Once upon a time I would be mistaken for Joan Kirner. I used to look sufficiently like her to fool those who hadn't met her in person. I still get questions about whether I 'miss politics'. I've got a great pic of her, the folk singer Judy Small and me at a fundraiser in 2006. We could be sisters.
I first met Joan in 1990 when, as Commissioner for Equal Opportunity for Victoria, I was facing a tough time dealing with death by a thousand cuts and interference with my independence by the Justice Department and a then-hostile legal profession.
I got near-instant access and a wry, kind lecture on how to expand the influence of a positive but slight meeting with a powerful office-holder: take notes, confirm what happened in writing as soon as possible after the meeting, and make sure the bastards giving me grief know that she knows, and she cares. They were far more polite for a while after that.
The next time I heard her gentle voice was on a conference phone when she enquired, quite properly, about the process I would use to address an embarrassingly public sexual harassment complaint against one of her Ministers. She did not ask for and he did not get any special treatment. The glare of publicity began for me, as it turned up the heat on her in the lead-up to the next election.
The former community education activist turned Labor MP and former Minister responsible for Landcare and education change, had graciously agreed to lead the party to an inevitable thrashing by the Kennett opposition. Her treatment at Kennett's and the media's hands was savage and sexist. It hurt, but she didn't let on. Her health was very much affected.
Yet she was not considered 'sick enough' to retire on ill-health grounds when she left the Parliament. She got no superannuation on the assessment of a doctor making his decision while Jeff was changing superannuation policy to punish 'the guilty party'.
She wouldn't challenge this nor talk about it, and I first learned of it while I was researching her biography more than ten years ago. It left her grateful to her friends who raised funds to pay for a specialist medical treatment for one of the illnesses she had begun to evince in 1994 — osteoporosis. Oddly, the oesophageal condition she had in 1994 was diagnosed as cancerous in 2013.
Joan's outstanding quality was