TRANSCRIPT Annabel Crabb City Recital Hall, Angel Place, Sydney Wednesday 25 November 2015 Anne Summers: Good evening, everybody, and welcome to tonight's conversation with the fantastic Annabel Crabb. This is the fifth and the final of the conversation events that I've held this year, and I'm so glad that you can be here for it. Some of you will know that my previous guests this year have been, on this stage also, General David Morrison, footballer Adam Goodes, former Sex Discrimination commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, and, at Sydney University, Nimco Ali, who was our first international guest, a British Somalian campaigner against female genital mutilation, and tonight, our final guest, Annabel Crabb. Those of you who have been before will know that there are three criteria that I use to select the guests. The first is, of course, that the person must have something to say. Secondly, what they have to say is not overexposed, we're not sick to death of listening to them. While we might feel with Annabel that we see a lot of her on television, it's worth remembering that she's usually the one asking the questions, so we don't really know a lot about what she herself thinks,.So tonight we're turning the tables on Ms. Crabb, and we'll be asking her what she thinks about various things. Finally, the final criteria, and in some ways the most important, is that in talking to the person, that we learn not just about them, but we learn something about ourselves, that they add something to the Australian story. We'll end tonight knowing a little bit more about ourselves, I hope. Before I welcome Annabel to stage, I would like to pay my respects to the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and pay my respects to their elders, past and present. This is, was, and always will be Aboriginal land, and I thank the custodians for allowing us to meet. Now I'd like to welcome Annabel. There are many things about Annabel of course that I'm sure you're very familiar with but there are two things that I want to mention as I invite her on stage. These are two things that she has said about herself, that she clearly considers to be important, because she mentions them in her Twitter bio, on her Twitter handle. Those of you who follow her on Twitter know that she has almost 300,000 followers, so this is what she wants people to know about her. The first thing is that she is a Kohlrabi fancier, always a good thing in a girl, I think. The second thing, and the thing that really attracts me much more, because I think this is admirable and there should be a lot more of it, is that I would like us to welcome Annabel Crabb - apostrophe law-abider - to the stage. Annabel Crabb: Lovely, thank you. Anne Summers: I do like a bit of law abiding when it comes to apostrophes. Annabel Crabb: There should be capital punishment involved. Anne Summers: Today, of course, is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, also known as White Ribbon Day in Australia, and I'd like to acknowledge that. I'm very relieved that our banner is orange, which is the colour of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. I'm sure Annabel won't mind my mentioning her ABC colleague, Sarah Ferguson's, wonderful program, Hitting Home, which began on television last night and will be on again tonight. It'll start probably before any of us manage to get home, but I would encourage you, if you haven't already taped it, to catch up with it on IView. They are very, very important programs. I don't really expect that we'll be speaking so much about violence per se tonight, we have many other subjects we're going to touch upon, but I think it is worth remembering some comments that were made on this stage on 7 May this year by Elizabeth Broderick, when she said that violence is both a cause and a consequence of gender inequality. I think we will be talking quite a bit about, whether we call it feminism, women's equality, gender equity, or whatever we want to call it, it's the same thing, and we will certainly be talking about it tonight. One other thing I wanted to ask you first, Annabel, one of the things that really fascinated me when looking at your biography, was something I didn't know about you, was that when you were a student at Adelaide University in the mid-'90s. You were actually a Women's Officer at the Students Association. I was very interested to read this - for a couple of reasons. One is because you are the generation that was entitled to assume in the mid-'90s that all these issues had been fixed and life would just be wonderful, so I'm wondering why you wanted to be a Women's Officer. I was also very pleased to read about it because I too went to Adelaide University, and that's in fact where I discovered feminism, or women's liberation, as we used to call it back then. I'm glad to see that my Alma Mater maintains its reputation for female insurrection. Perhaps you could tell us why you decided, why you wanted to be a Women's Officer, and what did it involve? Annabel Crabb: I was looking at that picture that we took together before just backstage, and I was thinking that I really wish I could send that picture of us to my university self, it would've been incredibly thrilled to see it. Samantha Maiden, my friend at Adelaide Uni, who is a political journalist too now, we used to prance around the campus holding Damned Whores and God's Police. It was a very seminal text for us. I don't know, I grew up in the country, and I wasn't really especially radicalized as a feminist on the Adelaide Plains, but I guess as I read a lot and I read a couple of texts, quite disparate ones, I suppose, that I found quite inspirational. I read A Room of One's Own, I read The Female Eunuch, and I read Damned Whores and God's Police. I don't know, I got very interested in the issue of gender equality. I was into student politics a bit when I was at university, but I wasn't very attracted to joining the Labor Party or the Liberal Party, and I never did, but I was very interested in feminist issues. I ran for the office of Women's Officer. I can't recall if it was a contested election. Anne Summers: You can't remember your campaign slogan? Annabel Crabb: I can't, no. They're usually bad puns on surnames. God knows what I came up with for Crabb, but I think it's probably best left buried in the time capsule of the 1990s. There were lots of issues on campus about conduct, representation, sexual harassment. There was a massive issue, I remember, while I was Women's Officer, that was to do with the residential colleges, one in particular at the University of Adelaide, where there were some quite serious behavioural issues. That was probably one of the most hard-fought issues, I suppose, that I recall. I was also there with lots of people who wound up in federal politics. Penny Wong was the doyenne at the Labor Club on campus. Christopher Pyne was there. I used to debate against him, university debating, because I was quite a nerd. Andrew Southcott, Mark Butler, Nick Xenophon was not long gone from that campus. Yeah, I met all the people who wound up being quite significant in my later career, which I was not anticipating at that point. Anne Summers: It raises another question, and that is, what is it about Adelaide? Annabel Crabb: You tell me, Anne. Anne Summers: As somebody who's also from Adelaide, I feel quite qualified to speak about this. I was just very taken the other day when there was all this brouhaha about your Kitchen Cabinet interview with Scott Morrison, which we'll come to later. Annabel Crabb: My sideline in humanizing monsters. Anne Summers: Yes, that one. Of the many articles that were written about the subject, there was one by John Birmingham in which he described you as, and I couldn't believe all these things that were being said about you, because he said because you were “nice”. The reason he said you were nice is because you come from Adelaide. I thought, "Only somebody from Brisbane could say this." Annabel Crabb: That's true. Anne Summers: Adelaide is, as I'm sure Annabel ... No, she might not remember, because this was said in 1984, but when Salman Rushdie attended the very first Adelaide Writers Week, he made the comment that Adelaide is like Amityville or Salem and things here go bump in the night. He said it would be a great place to set a Stephen King novel. Annabel Crabb: That's so kind, these visiting writers. It reminds me of that great thing that, I think it was Clement Freud once said about New Zealand, where he said, I think it was Clement Freud, he said, "I went to New Zealand, but it appeared to be shut." Anne Summers: Whereas in Adelaide, and you told me backstage that your parents who have a farm, is it still at Two Wells? Annabel Crabb: It's currently ablaze of course.