Hobart Mercury, 3 October 2009

Red Julia takes job seriously but not herself

For all Julia Gillard’s talents and ambition, it is her sense of humour and of the

ridiculous that will see here through, writes WAYNE CRAWFORD

JULIA Gillard pleaded with Mark Latham not to proceed with the contentious policy on Tasmanian forestry that is widely thought to have tipped the

balance, and helped cost Labor the 2004 election.

Ms Gillard – then a close ally of Mr Latham, for whom she had

helped muster the support he needed to snatch the leadership

from Kim Beazley – greeted Mr Latham’s pro-green forestry policy

“with a sense of foreboding,” writes her biographer Jacqueline Kent.

“My political instincts were saying to me that this was going to be a

fiasco. This would cost us seats in Tasmania, and it might cost us seats

in the mainland, it’s bad policy, stupid policy,” Ms Gillard recalled

in conversations with Ms Kent.

“I was saying to Mark, `Please don’t do this, just please, pull out now’. And he was convinced that it was the right thing to do and was committed to making the announcement the next day, and it was clear to me that there was nothing at that stage that I could do to change his mind.

“It was like watching a child tottering towards a fire. A sense of

being completely immobilised, nothing I could do,” she recalls of the

policy that created a huge union backlash against Mr Latham and

Labor. The ALP went from being tipped as a likely winner to one of its

worst election routings.

Mr Latham’s policy was to end logging in most of Tasmania’s old-

growth forests and spend $800 million on a job-saving package for

timber workers, who were supposed to find jobs in plantation logging and

the craft industry.

The loggers were unimpressed. Timber workers declared Mr Latham unfit to lead the country, accused him of throwing workers on the scrapheap – and at a rally in Launceston famously cheered then prime minister John Howard when he proposed an alternative policy that promised to lock up 170,000ha of

Tasmanian forests (mainly areas that were inaccessible or not needed

for the forestry industry anyway) without costing any jobs.

Even Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) left-wing union boss Michael O’Connor – Ms Gillard’s close friend and confidant since the heady days of university student union politics, with whom she had shared a flat and been in a relationship – joined the Howard cheer squad. It is testimony to Ms Gillard’s loyalty that she accepted the behaviour of her old friend as being part of his job, representing the interests of his union members.

She has also remained loyal to Mr Latham, refusing to join her colleagues indulging in personal criticism of the former leader – something that has attracted criticism from those within the party who look back on the Latham experience as a bad mistake and a low point for Labor.

Jacqueline Kent’s The Making of Julia Gillard (Penguin Viking, $32.95) is the first complete biography of Australia’s most powerful woman, the first woman to rise to the position of Deputy Prime Minister (and acting Prime Minister during Kevin Rudd’s frequent overseas trips).

It outlines her transition from the university student activist with youthful radical tendencies – conservative commentators still like to characterise her as “Red Julia” not just because of the colour of her hair – to Labor’s centre, which is the position Ms Kent says she now occupies. Certainly her policy positions on industrial relations could hardly now be claimed to be radical — demonstrated by the fact that they attract as much criticism from the unions as from employers.

Now, she draws as much comment for her changing hairstyles (her partner Tim Mathieson sells hair products) and her broad Australian accent ( a “broad, grating voice” according to one conservative commentator; a “scary robot voice” in the words of another) as for her policies. But that is only to be

expected in the male-dominated world of politics in which she has also been criticised (by a female columnist) for being “single and childless” and (by the tactless Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan) as “deliberately barren”. It would be unthinkable for such remarks to be made of a male politician.

Ms Gillard received widespread support and defence against Senator Heffernan, who later was made by John Howard to apologise. On the

public reaction at the time, she recalls walking in her home suburb

of Altona in Melbourne one day when a woman, passing in a car

with a back seat full of kids, wound the window down and called out: “If

you want any kids, love, you can have mine.”

Thankfully, Ms Gillard doesn’t take herself so seriously as to give

much thought to the slings and arrows of the bigots. Indeed her sense of humour can surface at the most unlikely times and in the most unexpected circumstances.

There’s the classic story of her reaction on learning about Kevin Rudd’s infamous 2003 visit to Scores

strip club in New York.

She recalls in the book: “Kevin said: `There’s something we have to

deal with in tomorrow’s newspapers – it’s a big problem for us’. He

sounded really grim. I thought it was some amazing catastrophe. Then when he said `I was drunk in a bar in New York and it was a strip club’, it was so exactly not what I thought he was going to say, that I just burst out laughing. The whole thing was so absurd. Of all things and of all people.”

As it turned out, she was right not to take it too seriously. The incident

did no damage to Mr Rudd’s popularity – indeed, if anything it made him seem less nerdy and more human.

Then there was a time she was campaigning at a suburban shopping centre, handing out brochures while standing next to a board with a big picture of herself. Ms Gillard: “This old guy comes out of the supermarket, looks at me,

looks at the photo, looks at me, looks at the photo, then turns back to me and says, `Taken on a good day, wasn’t it, love?’ “I said, `And you’d be bloody

Robert Redford, would you, mate’?”

The man saw the joke and said he’d vote for her.

Julia Gillard has many qualities that make it inevitable she is considered a likely future prime minister – passion, pragmatism, ambition, intelligence, loyalty, political nous, capacity for analytical thinking and hard work. But clearly she also has that quality without which the relentless political grind can chew up and spit out even the keenest and most able aspirants – innate humour and a sense of the ridiculous.

The Making of Julia Gillard

(Penguin, $32.95)

The Australian, October 2009

Gillard’s grasp on the political domain

The Making Of Julia Gillard <Br>By Jacqueline Kent <br>Viking, 320pp, $32.95

TRADITIONALLY, political biographies come at the end of a career, although there are always exceptions. Two biographies of then opposition leader Kevin Rudd appeared in the months before the 2007 election, as Australians rushed to find out about the man who might be PM. And now we have the first of two biographies of Julia Gillard – the other, by journalist Christine Wallace is due next year – a mid-career politician, whose greatest triumphs (and defeats) are likely yet to come.

On the first page of The Making of Julia Gillard, Jacqueline Kent justifies her choice of subject, arguing that in a country where distrust of politicians is almost an article of faith, Gillard is a political celebrity. She is also Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations and Social Inclusion and an impressive parliamentary and media performer.

The bare-bones version of Gillard’s life and career has been told and retold, but Kent fleshes it out with insights from former university and work mates, political colleagues and opponents. It’s an overwhelmingly positive portrait, with the occasional criticism or nasty remark from a political foe outweighed by numerous quotes from admirers and allies.

Kent starts at the very beginning with the Gillard family’s migration from Wales to Adelaide when Gillard was four years old. Young Julia was clever and hard-working but not especially ambitious. After finishing school, she considered teaching but was persuaded by a family friend to study law.

At the University of Adelaide she joined the Labor Club, became involved in student politics and in 1982 moved to Melbourne to take up the role of education vice-president of the Australian Union of Students. It was in the AUS that Gillard learned, in the words of her friend and former colleague Josh Bornstein, to “keep going, keep going, keep going, while people are throwing things at each other”.

That skill was developed further when she joined law firm Slater & Gordon. Gillard excelled in industrial relations law, and after three years, became the first woman to be offered a salaried partnership by the firm.

Throughout, Gillard remained active in the ALP, and in 1992, she went for preselection in the safe Labor seat of Melbourne. She knew it was a long shot but felt that “if I didn’t put my hand up it would have been seen that I wasn’t interested in a political career”. She lost to Lindsay Tanner who, along with Kim Carr, remained a political thorn in her side for many years. Tanner, apparently, considered Gillard “a conservative and a careerist who could not be trusted”. When she ran for preselection in the seat of Lalor in 1998, he was determined to block her advance by all means possible.

Gillard won preselection and then the election, and today, Tanner and Carr are her colleagues in cabinet. Kent says Gillard learned in her law days that bearing grudges was destructive. Her philosophy is: “Shit happens, and go home and have a cry or a glass of red wine or kick the cat or whatever.”

This attitude is an obvious asset in the faction-riven, bitter grudge-holding ALP. Much of Gillard’s success is due to her ability to navigate the factions without becoming part of one. Although she began her career on the Left, many of her closest allies, such as Simon Crean, John Brumby (for whom she worked as chief of staff when he was Victorian opposition leader) and Mark Latham (to whom she remained loyal longer than was politically wise), have been from the Right.

Kent quotes a former law colleague of Gillard’s saying that “she could get across a highly complex area of law and turn it into a simple concept. It’s a rare skill to translate the intricacies of corporation law to someone with a primary school education.”

One could say the same about Kent’s ability to translate the intricacies of ALP factions to readers who might agree with Kent that sometimes politics, especially on the Labor side, can seem too complicated for its own good. She gives clear summaries of the histories of health, education, industrial relations and immigration policy, but never lets the main story, Gillard’s rise, get bogged down in descriptions of ALP policy or machinations.

This is not, then, a book for hardcore political junkies, nor is it for those wanting an insight into Gillard’s personal life or private thoughts. Kent’s Gillard is an inspirational figure, not just for girls and women wanting to enter politics but for those from working-class and immigrant backgrounds. Her story as told by Kent is one of determination, self-belief, resilience and hard work. In this sense, The Making of Julia Gillard sits comfortably alongside Kent’s biographies of pianist Hephzibah Menuhin and book editor Beatrice Davis, both women who lived unconventional but professionally remarkable lives.

It’s an accessible and enjoyable read, but a slightly unsatisfying one. In the end, I didn’t feel I knew Gillard; I knew a lot about her life. This was, perhaps, to be expected. Kent says that in interviews “Gillard gives little away. Under that engaging manner is a reserved person, a woman who is very self-protected.”

Fair enough, too: Gillard’s professional history is on the public record and she has no obligation to reveal more about her private self.

Besides, despite her brushing the question aside – “Anyone who thinks that my being PM is inevitable knows nothing whatever about politics” – there’s a good chance that Gillard will be our next prime minister and it’s only prudent that she remain on guard. Maybe once she has stepped away from public life she’ll be more forthcoming.

Emily Maguire is the author of Princesses & Pornstars: Sex, Power, Identity. Her latest novel, Smoke in the Room, is out now.

Biography Footnotes, no 4, 2009

Book Review: Jacqueline Kent, The Making of

Julia Gillard, Penguin/Viking, 2009, 328pp, $32.95.

Many people want to know about Julia Gillard, undoubtedly

the most powerful woman in Australian Federal politics today -

what makes her tick and how she came to be such a star

parliamentary performer.

The Making of Julia Gillard, gives us an insight into what has

made this formidable politician. But we get very little about

her personal life, how she operates and keeps up with her

personal workload of three key portfolios, Industrial Relations,

Education and Social Inclusion.

Kent writes that ‗only once did I feel I had slipped below the surface: when I asked her about her relationship with Bruce Wilson. She shrugged it off with, ―Oh well, these things happen‖. When I pushed a bit, quoting some of the more unpleasant tabloid headlines and saying, that must have impressed you, she flashed ―Not so much‖. And for a second I saw how that squalid scandal-mongering had hurt her‘.

[In1995, Gillard worked on a case for Bruce Wilson, the AWU secretary, in an intra-

union dispute, and began an affair with him. After several months it was discovered that Wilson was defrauding the union. As soon as it was discovered, Gillard ended her relationship with Wilson. There were headlines such as ‗How Gillard‘s Ex Scammed‘ and Con Man Broke my Heart‘].

Julia Gillard has been considered to be very much in control in her relationships with

men. ‗But that doesn‘t mean her heart is not engaged‘, Kent says. ‗Close friends knew how upset she was about what happened with Wilson. It hurt her a lot. She put a lot of trust in the guy‘.

Gillard came to Australia as a four-year-old with her parents, who came from Wales as Ten-Pound Poms‘. They settled in Adelaide where her parents were determined that their children would have the chance of an education, which they had not.

After Mitcham Primary and Unley High School, she started at Adelaide University in

1979. Soon she became involved in student politics and in 1982 became education vice- president of the Australian Union of Students. The AUS secretariat was in Melbourne, where she finished her arts-law degree at the University of Melbourne.

In 1987, leaving student politics behind her, Gillard got a job as a solicitor at Slater and Gordon. There she developed her capacity for work, being often in the office at six in the morning. She was soon moved into industrial law, in which she became a specialist. But she had never taken her eye off a political career, despite her success as a lawyer. For her ‗law was always an offshoot of politics rather than politics as an offshoot of law‘, says Andrew McKenzie, a former Gillard colleague.

Kent says that Julia Gillard is one of the most single-minded and determined realists in this or any other Australian Government‘. It was that determination and persistence that got her into politics. After finishing with the law, Gillard twice failed to gain Labor preselection for a Federal seat. She was thwarted in this by Kim Carr and Lindsay Tanner. Before she finally cracked it, she served as Chief of Staff in John Brumby‘s office when he was leader of the Opposition in the Victorian Parliament. There she gained a useful insight into politics, which helped her when she finally entered Parliament, as Member for Lalor, in October 1998.

Though at first people were slow to take to Gillard, she is now very popular with the public. From an early age, she made clear the domestic arts have no great appeal for her. And she has no children either. When Senator Bill Heffernan launched a

personal attack on her saying that she was unfit for leadership because she was unmarried and childless, she won sympathy and support for her composure in handling an unprovoked political onslaught, which backfired. Heffernan was widely

ridiculed and John Howard made him apologise.

Of course, she still attracts hostility in some quarters. That is inevitable for one who plays the political game for what it is and because she doesn‘t display the vulnerability expected from women politicians. She knows who she is and where she is going and the media know she is not about to let them run the agenda. She is adept at switching topics and not following interviewers‘ leads. She says what she wants to, and nothing more. She thinks quickly on her feet and never succumbs under pressure.

Throughout her parliamentary career Gillard‘s advancement has been helped by Simon Crean and Mark Latham. After the 2001 election when Simon Crean became Leader of the Opposition, Gillard was promoted to the Front Bench as Immigration spokesperson.

With support from Simon Crean and Mark Latham, she went on to become shadow

Health Minister. She was as close as anybody to Mark Latham when he decided to

resign as Labor leader after the 2004 election. It was Latham who first put her forward as a possible Labor leader. She remained loyal to Crean and Latham by publicly defending them, despite criticism within the party.

In the lead up to the 2007 election, Gillard teamed up with Rudd and won. She had not been a Rudd supporter until she was nudged into it by Kim Carr. She and Rudd agreed to run on a joint ticket, with Rudd as leader and herself as deputy. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

On 3 December 2007, Julia Gillard, at the age of 46, was sworn in to be Deputy Prime

Minister, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Minister for Education

and Minister for Social Inclusion. She and Kevin Rudd had worked out this particular

range of responsibilities for her precisely because they were so compatible. With the

exception of the Prime Ministership and Treasury, Gillard‘s portfolios were the most

wide-ranging and influential in the Rudd Government.

As Minister for Industrial Relations and Education she has abolished Work Choices,

replacing it with her Fair Work Bill, and introduced an educational revolution, which is still being played out over league tables. It is an argument she is determined to win.  A lawyer friend once said, ‗If ever I meet anyone tougher than Julia Gillard I‘ll fall over. There isn‘t anyone‘. That is what has made her such a star parliamentary performer. She is unflappable and articulate, knows what she wants to say and lets it go at that.

Kent gives lots of clues about Gillard in this book: how she relaxes, her relations with

men, her reading habits. ‗I don‘t read seriously‘, she told Kent. ‗Mysteries, detective

novels, stuff like that. One of our Commonwealth car drivers keeps me supplied‘. She

told Kent that she was just too busy to get back to serious reading. But there is still a lot more to come out about Gillard than Kent has been able to reveal. She says that having this book written about her makes her feel ‘rather like a lab rat‘. However, she gives little away. Under that engaging manner is a reserved person, a woman who is very self-protected‘.

This is a competent biography as far as it goes. However, politics is a new field for

Kent, who has won national awards for her earlier highly acclaimed, A Certain Style,

Beatrice Davis, A Literary Life and An Exacting Heart: The Story of Hephzibah

Menuhin. She has made a good fist of Julia Gillard, but I found her analysis of policy

decisions, with which Gillard was associated, a little too detailed. A more general

outline would have sufficed. In the recounting of them, I sometimes lost sight of

Gillard. But overall, this is a well researched book that deserves to be read widely.

Kent‘s book is the first of two biographies of Gillard. The second, written by political

journalist Christine Wallace, entitled Gillard, will be published next year by Allen &

Unwin. That was straight forward enough until the recently appointed editor of The

Monthly, Ben Naparstek, seeking to create some mischief, asked Christine Wallace to review Kent‘s book. If Wallace had had any sense she would have gracefully declined Naparstek‘s offer. But she went ahead and damned Kent‘s book with faint praise, making a fundamental mistake along the way by suggesting that the book was authorised by Gillard. It was not approved by Gillard, who agreed to interviews long after Kent began her research. Narparstek defended his choice of Wallace by declaring she was ‗the most qualified person in the country‘. Kent was outraged, as was her Penguin publisher Ben Ball. ‘I make mistakes, too,‘ said Kent, ‘but this one was a clear conflict of interest‘. It will be interesting to see who Naparstek gets to review Wallace‘s book.

by John Farquharson

* John is an ADB author and member of the ADB‘s Commonwealth Working Party. He worked previously as a political journalist and was a former deputy editor of the

Canberra Times. He is now a freelance writer.

Gillard’s grasp on the political domain

The Making Of Julia Gillard By Jacqueline Kent Viking, 320pp, $32.95

TRADITIONALLY, political biographies come at the end of a career, although there are always exceptions. Two biographies of then opposition leader Kevin Rudd appeared in the months before the 2007 election, as Australians rushed to find out about the man who might be PM. And now we have the first of two biographies of Julia Gillard – the other, by journalist Christine Wallace is due next year – a mid-career politician, whose greatest triumphs (and defeats) are likely yet to come.

On the first page of The Making of Julia Gillard, Jacqueline Kent justifies her choice of subject, arguing that in a country where distrust of politicians is almost an article of faith, Gillard is a political celebrity. She is also Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Education, Employment and Workplace Relations and Social Inclusion and an impressive parliamentary and media performer.

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