Julia Gillard’s My Story is precisely as the title suggests: it’s Gillard’s truth, not a universal truth – about politics and power, about Kevin Rudd, and about the man she labelled misogynist, Tony Abbott
On Kevin Rudd
Her depiction of Kevin Rudd as a person who couldn’t cope with the pressure of the top job, but wouldn’t leave it either, is a brutal read. She’s polite and praiseworthy about Rudd’s management of the global financial crisis, his desire to ensure Australia won a seat on the UN security council, and his advocacy through the G20. Apart from that, Gillard’s Rudd is paralysed, miserable, irritable, indecisive, unpredictable, vengeful, erratic – “a dreadful mixture of sharply political and indecisive”, “a man who craved attention and the applause of the crowd”, a politician who couldn’t get out of the speedboat of opposition and “identify his driving purpose for the government he led.” As takedowns go, hers is withering.
In our conversation I asked Gillard two questions. First, did she believe her portrayal of Rudd was fair? “Yes, I do,” she said.
The second question I posed was whether it might have been better to wait a bit longer before writing her memoir – might she have produced a more forgiving version of events with the benefit of the long view? This account is very proximate to the events and proximity doesn’t always lead to clarity.
“I think I’ve been fair to him and I’m set in that conclusion,” Gillard said. “I did reflect on all this very deeply and continuously as I wrote, I sought in the book to show the incredible strengths of Kevin as well as the tragic weaknesses – and the consequences of both. You find in the book some absolute applause and accolades for him … and clearly, I think it’s fair to say that he did things that led inexorably to his demise as prime minister in 2010.”
Rudd thus far has responded via proxies, making dignity the better part of valour: “The Australian people have long reached their own conclusions about Ms Gillard’s relationship with the truth – from the coup to the carbon tax. They have also reached their own conclusions on Ms Gillard’s continuing efforts to reconstruct a justification after the event for her actions in June 2010, by trying to dress up personal political ambition as some higher purpose for the party and the government.”
Memorable moments – a short roll call
The Gillard memoir spans 500 pages and much time is spent traversing the highs and lows of public life. Notwithstanding this wealth of content, I’m ambitious to nudge the author off her talking points, all the while knowing I’m on a hiding to nothing. Can we try and be spontaneous and construct a list of highs and lows? Let’s start with the most memorable time in the prime ministership?
“Argh. Memorable time. Um.” Gillard nominates speaking at a special sitting of the US congress – “a huge occasion and a big imprinted memory” – and forging a new diplomatic and economic dialogue with China. “These two events come to me because they are very big bookends to the period of my prime ministership, one happening very early, one happening very late.”
Worst time? This one’s easy. She nominates the sudden death of her father whilst she was overseas – which was quickly followed by what she terms “the Alan Jones atrocity and the consequences of that for my family.” The Sydney broadcaster declared infamously that Gillard’s father had “died of shame”. He later apologised.
Biggest regret? Strangely, it’s not losing the leadership but losing the carbon pricing fight by conceding her government’s clean energy package was a carbon “tax” instead of a fixed price. “I’ve been honest in the book. You don’t serve three years and three days as prime minister and be someone in your early 50s without some sense of regret. The one that was the most damaging was the error in the terminology – conceding and not contesting the terminology of “carbon tax”.
I ask her whether your worst error is necessarily your biggest regret. Might they be different concepts? “I suppose that’s true, but I think for me they are one and the same.”
A moment when you felt really happy? “The happiest moments weren’t public moments. For me, getting it done, the sense of purpose ... the end of the day glass of wine, thinking about something we had fought hard for and finally got done.” Anything else? Education. Her thing. “I’ve got a very clear, almost forensic recall of all the big steps forward in education. I can put myself in those meetings and those moments. They weren’t ones of glamour or glitz or honour guards and people applauding, but they matter to me.”
On her own experience of prime ministerial power
The American journalist Henry Fairlie, in his book The Life of Politics, observed that “the politician in his free state is a potter who cannot choose his clay, a painter who cannot mix his own paints, a composer who must compose for a brass band what he had perhaps intended for a strong quartet.” It was a reflection on political power, and its inherent limitations. Gillard’s reflections on her own experience of power remain positive despite the fact Labor lacked the numbers to control either chamber after the 2010 election, and her sharp complaints in the memoir about unrelentingly hostile media coverage both of herself and her policies.
Gillard says she did not feel “puffed up powerful” as prime minister, but was nonetheless conscious that people reacted to her quite differently once she moved into The Lodge. The office distanced her from people. “I didn’t enter the room conceiving of myself as a powerful person. More, my instinct was, because people react to you so differently once you are the prime minister, you wanted to reassure people and humanise the experience for them.”
“The shaking middle level public servant who is terrified. The school principal who is close to breakdown because of the stress of having the prime minister at school. I was conscious [that as prime minister of Australia] I came with a lot of hoopla,” she says. “I wanted not to give the impression of ‘here I come, surrounded by the security detail, out of the big white car with journos hanging off my every word, I’m so powerful’ – I actually wanted to give the impression to people that despite all the eccentric clobber that’s around me, we can have a conversation. I’m a person. You are a person. We can chat. That was how I felt about it.”
In terms of the practical exercising of her power, rather than people’s external perceptions of it, she notes: “I was conscious that day by day you had a number of levers of power in your hands ... with checks and balances ... and media scrutiny that could run to the truly audacious on occasions. Yes, I was conscious of being able to do things – but also the likely limitations and battles. I had to think about how to conceive the way through. But notwithstanding the political circumstances, I was more conscious of the possibilities than the limitations. After winning the election by means of creating a minority government, then of course there were a new and unexpected constraints – but even then I thought of the tremendous possibilities.”
“I looked to maximise them.”
Relations with Tony Abbott
Gillard says she has had two encounters with the prime minister since her departure from politics. The first in an airport lounge, the second on the phone. “I somewhat amusingly ran into [Abbott] at an airport,” she says. “This was before Kevin had formally called the election campaign. I was in the airport taking the first interstate flight I’d taken since moving out of The Lodge.”
“I was going to Adelaide. I was in the lounge. There was an anxious airline person who came over and said ‘Mr Abbott is joining the lounge’ ... very very anxious. Tony did come into the lounge and I was conscious that from many an arm chair around there was sets of eyes on me and on him, perhaps a frisson about what may or may not happen next. I almost worried there would be a shout of ‘fight fight fight’. I thought you can’t have this, so I wandered up.”
“He hadn’t seen me. He was a little bit startled I think. He shook my hand. We had a pleasant conversation, pleasant and ordinary. A light conversation, no anxiety at all. Later, I booked a call to advise him of my appointment to the global partnership for education. I thought that was the right thing to do before it became public. He congratulated me on the appointment.”
Gillard says neither has sought a meaningful conversation about their bruising and highly personal contest over the past few years. She offers somewhat drily: “In the airport conversation there was a ‘politics is a tough business exchange’ – but we haven’t sought to sit down and agonise our way through it.” No sharing circles then.
Gillard says she is not surprised by the Coalition’s first 12 months in government, or by Abbott’s performance as prime minister, but she suspects the voters are. She says Abbott has never sought her advice, and he’s unlikely to switch course in the future. In any case, she expresses no desire to lay down the cudgels and become a confidante. Tony will just have to make his own way. “To the extent that I’m in the advice business, I’ll leave it to my own side of politics. If it’s sought. If my colleagues want to know what I think, my door is always open.”
Why write this book? What did you want to tell readers?
Political memoirs are produced often to reinforce insider conversations and serve personal agendas. Gillard insists that this offering wasn’t for the beltway, for the crowd who will turn to the index looking for their name reference before they start with chapter one. She says she actually wanted to reach out to people curious about what it might be like to be prime minister. She says the first run of coverage about the memoir hasn’t really focussed on that simple mission, to peel back the curtain on a bunch of ordinary yet extraordinary things.
“I want this to be a book that can give interest and meaning for people well beyond the usual circles. One of the things I very much focussed on was giving people a real insight into what it’s like to be prime minister, the day to day stuff,” she says. A lot of people aren’t great followers of politics but they are interested in the life. “Where do you live, what’s it like, what do you do, what’s the office like, how does it work, how does it feel to be in those circumstances. I’ve tried to explain that because I think it will help people understand more of things that can be hidden. I hope for people there is a real sense of a peek behind – a long look behind the curtained-off bits of political life.”
