Julia Gillard opens up about turbulent years as prime minister in Stellar interview

Former prime minister Julia Gillard has opened up about how she coped during the toxic days that plagued her in a candid new interview.

Julia Gillard has spoken candidly about the turbulent days of her prime ministership, admitting there were times when she’d just have preferred “to be at home at rest”.

The ex-Labor leader seized the role from Kevin Rudd and became Australia’s 27th prime minister in a shock leadership spill in 2010, which eventually led to him returning the favour in 2013 and inadvertently setting in motion a years-long trend of toppling sitting leaders.

In a new interview with Stellar magazine, available in today’s Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Herald Sun, Gillardreflected on how she coped during what’s still considered a particularly tumultuous time in Australian politics, saying she wouldn’t “pretend” it had been an easy road.

Gillard has opened up about her time in the nation’s top job. Picture: Nick Clayton/Stellar magazine

She spoke candidly about the “pressures” of the role. Picture: Nick Clayton/Stellar magazine

“I was conscious there were all of these pressures on my shoulders; being prime minister for anybody isn’t an easy job. And I had this added thread of gender,” Gillard, 58, explained.

“I was conscious of that and sometimes very physically or intellectually tired, and you did feel like you were pushing yourself up and out into the world when you’d prefer to be at home at rest.

“But the most dominant side knew there were things we wanted to get done … Time is a precious thing while you’re there, and it’s never long enough for everything you want to do.

“So that driving sense of purpose was the bigger influence on me.”

She pointed out that a significant portion of the response to her taking over from Rudd in the leadership spill was done “through the prism of gender”.

“The fascination with appearance – if someone did the research comparing column inches spent on my appearance in the days after to Malcolm Turnbull when he took over from Tony Abbott …” Gillard said.

“(And) there was a sense, obviously, I became prime minister in circumstances where I asked for a ballot against a sitting prime minister.

“That had been done before by Paul Keating against Bob Hawke, and it has certainly been done since.

“But I think there was framing done around a woman and power that was also driven by gender assumptions and the stereotypes in the back of our brain; that we expect men to seek power, but we don’t expect women to do it.”

Gillard became Australia’s first female prime minister after toppling Rudd in the 2010 leadership spill.

During the interview, Gillard also revealed her reaction to discovering Barack Obama and his team used to watch her now infamous misogyny speech whenever they were “really annoyed” at Tony Abbott – an anecdote recently revealed by the former US President’s deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes.

“I was aware at the time that President Obama watched the speech – way back when I was prime minister he mentioned that he had watched the speech – but what I didn’t know until Ben said that was it was something that was done repeatedly (laughs) when Abbott was in office,” Gillard said.

“I had no inkling, zero inkling, when I did that speech that we would still be talking about it all these years later.”

Read the full interview with Julia Gillard in the current issue of Stellar, available in today’s Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Herald Sun.