Bronwyn Pike will step down at the end of this month after wonderful service to Uniting Vic.Tas as CEO.
By Aileen Muldoon
When Bronwyn Pike steps down as the CEO of Uniting Vic.Tas at the end of this month, she will call time on an extraordinary career of dedicated public service which has its roots in her Christian faith and commitment to the Uniting Church.
Brought up in the Methodist Church, Bronwyn’s parents were dedicated evangelical Christians.
As a young girl growing up in the 1960s and ‘70s, she remembers there was a strict moral framework and the Church being full of people who were largely ‘tee-totalling’.
At the same time, her family, heavily influenced by her mother, were strong Labor Party supporters.
Bronwyn’s mother came from a poor working-class background and during the Depression her family was forced to rely on welfare to survive.
Her mother never forgot the prejudice directed at her family at that time and she instilled a powerful sense of social justice in Bronwyn from a young age.
It is these two intimately connected threads, her Christian sensibility and commitment to fighting for the disadvantaged, that have animated Bronwyn’s public life.
They shine through in the many positions she has held within the Uniting Church and in her political career as a minister in a Victorian Labor government.
While Bronwyn remains an active Uniting Church member, there was a time when she thought about walking away from religion.
“I think as a teenager, I could have easily drifted away from the Church,” she says.
“When I look back on that now it was quite suffocating for a young person to be brought up in that environment when, at the same time, Woodstock and the Vietnam War protests were happening.”
On reflection, Bronwyn says it was the discovery of liberation theology, which originally emanated from the Catholic Church in South America, that kept her connected to her faith.
“Liberation theology came out of the struggles of working-class people in South America being led by priests who were standing against the regimes that were abusing people,” she said.
“It was very political. I became attracted to its strong emphasis on political activism as part of faith, really picking up on parts of the Bible around equity, social justice and human rights.”
It was, in short, a unifying of her faith and politics.
She became heavily involved in the work of the Uniting Church in the social justice area, volunteering on the National Assembly’s Social Justice Commission and the Commission of Women and Men, which was primarily concerned with improving equality for women.
The opportunity to bring people together was one of the traits of Bronwyn Pike’s leadership of Uniting Vic.Tas.
Bronwyn started her professional life as a school teacher and it was while in that role in Darwin that she was drawn back to the work of the Church, this time in a paid capacity.
She left teaching to work for Somerville Community Services, the Uniting Church’s community services agency in the Northern Territory.
The agency provided a connection to her roots, named as it was after Margaret Somerville who was a Methodist missionary working on Croker Island, just off Darwin.
Somerville was famous for her courage in evacuating 95 Aboriginal children during World War II as the Japanese began bombing Darwin.
When a role was advertised for a Director of Justice and Social Responsibility for the Uniting Church in Victoria, it seemed a natural progression for Bronwyn to extend her community services work to advocacy and public policy.
She arrived in Victoria just as Jeff Kennett was elected Liberal Premier of the state at the end of 1992.
His government immediately embarked on a controversial radical program of swingeing cost cutting and privatisation of public utilities.
Bronwyn became part of a coalition of opposition to these policies.
“As an activist, I pretty quickly connected with people at Trades Hall, the Victorian Council of Social Services, Tim Costello at the Baptist Church and John Dalziel from the Salvos,” she recalls.
“One of the obvious things to campaign on was gambling.
“Kennett was so gung-ho about it. When he opened Crown Casino, he said ‘this is the future of Victoria’.
“I would get asked to do lots of media interviews because there weren’t many people speaking out against Kennett then.
“Kennett got really mad because it was the Church criticising him.
“He said we should stick to our knitting and, of course, that just got me more fired up because I believed that social justice was our knitting.”
It was an environment in which Bronwyn’s focus turned to politics.
She was getting a name for herself as Victorian Labor was undergoing a painful renewal process.
She initially ran for pre-selection in 1997 as the party’s candidate for the state seat of Mitcham, where a by-election was being held, but lost out on the factional numbers.
Her second attempt at preselection was successful, endorsed as the Labor candidate for the prized seat of Melbourne at the September 1999 state election.
Bronwyn’s timing was perfect.
Her entry into the Legislative Assembly coincided with the Steve Bracks-led Labor Party narrowly prevailing over Kennett’s government.
Bronwyn went on to hold the seat of Melbourne for 13 years, from 1999-2012, despite intense efforts by the Greens to wrest it from her.
Bronwyn’s parliamentary career exemplified her passion for social justice and equality, as well as testifying to her enviable capability.
Remarkably, she was a minister for 11 of the 13 years she spent in the Legislative Assembly.
Bronwyn Pike with Rev Dr John Flett from Pilgrim Theological College at the launch of John’s book in 2023.
In a rare show of faith in a novice MP, upon forming government Bracks promptly appointed her Minister for Housing and Aged Care and subsequently added the Community Services portfolio to her responsibilities.
Following the 2002 election, Bracks assigned Bronwyn the Health portfolio, a lynchpin ministry in the State Government that she served in for five years.
She finished her parliamentary career as Minister for Education and Skills.
In May 2007, along with her Labor colleague, Lynne Kosky, Bronwyn became the then longest serving woman minister in Victoria’s history.
“I was so fortunate to be the Member for Melbourne and a government minister for all that time,” she said.
“I really found it wonderful to go into politics and work and meet people who shared the same passions and commitment that I did.
“That was a really important experience because sometimes I think people in the Church think they have a monopoly on social justice and it’s not true.
“It gave me a much broader perspective.”
After leaving parliament in 2012, Bronwyn continued her work through the Uniting Church.
She filled several leadership positions, including as the Board Chair of UnitingCare Australia and Uniting NSW/ACT and she was the inaugural Board Chair of Uniting Vic.Tas.
“I really believe the Church made a courageous decision to bring together all the agencies to form Uniting Vic.Tas,” she says.
“It wasn’t entirely without controversy. Not everyone loved the idea. It was an enormous task, and I think much bigger than anyone ever imagined.
“And I want to pay tribute to Paul Linossier, who was the inaugural CEO.
“He did an absolutely amazing job in setting the framework for a unified organisation and putting the building blocks in place.”
After nearly six years as Uniting’s second CEO, Bronwyn is pleased to have built on the legacy of her predecessor and leaves the organisation in a strong position to continue its missionary work.
“I am absolutely passionate and committed to Uniting,” she says.
“In the Basis of Union, it talks about worship, witness and service.
“To me the worship is the congregational part of the life of the Church, the witness is the advocacy, what kind of world we want to live in, and the service is what we do at Uniting.
“If the Church lets go of any one of those, like a three-legged stool it will fall over.”
In 2022, Bronwyn was awarded the Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for significant service to social welfare and not-for-profit organisations and to the Parliament of Victoria.
But you won’t hear her talk about it.
She prefers rather to emphasise the achievements of others.
“The thing I’ll miss the most and the greatest joy I’ve had in the job is to bring together and see the growth of this amazing group of people who can now lead the show without me,” she says.
“That has been so rewarding.”
Bronwyn notes that she has never really had a life plan, so she will be open to what comes along following her time with Uniting Vic.Tas.
In the short term, she is looking forward to enjoying the freedom of travelling with husband Bob in their converted Kombi and reading lots of good books.
We wish her well for the break, and few could be more deserving after an exemplary lifetime record of community-enhancing public service.
Aileen Muldoon is General Manager, Community & External Relations with Uniting Vic.Tas
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