists of politics that Iemma's prescience in injecting fresh energy made it possible for him to be axed. The Rees front bench includes six ministers from the same round of preselections; four chosen by the national executive at Iemma's urging (Jodi McKay, David Borger, Phil Costa and Rees himself) and two elected by rank-and-file members in the same round (Michael Daley and Verity Firth).
Directness and cut-through have long been marks of Rees' style, says parliamentarian Meredith Burgmann, who has known him since his adolescence. ``Nathan was always technically regarded as (in the) soft Left (faction) because of his mother's connections, but I don't think he ever really regarded himself as a factional person,'' Burgmann says. ``I'm a fan of Nathan's. I think he's brilliant.''

One old political friend of Rees says he has all the political brutality of Paul Keating, but lacks Keating's conscious charm. ``One of Nathan's problems is that he doesn't flick the switch to vaudeville. He's a no-nonsense bloke and he never went out of his way to cultivate the colleagues in the caucus.'' That was deeply annoying to the senior strategists who were trying to persuade Rees to take over the premiership from February until September -- they wanted him to start a campaign of wooing his comrades with lunches and dinners. Rees just wasn't interested. ``He never went out of his way to flatter anyone or stroke egos or ingratiate himself,'' one Rees backer recalls.

Long lunches might not be the best way for a health nut like Rees to do business, anyway -- the pinstriped crowd at upmarket Italian lunchery Beppi's were startled one day to see Rees getting a little shabby over a few glasses of grappa across the table from Frank Sartor, prompting nudged remarks about how Labor has changed. A generation ago two senior ministers would have drunk the joint dry before they showed even the slightest hint of inebriation.

There was no honeymoon period for Rees as Premier; as the factions recalibrated and Rees installed his Cabinet, a new breed of disgruntled outsiders began sniping. ``Rees is a puppet of the factions, just like Iemma. The difference is that everyone loved Iemma. The difference with Nathan is that nobody has any loyalty to him, really,'' says one.

Rees' handling of the Matt Brown affair -- swiftly sacking the exuberant police minister after the underpants dance was revealed -- brought schadenfreude and admiration in equal measure.
``Rees has just gone from being red hot to having a red-hot poker up his a***,'' said one disaffected Labor figure after the Matt Brown affair.

But Rees' allies saw it as a good opportunity for Rees to show voters his mettle. ``I don't think it hurt Nathan,'' one Labor powerbroker says. ``It hurt the Labor brand but Nathan handled it brilliantly and decisively.'' After Rees' first fortnight, senior Labor figures are more optimistic about the party's fortunes than they have been for a long time.

``We have a long way to go,'' says one, ``a long, long, long way to go. But there is a ray of light.''

Source: The Sunday Telegraph 21st September 2008