Julia Gillard

Julia Gillard: Fifteen Minutes That Outlived a Government

On 9 October 2012 the Prime Minister of Australia stood up in Question Time, pointed across the chamber at the Leader of the Opposition and said: "I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not." Within a week the video had a million views. Australian commentators were unimpressed at the time — Michelle Grattan called it more desperate than convincing. The rest of the world disagreed so emphatically that the Macquarie Dictionary changed the definition of a word. Nine months later Julia Gillard was out of office, and the speech is now the most widely known thing any Australian prime minister has ever said.

From Barry to Adelaide

She was born Julia Eileen Gillard on 29 September 1961 in Barry, a port town in South Wales. In 1966 the family migrated to Australia. It is a plain fact that carries some weight in her story: the first woman to lead the country was not born in it.

She was a formidable student politician, becoming in 1983 the second woman ever to lead the Australian Union of Students. She then practised law for eight years, and in 1991 became the youngest partner at Slater and Gordon, the Melbourne firm historically tied to the labour movement. She also worked for the Victorian branch of the Labor Party. The combination — union law, party machine, student politics — is the classic Labor apprenticeship, served with unusual speed.

The Rise

Gillard entered the House of Representatives in 1998 as the member for Lalor, in Melbourne's western suburbs. By 2006 she was deputy leader under Kevin Rudd, and when Labor won government in 2007 she became Deputy Prime Minister, holding the employment, education and social inclusion portfolios simultaneously — an unusually heavy load, and the portfolios she cared most about.

By mid-2010 Rudd's standing had collapsed. Gillard challenged him for the leadership and won, becoming on 24 June 2010 Australia's twenty-seventh prime minister and the first woman to hold the office or lead a major Australian party.

Governing Without a Majority

The election she called in August 2010 produced a hung parliament: Labor and the Coalition each took 72 of 150 seats. Gillard then did the thing she was genuinely best at. She negotiated confidence-and-supply agreements with the Australian Greens and three independents — Rob Oakeshott, Tony Windsor and Andrew Wilkie — assembling a 76–74 majority and a government that almost every observer expected to fall within months.

It did not fall. It legislated, and at volume. The Clean Energy Bill 2011 introduced a fixed carbon price from 1 July 2012, designed to convert into a full emissions trading scheme — passed despite her explicit 2010 campaign promise that there would be no carbon tax, a broken pledge that shadowed everything afterwards. She renegotiated Rudd's mining tax into a Minerals Resource Rent Tax at 30 per cent, raising some $12 billion by 2013–14. The National Broadband Network rollout began, testing in Tasmania and launching on the mainland at Armidale in May 2011. The Gonski review produced a needs-based schools funding model built on a Schooling Resource Standard, with four states and the ACT signed up by 2013. The National Disability Insurance Scheme commenced on 1 July 2013. And she established the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, which reshaped Australian institutions for a decade.

Asylum policy was the ugly counterweight. After the High Court blocked the Malaysia Solution in August 2011, her government returned to offshore processing, reopening Nauru and Manus Island in August 2012.

The Speech

The immediate occasion was squalid. Tony Abbott moved a no-confidence motion against the Speaker, Peter Slipper, after hundreds of Slipper's text messages — vulgar and sexist — became public that morning. Slipper's defection to the crossbench had given Gillard's minority government an extra vote, so Abbott framed the motion as a test of her consistency.

Her reply ran fifteen minutes without notes to speak of, cataloguing Abbott's own record: his remark that abortion was "the easy way out," his musing about whether male authority was really a problem. She said that every day, in every way, he demonstrated exactly what he was accusing others of.

Abbott called the speech unfair and completely invalid, a deflection from the actual question. Australian journalists split. Abroad it was received as an event: François Hollande and Helle Thorning-Schmidt sent congratulations, Barack Obama acknowledged it, and Hillary Clinton later praised her for facing down outrageous sexism. The Macquarie Dictionary widened "misogyny" from hatred of women to include entrenched prejudice against women. The philosopher Kate Manne built her 2017 book around the distinction.

There is also a sharp criticism that deserves recording: on the same day her government cut welfare payments to single mothers. The writer Shakira Hussein objected that she would not be lectured on sexism by a leader who had driven women deeper into poverty.

The Fall

Three leadership spills defined her term. She beat Rudd 71–31 in February 2012. In March 2013 he declined to contest. On 26 June 2013 he beat her 57–45. The second Rudd government began the next day, and Gillard left Parliament on 5 August 2013. She has since chaired the Global Institute for Women's Leadership.

Why Julia Is Called a Genius

The claim is best made narrowly, because the broad version does not survive contact with the record. Gillard was not a visionary policy thinker or a great communicator — her public delivery was often flat, and she lost the argument over her own carbon price so comprehensively that it was repealed.

What she possessed to an exceptional degree was parliamentary craft: the ability to count, hold and use numbers in a chamber where she had none to spare. Governing with a 76–74 margin, dependent on a Greens party and three independents with incompatible demands, she passed carbon pricing, a resource rent tax, the Gonski funding model and the NDIS, and established a royal commission that changed the country. Most minority governments survive; very few legislate. That is a technical, unglamorous form of brilliance, closer to engineering than to oratory, and it is the strongest thing on her ledger.

The misogyny speech is the other candidate, and it is a genuinely different skill — a piece of improvised political rhetoric so effective that it altered a dictionary and became a global reference point for a decade. Whether it was principled or opportunistic is still argued; the single-mothers cut on the same day is a real stain, and Abbott's charge of deflection was not baseless.

The honest summary: her tactical intelligence was outstanding, her strategic and communicative judgment was not, and she was removed by her own party after three years. Calling that genius requires specifying which faculty is meant. The parliamentary one is defensible. The rest is contested, and in a living political figure it should stay contested.

Legacy

The National Film and Sound Archive added the misogyny speech to its Sounds of Australia register in 2022; Guardian readers voted it the most unforgettable Australian television moment of 2020; it has been set to music and staged as a 2023 play, *Julia*. The NDIS and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse outlasted her government and both major parties' subsequent quarrels. Her prime ministerial records stay sealed until 2031 — which means the fullest account of her three years has not been written yet.

Achievements

• Affiliated with Slater and Gordon
• Educated at University of Adelaide, Melbourne Law School and Unley High School
• Worked as politician and lawyer