Anna Bligh tells her tale of the sinking Labor ship and what cost her the election in 2012

UPDATE: Former premier Anna Bligh’s autobiography has revealed the complex relationship she had that spurred her to succeed.

Former Queensland Premier, Anna Bligh, addresses at a YWCA lunch at Spring in Brisbane. Pics Tara Croser.

AN abusive father who belittled women and a secret pact with her mother inspired the young Anna Bligh to push herself, study and achieve.

Writing frankly about her childhood on the Gold Coast, Ms Bligh reveals in her autobiography the complex relationship she had with her alcoholic father and the role it played in her life.

The former Queensland Premier said her father’s abuse against her and her three siblings were not physically violent, but devastating nonetheless.

“He would taunt and humiliate us until we broke into tears, make us do and redo jobs until we argued or sobbed,” Ms Bligh wrote in Anna Bligh: Through the Wall.

“His attacks would find our vulnerabilities with military precision.

“His temper was always on a short fuse and its unpredictability was a source of terror.”

But Ms Bligh said it was her mother who did her best to shield them from her father’s “psychological warfare” and in doing so would cop the brunt of his anger.

“Cringing together in our bedrooms as we listened to her humiliated was always a unbearable,” she said.

As her father would belittle the idea of women seeking to further their education, a concept Ms Bligh said had not reached the Gold Coast in the 1960s, her mother would encourage her in secret to find ambition and further her education.

“She would often tell me that I had to be able to make my own way in the world and I should study hard to guard against becoming trapped like her,” Ms Bligh said.

“My father’s constant disparagement of the education of girls was incentive for me.

“Proving him wrong became another powerful driving force for me to study and do well.”

EARLIER: ANNA Bligh spent just three pages on her “humiliating” final election campaign in her autobiography, while she indulged in a 72-page analysis of her role in the 2011 floods and Cyclone Yasi.

The former premier blamed the biggest electoral defeat in Queensland’s history on a perfect storm of a fed-up public, the health payroll scandal, unpopular decisions and the devastating Rudd-Gillard factor.

She also took a swipe at the unions, saying their campaign against the Labor Party and its asset sales following the 2009 election left them “tits up in a ditch” for the polling day in 2012.

It was revealed in her autobiography Anna Bligh: Through the Wall, out today, which covers her life from her Gold Coast childhood to her battle with non-Hodgkin lymphoma since leaving office.

The Rudd-Gillard factor had a major negative affect on the Bligh election campaign.

Australia’s first elected female premier said the damaging dispute between the trade unions and her government over the sale of Queensland Rail’s coal and freight arm “tore an irreparable hole” in the relationship. She said the relationship between Labor and the unions needed to be “rethought and remade”.

Despite only putting privatisation on the agenda shortly after the election in 2009, Ms Bligh said there was no “secret plan” to sell assets going into the campaign. In the brief outline of the doomed 2012 campaign, Ms Bligh said the 2010-11 health payroll debacle hurt her government more than asset sales ever did, while voters marked Labor down heavily for its negative advertising.

“I have read and heard of many reasons for the malevolent, visceral nature of the result, but none has ever fully explained it,” she said. “Voters really wanted to get rid of us this time round.”

Among her tales of the devastating 2011 floods Ms Bligh wrote how she feared she squibbed her now-famous “we are Queenslanders” speech by breaking down.

“I left the media room ... certain that my tears and choking voice had crushed people’s confidence, not lifted it,” she said, adding it was only later she discovered it did the reverse.

“These words, and the heavy emotion with which I said them, remain one of the public’s strongest memories of me and my time in public life ... I did not finish public life with regrets.”

HarperCollins publishers list the book as on sale from today.