Julia Gillard on gender equality, legacy and life after politics
In a rare and thought-provoking interview, Julia Gillard reframes her misogyny speech, admitting feminists like herself have not brought young men along on the journey.
It’s raining in London and Julia Gillard is beaming. Wearing a favourite overcoat befitting the grey spring day (the weather has lately been mild by UK standards, but reverts to type before her photoshoot with The Weekend Australian Magazine), her sunny smile lights up the windswept banks of the Thames.
Days earlier, as she sipped an early morning coffee during our Zoom interview, she was warm and open – even amid flashes of steely resolve recalling some of the most turbulent days governing the nation. But it was face-to-face in Adelaide some months back, as we first caught up for a conversation that culminated in this profile, that I was most struck by the former prime minister’s relaxed and friendly demeanour.
It’s as if years have been peeled away.
“You come out of something as intense as the prime ministership and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, what next?,” Gillard, 62, reflects. “And that initially is a really terrifying question, the ‘what next?’ … I had a terror of turning into the kind of person who spent the next 30 years or so, even potentially more years of their life, being a raconteur about their political career, endlessly telling the same stories.”
That dread was soon extinguished. “I wouldn’t, in those weeks when I was sorting myself out after coming out of the prime ministership, have truly imagined that I would get a suite of engagements that are so fulfilling for me as well as having the opportunity to share time between wonderful places in the world, London, and back home in Australia. So, I don’t take it for granted. I am thankful for it. And, yeah, maybe that shows.”
It does show. While the vision of a former prime minister full of endless recriminations and running commentary on the government of the day was never going to be the next phase of life for Julia Eileen Gillard – Australia’s first female prime minister, who served for a tumultuous three years from June 2010 to June 2013 – her approach out of office has surprised. There are no late-night social media posts lashing former colleagues or adversaries, dial-a-quote availability for pesky journalists or jumping at the chance to appear on radio or television, telling us all how she did it back in the day and what needs to be done now. No. Gillard carries herself with poise and integrity, earning respect from both sides of the political divide. Scott Morrison has judged her the model former prime minister.
While Gillard could be tough and determined, and hard-nosed and cold-blooded as the darker side of politics sometimes requires, it was always matched with respect and courtesy towards colleagues, public servants and personal staff, the workers at Parliament House and even cynical journalists. Post-politics, she embodies this quality and more. Even in the four years since I’d last interviewed her, it was clear as we chatted in her hometown of Adelaide that there’s been a further evolution.
Stripped of political power, yet wielding significant cultural influence, Gillard is focused on her policy passions of health, education and women’s leadership while building on a legacy she never expected - and grappling with a social movement she unwittingly set into motion.
Gillard jokingly says to me there is no secret handshake, no membership card or a cubby house to share with the other living members of the ex-PMs club – the rest all men. However, as she contemplated the next phase of her life, she had a strategy. Having overcome the anxiety of the “what next”, Gillard drew on her innate resilience and carved out a new life. It is obvious, 11 years after losing the prime ministership to Kevin Rudd and leaving politics altogether, that the strategy has worked.
In the aftermath of federal Labor’s defeat in September 2013, Gillard returned to Adelaide to spend time with family before stepping up to chair the World Bank’s Global Partnership for Education in 2014 (where she remained until 2021) and to chair Beyond Blue in 2017 (she resigned the post last year, although remains as patron).
During a two-week fellowship at King’s College London, Gillard pitched the idea for a Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at the university and they went for it. She began spending several months a year there from 2017 (there is now a sister institute at the ANU). In early 2020 came an offer that essentially signified her place in British society: the prestigious Wellcome Trust, one of the UK’s top science and medical research charities, asked Gillard to chair the board of directors. She accepted and took up the position the following year. Now she spends about half the year in London and the rest of the year in Adelaide or elsewhere around the globe.
To support the work of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, Gillard launched a podcast with the Virginia Woolf-inspired title A Podcast of One’s Own, focused on gender equality and the paucity of women in leadership positions. Among her high-profile interviewees from Australia and overseas are Katy Gallagher, Sam Mostyn, Tanya Plibersek, Kathy Lette, Marcia Langton, Hillary Clinton, Cate Blanchett, Mary Beard and Annie Lennox. Episode One back in 2019 began: “Hi, I’m Julia Gillard and I believe in a world of gender equality. I once gave a speech calling out sexism and misogyny…” Although the podcast was recorded for a global audience, and it was seven years after the event – which occurred during a heated parliamentary debate in October 2012 – the so-called misogyny speech needed no further explanation. Those impromptu words delivered from handwritten notes had catapulted Gillard to international fame.
“I say to the leader of the opposition: I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man,” Gillard thundered at Tony Abbott. “I will not. And the government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever. The leader of the opposition says that people who hold sexist views and who are misogynists are not appropriate for high office. Well, I hope the leader of the opposition has got a piece of paper and he is writing out his resignation. Because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives; he needs a mirror.”
The speech was electrifying. Those who criticised it as shrill overreach misunderstood its power, which reverberated far beyond the confines of parliament. The immediate context, fading from popular memory, was a toxic debate over turncoat Speaker Peter Slipper’s sordid phone messages to a former staff member. Gillard had been under siege. The political atmosphere was febrile. Slipper should never have been made Speaker; it was a deal done to lift the government’s numbers in a minority parliament. He narrowly survived a motion of no confidence, with the government’s support, but later resigned in disgrace.
The broader context, still very much alive in popular memory, was the relentless focus on Gillard’s gender and the personal attacks on her. In March 2011 Abbott had spoken at a rally against the carbon tax outside Parliament House, with placards behind him describing Gillard as a “bitch” and “witch”. In September 2012, broadcaster Alan Jones said Gillard’s father, John, died of shame because she had “told lies”. In moving a motion to dismiss Slipper as Speaker, Abbott said the Gillard Government “should already have died of shame”.
When Gillard returned to her office, she quickly became aware of the ripples that her speech had caused. But its longevity has been staggering. A mash-up with Doja Cat’s Boss Bitch has an audience of millions on TikTok while a version of the speech on YouTube has over 6 million views. As a result, a generation of young women who may have been too young to remember the speech have claimed it as their own. Not now, not ever adorns posters, mugs and tea towels. In 2022, on the 10th anniversary of the speech, a stage event in Sydney and Melbourne celebrated the moment, with Gillard, guests and musicians reflecting on its impact. And the National Film and Sound Archive made it an official Sound of Australia – recordings that have made a defining imprint on Australian culture – alongside the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive and the Neighbours theme song.
It also inspired a play, Julia, starring Justine Clarke, which premiered a year ago in Sydney and Canberra, is now on in Melbourne before an encore season in Sydney and Adelaide.
Few former prime ministers can claim such contemporary relevance. And yet Gillard tells me she still has not watched the speech back in full. “It clearly has become completely unmoored from the parliamentary circumstances of the day in which it was given, for the younger women and girls who are using it as an anthem,” she acknowledges. “It has captured a sort of zeitgeist that this is a generation that isn’t going to be polite, deferential, take it on the chin … Instead, the attitude is, if something happens in our workplace or in our lives that is harassment, then we are going to call it out. We are going to shine a light. We are going to demand that it be rectified. And I think whilst the misogyny speech is not the same set of gender issues as #MeToo, I think it’s capturing that flavour of ‘We won’t be silenced’.”
But the flipside, Gillard says, is that some “think either we have reached gender equality, or gender equality has gone so far that it is now discriminating against men”.
Research commissioned by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership across 31 countries shows that 51 per cent of respondents believe men are being asked to do too much to support gender equality, Gillard notes. 60 per cent of Generation Z men (aged 18-27) say women’s equality has gone too far, which is a much larger proportion than any other generation. It’s a troubling reality as society attempts to address ongoing violence by men against women. Gillard is also concerned about the rise in misogyny and sexism online among young men – symbolised by the popularity of influencer Andrew Tate – who argue, as she puts it, that “masculinity is best defined by your capacity to dominate and subjugate women”.
Her answer for how to address this may come as a surprise to some. She calls for a rethink about how women and men campaign for gender equality and a respectful place for all genders in society.
“There’s certainly a hardening of attitudes amongst young men that it’s all gone too far ... For people like myself, who have been an active feminist and campaigning in various ways on gender equality for literally a lifetime, we have got to be self-critical and analytical about our obvious inability to take young men in particular on the journey with us,” she says.
“It’s clearly landed in a way that is felt as exclusionary or diminishing for particularly young men.” It is essential, Gillard believes, that men and women have this conversation. “How do we reshape the way we are campaigning for gender equality so that we are explaining what I deeply believe to be true, which is that a gender equal world will be better for everyone?”
There has been progress. Gillard notes that Labor now has a majority of women in its parliamentary ranks and there are ten women in cabinet, the largest number ever, which is a political revolution in just a decade and a half.
But much more needs to be done. “Gender doesn’t explain everything, it doesn’t explain nothing, it explains some things,” Gillard said when she exited the prime ministership. She had copped it all: about her marital status, not having children and her appearance. Even her empty fruit bowl was the subject of analytical interpretation by politicians, journalists and academics, including the notion that it represented all of the above. Gillard confirms that she still has the notorious bowl and it routinely has things in it. “It was so silly,” she laughs. But adds: “It is, in some ways, a kind of cute way to shine a light on the underlying problem: which is we look at women leaders and assess and evaluate their leadership differently.”
Gillard was born in Barry, Wales, onSeptember 29, 1961. John and Moira Gillard packed up young Julia and her sister Alison and departed the UK for Adelaide in February 1966. The values learnt from her parents were carried into public life. “They were very resilient, stoic people,” Gillard says. “They worked hard. They took things in their stride. They didn’t complain. That attribute of resilience is one that I inherited from them and learned from them. They were also both passionate about the power of education … [and] they very much believed in treating people with courtesy and respect. That was absolutely drummed into my sister and I, and that shaped how I navigate the world.”
As a schoolgirl, Gillard never dreamed of being prime minister. A career in politics was not something she thought about until galvanised at university in Adelaide and Melbourne, becoming a student leader and later working as a lawyer and political staffer. “It was a slower reveal of ambition,” she explains. Her motivation was effecting political change. There was no “mission of sitting in the top chair” but there was an aspiration to be minister for education or workplace relations in a Labor government.
After winning the federal seat of Lalor in Melbourne’s south-western suburbs, Gillard set out to understand the means and ends of power: honing skills in policy development; media presentation; speechmaking; navigating Labor’s Byzantine caucus, conference and executive structures; and learning how parliament worked. “It was only learning by doing that the possibility that I could be or do something more came to me,” she says.
The seeds of ambition were sown by the time Gillard formed a ticket with Rudd and succeeded in a leadership challenge against Kim Beazley and Jenny Macklin in December 2006. Labor formed government the following year and Gillard became deputy prime minister. But by late 2009, Rudd’s leadership was faltering. In the first half of 2010, there was deep disquiet among sections of the cabinet, caucus and party organisation about Rudd’s judgment and temperament. In April 2014, I revealed in The Australian an explosive email Gillard sent Rudd at 9.49am on Monday, June 21, 2010. She was alarmed about the government’s standing and Rudd’s inability to address it.
“To state the obvious – our primary is in the mid 30s, we can’t win an election with a primary like that and the issue of asylum seekers is an enormous reason why our primary is at that low level,” Gillard wrote to Rudd. “It is an issue working on every level – loss of control of the borders feeding into a narrative of a government that is incompetent and out of control.”
Gillard outlined the Rudd Government’s shambolic approach to the issue of asylum seekers, and then identified a strategy, in a lawyerly way, to deal with it. She asked for “conclusions” to be drawn “about ... why we have lost four weeks of time in the countdown to an election in dealing with a key negative and how we are going to organise the government/our political operation so it doesn’t happen again.” The email was extraordinary for its directness and demand for accountability, but raised little alarm with Rudd.
Two days later, Gillard initiated a late-night leadership challenge. Rudd resigned the following morning rather than contest a party room ballot and gave a teary farewell press conference. How Gillard came to the prime ministership shaped perceptions of her.
“It was a shock,” she accepts. “People didn’t see it coming.” While men have been stabbing each other in the back since the days of Julius Caesar, it was rare for a woman to seize the leadership. “What wouldn’t have happened so much [if I were a man] is the implications about character,” Gillard argues. “Abbott was not being analysed through the prism of being a backstabber or, you know, someone with blood on their hands.” (Abbott successfully challenged Malcolm Turnbull as Liberal leader in December 2009.) “People accepted that I was the prime minister, but it was such a different visual model,” Gillard says. “There was a question whispering at the back of their brains, which is, you know, ‘Can a woman do this job?’”
There was an initial boost in Gillard’s popularity, but her political capital ebbed away. She faced unremitting opposition attacks and media criticism. Her life before politics was raked over. Rudd was also determined to wrest the prime ministership back, and the briefing and leaking against her by her own party was unyielding. But Gillard’s uneven performance and policy and political missteps bolstered Rudd’s bid to garner the caucus votes he needed to return to the top job in June 2013 (after an earlier failed challenge in February 2012).
Gillard delayed moving into The Lodge, underscoring perceptions of being an illegitimate prime minister. Her scripted speeches were lacklustre; remember “We are us”? Her campaign slogan “Moving Forward” became a parody. Asylum seeker policy was shambolic. A climate change Citizens’ Assembly and regulation to curtail press freedom were dumped.
It was a combustible mix that saw Labor sink in the polls to its lowest level after losing its parliamentary majority at the August 2010 election. But for all of that, and what might have been, Gillard has zero regrets about toppling Rudd. “I acted because I genuinely believed it was in the best interests of the government and the nation to get the government working again,” she says resolutely. “With Kevin as the leader at that point, it would not return to being a functional government, and we needed to get the government working again.” She adds: “I’m not anxious or worried about how people analyse it or how people judge it because, inside myself, I know what was motivating me.”
For three years as prime minister Gillard astutely managed a minority government – the first since 1940. Indeed, the nation faces this possibility again after the major parties secured historically low primary votes at the last election – although a future Labor minority government is unlikely to sign a formal power sharing agreement with the Greens again.
Gillard, a shrewd tactician, effective debater and highly efficient administrator, left a considerable policy legacy, despite the constraints. “Governments always need to negotiate to get their agenda through,” she explains. “The main skill is listening, really listening and, as a result, coming to understand the other person’s perspective. Even if people can’t get everything they want, they are much more likely to respond well if they are being truly heard and treated with respect.”
The NDIS was legislated, the rollout of the NBN began, and plain packaging of cigarettes was introduced. The apology to those affected by forced adoptions was a moment of national healing. The decision, against considerable opposition, to initiate a royal commission into child abuse in institutions has been more than justified by the atrocities uncovered. A mining tax and a price on carbon was legislated, but later repealed. Gillard concedes that describing the carbon price as “a tax” – which she promised not to introduce – was “a very big error” that made it harder to “sell” to voters, and would handle that differently if she had her time over again.
As education minister and prime minister, she oversaw the introduction of testing and benchmarking of students and schools, a national curriculum, and new assessment and reporting requirements. David Gonski led a review of school funding and recommended reforming the needs-based funding framework with a new per student standard. Testing of students in the decade since has shown little improvement in performance. Gillard responds that it is not just about money; we need to rigorously monitor student and school outcomes while placing greater emphasis on teacher training, support and recruitment.
“People remember the funding reforms, and that was about equity for all schools, about bringing all schools up to a resource standard which would enable them to offer a great education,” Gillard explains. “What is less remembered is those funding reforms came with a strong improvement agenda. We had proven through earlier national partnerships that if you tied funding to a designated set of reforms, you could make a difference even in the most disadvantaged schools. Since I left office, there has not been the attention required on that improvement agenda … we don’t have that degree of policy continuity and patience.”
In foreign policy, Gillard also left her mark. She established a rapport with Barack Obama and strengthened the US alliance by allowing Marines to be stationed in Darwin. A policy for engagement in the region during the “Asian Century” was developed. Annual leader-to-leader dialogues were established with China and India. Australia also won a seat on the UN Security Council.
But it was Gillard’s support for Israel and strong stance on antisemitism that stands out, especially now, even if at the time her cabinet did not always agree. “It is completely offensive to me that anyone should be treated unequally because of being Jewish, or any racial, ethnic or religious characteristic,” she says. “We know that if antisemitism is allowed to do its virulent work where that ends. If we see antisemitism, we have got to call it out.”
With Israel at war with Hamas, Gillard says the conflict must not license hate. In October, she co-signed a letter with five other former prime ministers expressing solidarity with the Jewish people and condemning Hamas atrocities. She was interviewed by Josh Frydenberg for a SkyNews documentary on the rise of antisemitism in the wake of the October 7 terrorist attacks. “I wish the dialogue was more sophisticated on campuses and generally about what people think about the conflict in Gaza,” Gillard says cautiously. “There should be no stereotyping or antisemitism or Islamophobia.” Gillard supports a ceasefire, the release and return of all hostages, and aid to rebuild Gaza. She urges an end to the conflict coupled with diplomacy that provides a pathway towards a two-state solution. “I’m still hopeful, even though it’s hard to find hope in these dark days, there will be a time when the conflict in the Middle East ends: people living side-by-side in peace.”
On an almost daily basis, wherever she is in the world, people who approach Gillard usually mention her being the first female prime minister or the misogyny speech. Women say it made them and their daughters think about a career in politics, while men say it affected the women in their lives and gave them a role model. She says this achievement – being the first – looms larger for her now than it did at the time. “While I was conscious of getting on with the job, many of the things happening were happening because people were seeing my leadership through the prism of gender,” she reflects. “I didn’t want, day-to-day, to see my leadership in that way. It was after I finished and wrote my book, My Story (2014), and I started working through it and trying to analyse and explain it, that the milestone really settled on me.”
She recalls that it was not until she stood with Governor-General Quentin Bryce at Government House, Yarralumla, for the customary photo after her swearing in as prime minister that it really dawned how much progress had been made for women in politics. “You could see in her eyes, her face, her demeanor, how meaningful it was for her to be the Governor-General who swore in the first woman prime minister given her lifetime engagement in issues of gender equality,” Gillard says.
Having shouldered the burdens of public office for 15 years and the intrusive glare of the public spotlight, Gillard was not interested in a high-level appointment by the returned to power Labor Party. There would be no Governor-General Gillard or Ambassador Gillard. There was one exception: accepting an invitation from South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas to chair the Royal Commission into Early Childhood Education and Care. Preferring to run her own race and protect her privacy, Gillard reveals she dismissed informal approaches about an appointment from those in Anthony Albanese’s inner circle.
“I’ve never had a formal, you know, ‘Would you like to be X?’ approach from the Albanese Government,” Gillard says. “But obviously I chat to people casually … and they raise, you know, ‘Is there something you’re interested in?’ And I’m always very clear: I’ve curated a life that I’m very happy with and I’m not looking for, or indeed I don’t have the spare time to say yes to, an appointment by the Australian government.”
Gillard is looking to the future, not the past. She radiates grace and dignity, choosing public interventions carefully and with consideration. It is not a vow of silence; more avoiding unnecessary controversy. This, she explains, is good for her wellbeing and mental health.
Prime ministers should be judged on their policy and political record above all, but their character also matters in how they are remembered. “I have tried to live this period of my life with a disciplined mental approach to that was then, this is now, you can’t change the past,” she says. “So there’s no point obsessing over who did what, when – just draw a line under it and live the most productive, happiest, engaged life you can.
“The thing that drove me into politics was the belief that you could make a change in the world for the better. And, so, my mission statement remains having an impact, making the world a better place, guided by my values, but doing that differently to how I did it during the active political phase of my life.”
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