Niki Savva: An insider’s view

Fotis Kapetopoulos
Niki Savva's parents Elpiniki and Andreas, left Choli in Cyprus, a village "remote and poor, hidden away in the mountains," and found themselves in Melbourne's working class outer suburbs. In fact, Andreas left first in 1951 while Elpiniki with her children Steven and Niki arrived later.

Like the thousands of other Greek immigrants, they might as well have "landed on Mars," as Savva writes in her new book, So Greek: Confessions of a Conservative Leftie.

Yet it was out of those dusty working class suburbs that Niki Savva emerged a journalist and later, political advisor to Australia's longest serving treasurer, Peter Costello. Costello a successful treasurer was an unsuccessful aspirant for the position of prime minister.

In the start of her book Savva paints a picture of the Press Gallery in the 1970s and 1980s, or "the beast", as she calls it, as infatuated with the left, fuelled by political intrigue and underwritten by sex and booze.

It was a world occupied by middle class Anglo men where a Greek Cypriot working class girl from the 'burbs would need a heart of steel to survive.

"The media was Anglo Saxon, middle class and I had to learn very quickly, a sense of humour helps you get through. If you don't have that, you can't survive really," Savva crackles a dry laugh over the phone as she talks to Neos Kosmos.

Tenacity, grit, outspokenness and humour characterize Savva. She ended up heading the Canberra bureaus of the Herald Sun, The Age and The Australian and in 1997 did what few journalists do, she defected to the right and took on the role of media advisor to Peter Costello.

It was that same passion and outspokenness that had Costello pick out her Greekness with, "you're so Greek!", or "she's so Greek!" whenever Savva let it rip.
"When Peter [Costello] would say, 'she's Greek you know' it was because I was passionate about things and because I would always say my piece."

And on the issue of Tampa, Pauline Hanson's One Nation and the incarceration of women and children in detention camps under the Howard Government, Savva maintains she said her piece.

She was able to convince her boss to place One Nation last in his preferences, against Howard's wishes. She tried to soften Costello's antipathy to what he termed, "mushy multiculturalism" and to be more forthright with his support for an apology to the Stolen Generation of Aboriginal children.

Howard in 2001 turned back the Norwegian tanker Tampa which was laden with rescued refugees, thus winning the election by airing the flames of xenophobia. -Savva still harbours regrets:

"I understood the reasoning behind it, [Tampa] but anyway... as I said in the book, we ended up paying a price for that later, it affected the way people felt about the government after that. Especially when there were many women and children in detention, then there were attacks on Muslims, and I was very, very, uncomfortable with that."

So what is it that turns a lefty to an advisor to one the most conservative governments in post-war Australian history?

On 11 November 1975 after Gough Whitlam's dismissal by Governor General Kerr, Niki Savva writes about how grabbed Liberal Party staffer Vincent Woolcock by the lapels and warned him: "You won't get away with this" - but they did, and she ended up marrying Woolcock later.