In Sam Dastyari's voice, there is shock. And something that sounds suspiciously like excitement. "They're saying I'm a Chinese spy!" he says. It is Father's Day – Sunday, September 4 – and the NSW Labor senator is phoning me from the centre of a political storm that is raging in the national capital. "God, what a week," he says. "I'm going to tell you what it feels like to be hit by a hurricane."
Strange, that I should find myself in the role of Dastyari's confidante. At the time of the phone call, I have known him for only a month – since I started compiling this profile piece. My first impression of him is fresh in my mind: a diminutive figure with a helmet of luxuriant dark hair and, from some angles, a disconcerting resemblance to Mr Bean. At our initial meeting, at a Starbucks cafe in central Sydney, I was struck by his boyishness. And his bounciness. Though 33, and a member of federal parliament for three years, he gave the impression he couldn't quite get over his luck at being allowed to play with the big kids. "Living the dream!" he said, heading to the counter to get us coffee.
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Sam Dastyari quits shadow ministry
The high-profile senator quits Labor's front bench but will stay on in parliament. Courtesy ABC News 24.
I had decided to write about Dastyari because he was a rising star in Canberra, with what seemed to me an admirable knack of seriously annoying the rich and powerful. He had led a crusade against tax avoidance by multinational corporations, for instance. He had started Labor's campaign for a royal commission into the banking industry. Whether or not that inquiry eventuated, he was pretty sure his name would continue to be spoken through gritted teeth in executive suites of the country's major financial institutions. "These people hate me," he told me happily. "These guys say, 'He's reckless and dangerous and he's going to destroy the Australian economy.' "
By Father's Day, others are calling Dastyari reckless and dangerous. Suddenly it isn't only the economy that he is accused of putting at risk, but national security as well. According to the headlines, he has twice asked companies with links to the Chinese government to pay work-related bills for him. What's more, someone has dug up a report in the Chinese-language media that quotes him as saying Australia should respect China's stance in territorial disputes in the South China Sea – a position directly at odds with both Labor policy and that of the Liberal-National Coalition government. On Sky News, South Australian Liberal senator Cory Bernardi has asked: "Do we have our very own Manchurian Candidate?"
On the phone, Dastyari makes no excuses. "I massively fucked up," he says. We decide to sit down together the next day, so he can explain to me how it happened. He is confident he will survive the scandal, but frankly I am not so sure. It seems to me entirely possible that Shanghai Sam, as members of the government are calling him, will have been banished to the political wilderness by the time my story is published. Before Dastyari ends the call, he urges me to look on the bright side. Whatever happens, people are going to be curious to read about him. "I actually think the piece will be much more interesting now," he says.
Funnily enough, Chinatown was the first place I went with Dastyari, back when I thought he was an uncomplicated subject. From Starbucks, we made our way through the city to the Emperor's Garden restaurant in Hay Street, where a sizeable posse of Chinese-language journalists and assorted political types were milling about amid lights, leads, TV cameras and signs that said "Stop Racism" in 10 languages. Dastyari had called a press conference to emphasise Labor's commitment to multiculturalism and concern about the resurgence of the xenophobic One Nation party. Before proceedings began, he moved through the throng, greeting anyone who caught his eye with a delighted cry – "Hey!" – and a handshake so exuberant that it was almost a high-five (the right arm swept upward and outward, reaching shoulder height before swinging down and clasping the hand being proffered to him). He leaned in for a minute or two of intensive schmoozing, then turned his attention to the next person.
Later, he went outside to record a video with Tony Burke, one of his senior federal Labor parliamentary colleagues. Burke, who is tall, stood in a gutter so that the staffer filming the two men could get both faces in the frame. Dastyari good-humouredly took up a position on the kerb. "The height thing," he said.
After the federal election in July, Labor leader Bill Shorten promoted Dastyari to the shadow ministry, making him spokesman for consumer affairs. Shorten also gave him the key position of manager of opposition business in the senate – essentially, his party's chief tactician in the upper house, where the government had won 30 seats and Labor 26. I knew that the 20 other senators represented a range of minor parties, from the left-wing Greens to conservative Family First, and that Dastyari had to try to persuade as many of them as possible to vote with Labor rather than the government. South Australian independent senator Nick Xenophon told me he believed Dastyari had the energy, enthusiasm and pragmatism to do the job well: "He'll work with just about anyone to achieve an outcome."
![Sam Dastyari.](/web/20170115015550im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/f/g/6/y/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grawbe.png/1474862937289.jpg)
Still, negotiating with the so-called crossbenchers was going to require patience and persistence, which even Dastyari's strongest supporters conceded hadn't previously been his strong suits. "Short attention span," said former Labor foreign minister and NSW premier Bob Carr, citing a frequent criticism of Dastyari. "Hyperactive," said Labor-aligned political strategist Bruce Hawker. At least Dastyari was moving in the right direction, said NSW Labor state parliamentarian Daniel Mookhey, a friend since both were teenagers: "He doesn't really concentrate on anything for more than 10 minutes. But when I first met him, he wouldn't concentrate on anything for more than two."
It was obvious Dastyari would have an uphill battle to win over One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and the three other members of her senate team. Since Hanson's return to parliament after an 18-year absence, she'd given every indication that she disliked him almost as much as the bankers did. During a tense exchange on the ABC's panel program Q&A;, she had fixed him with a sharp look and asked: "Are you a Muslim?" Someone using One Nation's Twitter account then suggested Iranian-born Dastyari might have dual citizenship and therefore be ineligible to sit in the Australian parliament. He tweeted back: "Dear One Nation, you're drunk. Log off."
![Senator Sam Dastyari speaks to the media outside NSW State Parliament House on Tuesday.](/web/20170115015550im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/a/2/d/l/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grawbe.png/1473948794501.jpg)
As part of my research, I spoke to Dastyari's old headmaster, Tony Fugaccia, who said he had contacted the senator after the program to congratulate him on his forthright opposition to both bigotry and corporate greed. "I've had a growing admiration for the way he takes stands – represents people who haven't been terribly well represented in the past," Fugaccia said.
The news story that focuses the attention of the Canberra press gallery on Dastyari is written by Fairfax journalist Latika Bourke and published online on Tuesday, August 30. Drawing on a previously overlooked entry in the register of pecuniary interests that all federal parliamentarians must maintain, Bourke reports that Dastyari forwarded a $1670 bill for an overspend on his parliamentary travel budget to Top Education Institute, a Chinese higher-education provider based in Sydney. As Bourke spells out, this means that "Chinese interests have effectively subsidised the work of the Australian parliament".
Even I was shocked when I got to Canberra. I thought I understood how power in this country was exercised.
Yet Dastyari's initial response is almost nonchalant. On Twitter, he posts a link to the piece and writes: "Fair yarn. While fully disclosed, understand concern, so I'm donating the amount to charity." That evening, he sends me a text message: "It's a really, really weird life at times!!!!!! I love it. But it's so, so strange."
Next thing, I am reading media reports that the charity has knocked back Dastyari's donation on grounds that the money is tainted. In the space of a few hours, he seems to have gone from political princeling to pariah. I turn back to the transcripts of our conversations, searching for clues to his character, wondering what I have missed.
![Senator Sam Dastyari announces he is quitting the shadow ministry.](/web/20170115015550im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/b/5/b/r/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grawbe.png/1473948794501.jpg)
When Dastyari gave his maiden senate speech in 2013, he had the clean-cut appearance and modest demeanour of a junior debating team captain. In reality, he pointed out to me, he was anything but a babe in the woods. "No, no, no," he said, leaning forward to press home the point."I went to Canberra as an operator."
His previous job was general secretary of Labor's NSW branch – in other words, boss of the toughest political machine in the country. He had landed that position at just 26 and held it for three years, in which time he introduced reforms designed to combat the cronyism and corruption for which the branch – dominated by his Right faction – was notorious. By the time he cleaned out his desk at state party HQ at Sydney's Sussex Street, he told me, he considered himself a person with few illusions. "But even I was shocked when I got to Canberra… I thought I understood how power in this country was exercised, but when I got to Canberra I realised how little I knew."
![Senator Sam Dastyari on board Bill Shorten's campaign bus in Sydney.](/web/20170115015550im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/c/3/9/m/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grawbe.png/1473948794501.jpg)
For a start, he hadn't expected the corridors of Parliament House to be clogged with highly paid lobbyists pushing the interests of the top end of town, he said. He hadn't fully appreciated that "a handful of business and corporate interests really do completely dominate the political debate". In this group, he included Australia's big banks.
As chair of the senate economics references committee during the last parliament, Dastyari became aware of wide-ranging misconduct by the banks, and their financial planning and life-insurance arms. It ranged from systematic rorts and rip-offs to instances of fraud and forgery. The committee heard testimony from people who had lost their life savings, and Dastyari, who had meetings with some of the banks' victims, grew increasingly angry on their behalf. "For me, it was an eye-opening experience," he said.
Initially, his call for a royal commission into the banking and financial services sector was viewed as grandstanding even by Labor colleagues. "Clearly he is hugely ambitious and does love the limelight," I was told by Sam Crosby, executive director of centre-left think-tank, the McKell Institute. NSW Labor's Daniel Mookhey put it this way: "The most dangerous position is between Sam and a camera." Sean Edwards, the former Liberal senator who was deputy chair of Dastyari's committee, had sensed an element of opportunism. "Everyone will come out and cheer if you bash a bank," Edwards said, "and Sam knew this." Edwards added that he and Dastyari "fought all the time, because he was just a shameless publicity tart. So much so that he would conduct a press conference prior to the day's proceedings, almost pre-empting the outcome of the hearings. Which was unprecedented."
But scepticism about Dastyari's sincerity had diminished over time. There was political advantage in what he was doing, said former NSW Labor premier Nathan Rees, "but Sam really believes in this stuff". In April, when Bill Shorten threw his weight behind the campaign for a royal commission, a Fairfax/Ipsos poll found two-thirds of voters agreed that one was needed. Dastyari told me the banks had retaliated against him, using their lobbyists to spread the idea that he was a zealot leading the party into an irresponsibly anti-business position. "There was an active campaign to discredit me," he said. "But frankly, who gives a shit?"
If anything, he seemed to be thrilled to find himself up against such formidable foes. "This is not the Wagga Wagga branch of the pony club," he told me. "They play tough. They play for keeps." He thought he had met some brutal characters at Sussex Street, he added. "But they're a bunch of pansies compared to the banks."
Steven Munchenberg, chief executive of the Australian Bankers' Association, said he had no idea what Dastyari was talking about. "I certainly don't hate him," Munchenberg said. "I'm surprised he says that."
As Dastyari and I hurried from one appointment to the next, I felt glad he didn't have longer legs. Keeping up with him was hard enough as it was. Not only did he walk quickly, he talked quickly. And ate quickly. Having a pub lunch with Jeff Morris, the Commonwealth Bank whistleblower who had become his friend and ally, Dastyari polished off his own steak and chips before Morris had properly started on his. Then he began filching Morris's food. "Help yourself, mate," Morris said mildly, when he noticed what was happening. The following day, at a cafe in inner-Sydney Surry Hills, Dastyari's warm mushroom salad disappeared so swiftly that the waiter who delivered the meal all but did a double-take when she returned to check that we had everything we needed. "You were hungry," she said, removing his empty plate.
Friends said Dastyari kept his batteries charged by taking short naps when the opportunity arose: he could fall asleep mid-conversation, only to snap back to consciousness a few minutes later. From the moment he opened his eyes, he was on. Some had been surprised that Dastyari chose to spend seven weeks before the federal election captaining Labor's campaign coach, known as the Bill Bus. "No one thought he could sit still that long," said Dee Madigan, creative director of advertising agency Campaign Edge.
Dastyari was the instigator of the road trip, which Shorten joined at strategic intervals, and he proved himself adept at old-fashioned electioneering. "Seeing him work crowds – and not in a manipulative way, just a very genuine way – was an absolute privilege," said coach driver Doug Catt. To me, Dastyari admitted the pleasure was mixed. The countryside was not his natural milieu, and for long stretches on outback highways he felt frustratingly distant from the main game. At one point, when the coach broke down on the Nullarbor Plain, he despaired of ever making it back to civilisation. "I'm thinking, 'This is going to go all Wolf Creek,' " he remembered.
Catt confessed he was stunned by how rapidly the senator's composure unravelled when the engine died that day. "Sam was almost self-destructing," the driver said. Dastyari confirmed this: "I just flipped. I was yelling at the bus." The main problem? No phone reception. In six months last year, Dastyari ran up a mobile bill of $15,175, believed to be a parliamentary expenses record. He had since changed plans (and opted to pay his bills himself) but his usage was as high as ever. For him, "no network coverage" was the most upsetting phrase in the language. To find himself stranded in a vast and featureless landscape in the middle of a closely fought campaign, without the ability to make or receive calls? "This was the low point of my life," he said.
Fortunately, the mechanical problem wasn't serious. Catt said he had the bus back on the road in, oh, 15 minutes.
The question Pauline Hanson put to Dastyari on Q&A; was a tricky one for him to answer. "There is no doubt that my Iranian birth certificate has me defined as a Muslim," he told me. But he had never practised the religion. His parents, Naser and Ella, were left-wing student activists expelled from university after Ayatollah Khomeini's 1979 Islamist revolution. They migrated to Australia in January 1988, landing in Sydney in the middle of the bicentennial celebrations with no money, little English and two young children: four-year-old Dastyari, whose Iranian name is Sahand, and his sister, Azadeh, 8.
In Iran, Naser and Ella had studied civil engineering. "They came here and they drove taxis and sold cakes," said Dastyari, full of admiration for the way they worked to get ahead, eventually buying franchises for two Michel's Patisserie stores and a King of Knives shop. Azadeh became a human rights lawyer and refugee advocate. Dastyari went to Baulkham Hills High, a selective secondary school in north-western Sydney, where he was a popular but frequently absent pupil. It seemed to the principal, Tony Fugaccia, that once Dastyari joined the Labor Party at the age of 16, he become so absorbed in politics that "he sort of forgot that he was at school".
By 17, he had wrested control of the party's Hornsby branch from a local Labor luminary, having signed up dozens of friends and brought them to meetings. "Not knowing," Dastyari told me cheerfully, "that there is an official term for this: it's called a stack." Summoned to Labor headquarters, he showed up in his school uniform. "I get completely ripped apart. Like, 'Who do you think you are? How dare you do this?' I left the meeting and I thought, 'Well, politics is over for me then.' "
Karl Bitar, then a Labor organiser, later to become both NSW and national secretary of the party, said he was struck by the young Dastyari's audacity: "He wasn't stacking the branch against some nobody; he was stacking the branch against someone who'd been a political operative for about 20 years." Far from ending Dastyari's political career, the episode made his name in Labor circles. By the time he enrolled in economics-law at the University of Sydney – with an admission score of 99.75 – and went on to become NSW president of Young Labor in 2005, he had won a kind of cult following among student politicians on the conservative side, too. "He was the guy everyone talked about," said Matt Kean, now a member of the NSW Liberal government. "There was this mythology around him." Kean hadn't met anyone quite like Dastyari: "Big personality. Charming as all-get-out, yet very, very wily."
Nick Xenophon told me Dastyari still had that calculating side. "He has this technique of talking about all sorts of things and then moving in for the kill," Xenophon said. "Nowadays I just say, 'Sam, what do you want? You don't have to be nice to me. Let's cut to the chase.' "
Inevitably, Dastyari landed a position at Sussex Street and rose rapidly through the ranks. When he got the top job, general secretary, in 2010, Labor had been in power in NSW for 15 years and faced certain defeat in the 2011 state election. Barely a week went by without fresh allegations of corrupt behaviour by senior Labor parliamentarians, including his close associate Eddie Obeid. "The party was really coming apart," said Chris Minns, who was then Dastyari's deputy and is now Labor member for Kogarah in the NSW parliament. But according to Minns, Dastyari's infectious good cheer kept up the morale of his troops as they marched towards annihilation.
Dastyari said he wasn't as composed as he looked: "There was a point where I ran into the bathrooms at head office and I was so scared I was throwing up. Now I look back and think, 'What a drama queen.' "
When the self-styled reformer subsequently decided to move to Canberra, filling a vacancy in the federal upper house, he was criticised for hypocrisy. As a Labor source put it to me: "He got himself into the senate through exactly the same rigged, undemocratic preselection process that he claimed to be doing something about." Dastyari was unrepentant: "I was relieved to get out of that place. Why did I go? Because I could. The opportunity was there, and I took it."
I pointed out that he could be accused of never having had a real-world job. "Yeah, yeah," he said. "Fair enough. True."
The joke among Dastyari's friends is that his obsession with politics is a little on the weird side, leaving no time for normal activities like going to the football. But that isn't strictly correct, says federal shadow treasurer Chris Bowen: "He's been to an AFL game with me and the Chinese consul-general." Bowen pauses. "The Chinese consul-general knew slightly more about AFL than Sam did." When I ask Dastyari if he has any outside interests, he replies: "Besides politics? No. The reality is you spend so much of your time living and breathing it that, apart from the kids, there's really nothing else." He and his wife, Helen, have two daughters, Hannah, 5, and Eloise, 2. Their cats, named by Dastyari, are Margaret Thatcher and Chairman Mao.
When he started dating Helen, the daughter of veteran Labor strategist Peter Barron, she was an economics adviser to the then NSW Labor premier, Morris Iemma. These days, "she's not particularly interested in politics on a day-to-day basis", says Dastyari, who sometimes gets the feeling that Helen would like him to lead a more rounded life. He tells me that when she found him reading Chris Bowen's book, The Money Men: Australia's Twelve Most Notable Treasurers, she said: "You are a complete loser." Also, she refused to name their Siberian husky Gorbachev.
Friday, September 2: the furore over Dastyari's use of Chinese money shows no sign of abating. Until now, he has gone to ground, refusing all requests for interviews, but on Friday afternoon he tells me he is adopting a new tactic: on Monday he will submit himself to an interrogation by talkback radio host Ray Hadley. "He's going to kick the shit out of me," Dastyari predicts. "That's why I'm going to go on the program." He suggests I accompany him to the studio so I can get some colour for my story.
By Sunday, he has changed his mind. It seems to him that the intensity of the media focus on him is easing, giving way to a wider debate on the advisability or otherwise of politicians and political parties accepting donations from foreign interests. "The cycle has moved on," he says with relief. He thinks the best thing he can do is continue to keep his head down.
But on Monday the story flares again. Dastyari's name is back on the front pages, and his mood when we meet in a suburban cafe is uncharacteristically subdued. One of the two controversial payments he received was $5000 from Chinese property company Yuhu Group. When we discussed this earlier, he explained that an advertising firm sued him over a fee owed for work he commissioned when he was NSW general secretary. He told me he went to Yuhu – one of NSW Labor's major donors – and said: "Can you fix this legal bill and I'll declare it?" When I asked why he didn't forward the bill to the party, he said breezily it was "a lot easier" this way.
Now, watching him pick at his avocado on toast, I feel like a curtain has come down. "I made a mistake," he says. "It was the wrong thing to do. And look, I've faced a firestorm as a result of having done that." I am genuinely puzzled though. Why did he think it was okay to get these companies to pay his bills? I put the question to him more than once, and just as at the dismal media conference he holds the following day, he fails to answer it. Instead, he says repeatedly that he intends to learn from the experience. "I have spent so much of my career up until now focused on moving forward, always in this giant rush." What he has come to understand, he says, is "the importance of slowing down, in life and in politics".
Wednesday, September 8: Following a news report that he may have broken Labor Party rules on donations, Dastyari calls another media conference and announces he has resigned from the front bench. That evening, we talk on the phone, and at last, as he contemplates the wreckage of his career, he offers a kind of explanation for his behaviour.
"Back in my days at the party office, when you overspent on a campaign, you raised that money from donors and then you declared it," he says. "That's what I did when I overspent my office travel account." Basically, he was following Sussex Street procedure. "What I didn't do was stop and think about the perception and consequences of running my office like that." In any case, he says, it was wrong. "And I've paid the price."
When I mention that he conducted himself with dignity in front of the television cameras, he admits that he struggled to hold himself together, especially when he mentioned Helen. "It's a harrowing experience, giving a resignation press conference." Not that he is keen to discuss the personal toll. "I get the fact that there's probably not a huge amount of sympathy out there for me on all this. Nor am I seeking it."
Shortly afterwards, he ends the call. "I'm about to have dinner with my wife," he says.