Jane Caro and the Reason revolution: you’re soaking in it

“The most famous ad I wrote,” says Jane Caro, as we stride down Park Street towards Hyde Park, “was one for washing powder.” She makes a face. “Where this bloke is in a nightclub and asks a woman for her phone number and she …”

“She writes it in lipstick on his shirt and then…” I said excitedly, suddenly recalling it, clear as dazzling clean whites. 

“Yes! Me and the art director put that together. Very proud of that.”

In the ad, as I recall, the young man, staggering home, drops the shirt in a hamper, and in the morning wakes in reverie… and then horror as he hears the machine going. Too late! The power of whatever goop it was has erased his prize. It was very ’90s, high finish, gleaming Anglo couple, the slight naffness of ’90s style, fantasy of another time.

“That opened a lot of doors.”

“I would have sworn that a bloke wrote that.”

“No, that was us. It was designed to try and get blokes to buy more washing powder.”

It occurs to me that may or may not have worked. It’s a castration scenario, of course: the woman, smiling, wielding the lipstick phallus to give the bloke a fake contact, which washes away anyway, the trace of a trace. She got his number, but he never got hers. For the sake of an interview, I decide not to bring this up.

By now, hundreds of red-T-shirted protestors are starting to swarm around us, part of the state’s high school teachers’ strike. We’re on the way too. Caro, not much more than five feet tall, is in an RM Williamsy brown jacket and a tan bush hat, a half dozen of her supporters swarming around her, in teal and white Reason T-shirts, grouping and regrouping as they give out a few leaflets — “Don’t overdo it” — for Caro’s Senate campaign, as part of said Reason Party.

She has a commanding style; it must also be said she has a vague look of Paddington Bear, as though that Peruvian ursine suddenly got militant and joined the Shining Path (Paddingto e la Senderosa Luminosa hasta la victoria siempre).

“Well, anyway, that was advertising, which I’d stumbled into and stayed with for decades, copywriting. There were a bunch of us, women in advertising. We supported each other.” They would have needed to in Australian advertising in the ’80s and ’90s, when stalking the land were big beasts like Singo and co — bloody Singo, have a beer, have 60, wehredya get it? Let’s put the “lunch” on the company account. Are you with me!

Between then and now, Caro, well, you knew her… she’s been everywhere, done everything. Two decades ago, out of frustration with the continued iniquity of the state/private school funding split, she wrote an op-ed on it for the SMH out of the blue in defence of the beleagured notion of a genuinely fully-funded system, oriented to lessening inequality of opportunity, and hasn’t looked back. Since then, a torrent of articles, documentaries, public speaking, spreading out from education, to environment, to violence against women, and beyond. 

So when it was announced that Caro was running for the Senate in this election, no one was surprised that she had joined the fray. When it was on the Reason ticket, there were more than a few raised eyebrows. Reason has been largely the vehicle for Fiona Patten, formerly head of the Sex Party, the closest and most successful thing Australia has had to a genuine libertarian outfit. Patten is the former head of the Eros Foundation, which was either a bold champion of liberation or the peak body for some dodgy brothels, with their own expertise on women’s oppression, or a bit o’ both, depending upon your politics.

But as the politics of bohemia shifted, so has Patten’s politics, to a mix of the old libertarianism — championing voluntary assisted dying, for example — while also pushing what it would once have called nanny-stateism, establishing, for example, a state “ministry against loneliness”. Reason is running on — well, what everyone on this side is running on this time: really address climate change; put in a system of real accountability; revive the public sector in health, education and the rest. They have a stronger emphasis on consultation, democratisation and policy detail than the Greens, the old Sexo’s having become a German-style, left ordoliberal outfit. You’re soaking in it.

So the big question for someone like Caro is, why Reason? As a progressive, why not join and build the Greens?

“Because they didn’t ask me. And Reason did.” She says this without rancour or arrogance, though it does not escape a whiff of it, the notion that a party joins you, rather than the other way round.

By now, we were at Hyde Park, an absolute sea of red T-shirts, a few rainbow, some a motley of other colours from specific schools (“Hyde Macquarie Fighting Bolshevik Brigade”). There was a rocking sound system, and hardcore chanting over and over. “When I say teachers, you say power. TEACHERS!” “POWER!” “NO TEACHERS, NO FUTURE” the chant continued, though that one could have been written approvingly by Year 11s. 

“Besides, with regards to Reason and the Greens, I did like the idea of a smaller party, and an evidence-based one.”

“Evidence as opposed to…”

“Well, as opposed to a consensus-based party.”

Many Greens would be pleasantly surprised to hear that the bone-crushing Greens Machine is consensus-based, but let that pass. 

“But there’s always got to be a political decision in the end. Science doesn’t enact itself…”

“Yes, but –” Jane jumps in, before someone, a cheery young women bustles up. “Oh Jane, I just had to say, you’re an absolute inspiration to me. You put things so clearly…”

I give them a bit of privacy, and talk to a couple of Caro’s supporters. Actually more than a couple of Team Caro here are very Team Caro, relatives and personal friends of the candidate, an increasing trend among these small-party and independent candidates. Suburban warlords with a T-shirt army, ranging over the leafy hills. 

Jane is finishing up. “And together we can get the job done!”

She’s imparted some sort of buzz to the young woman, who goes away a little floaty. That’s probably the Caro effect. There’s a touch of the Vegemites there, love it or hate it. For many, Caro is the embodiment of progressivity, and positivity, the sense of liberation coming out of the 1970s, of realising a destiny. She’s a diminutive household god for many in that generation. For some coming later, she represents boomer blitheness, a worldview based on affordable housing, from a time when the atmosphere wasn’t trying to kill you, the personification of a generation that doesn’t get it about how it is now.

To be evidence-based, a lot of that is simply ex-Honi Soit, post-libertarian, Marxist, burnout Twitter, which is about 40% of Sydney Twitter, but they can be vocal about it. Some have been in conniptions about Caro’s latest project, a novel called The Mother, about a heroic mum’s attempt to save her daughter from violent coercive control, and which… well, Jane is no Diane Demetre, who would have had the daughter rescued by a sheikh landing his helicopter in the backyard and whisking the daughter away to found a dynasty in the sparkling desert sands — and could do with it. (I’m onto my third Demetre, Retribution, about a sniper who falls in love with the woman he’s supposed to assassinate. More please, but my God, the number of these new candidates with books. This election has a reading list like a 19th-century novel course.)

The boomer thing is also unfair of course, since a lot of Caro’s long war on the education front has been about the erosion of a commitment to lessening inequality that we were pursuing for a few decades, until it came up hard. “Had I joined the Greens, the advantage for them would have been someone advocating public education among a lot of people sending their kids to private schools,” she says, with a cheeky laugh. But she also mentions that her husband — college sweetheart — as a drinks merchant, introduced Veuve Clicquot to Australia, and if she is victorious, they will thus toast her triumph. Boomers. Nothing like them before, nothing since. “We’ve got John Bell doing a TV ad for us.”

“Look, the bottom line is the Greens have no chance of winning a second Senate seat, so without us it would have just gone to the right. Effectively Reason is a place where lower house teal voters can put their Senate vote.” You can’t really argue with that. The Greens aren’t complaining and, to be honest, you never know what’s going on behind the scenes, really. 

The demonstration, not an action but a good old-fashioned, new-fashioned mass demonstration, swells to fill the park ahead of marching on Parliament, and Team Caro dives into the sea of red, a small teal wave. The Greens haven’t arrived yet, but when they do, c’est formidable, about 25 of them, all in green with a green flag on a long pole. Perched on a slight rise in Hyde Park, they look over the minor party formations like the Savoyard cavalry surveying the hapless Piedmontese, about to take them apart. 

Team Caro has been swallowed up by the sea of red, but the last thing I hear is from the podium: “I SAY TEACHERS YOU SAY POWER. I SAY — OH, I’VE JUST GOT TO TAKE A FAN PHOTO WITH JANE CARO. SHE’S HERE, SHE GETS THE JOB DONE!”

She does at that. Will she do so come May 21? I’m still enough of a partyista to believe that the left should build the Greens, or further left parties, but as I say, you can’t deny the perverse logic our system demands: unity in difference. In the end, it’s all in the numbers.