2013
Julia Gillard’s spectacles
A woman’s work
Prime Minister Julia Gillard kicked off the election year of 2013 with an address to the National Press Club on 30 January. The following day the political stories in the news fought for space with stories about her Oliver Peoples rose-red spectacles. Why these glasses should be so controversial explains part of the Gillard prime ministership; women in power are scrutinised differently.
On 8 October 2012, Prime Minister Julia Gillard fielded a question from Tony Abbott, the leader of the Opposition. The question related to text messages sent by Abbott’s good friend but now political enemy the Speaker of the House, Peter Slipper. The private but sexually explicit messages were in poor taste and Abbott taunted Gillard about them.
Gillard rose and opened her answer with:
I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. 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. That’s what he needs. Let’s go through the Opposition leader’s repulsive double standards . . .
Gillard enumerated in the parliament the double standard, the sly sexism that operates in our society. It’s a world in which women have the apparent trappings of equality but are not the equal of men. It’s a world where women are still doing the ironing while men look after the ‘big’ jobs.
Gillard’s speech stopped the nation in its tracks for its passion and its plain speaking. It was reported all over the world – the only time in 200 years that an Australian prime minister’s remarks have been. Australian women, even the legion who otherwise despised Gillard, recognised that for the first time someone had articulated the sexism and discrimination they put up with on a daily basis.
The 27th prime minister of Australia and the 13th Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard was the first woman to hold the top job and the first woman to lead the ALP. She was, even for years before that, a character who fascinated and polarised the Australian public. Unlike other ambitious politicians, Gillard never married, never pretended to have religious beliefs, spoke with a very broad accent, and in one of her first major photo shoots posed in a kitchen with an empty fruit bowl and little evidence of hominess. These characteristics were commented on incessantly. One especially uncouth Liberal politician accused her in parliament of being ‘barren’.
There is a general sense that sexism goes unremarked. Women are supposed to put up with it because they are ‘good sports’ or because it’s beneath them to acknowledge it. The fact that women make up 50 per cent of the population and yet only 3.7 percent of prime ministers goes completely unremarked. Gillard’s ascent to the top job was a lightning rod for men and women in Australia who were threatened by the idea of a woman being in charge.
Gillard’s position was not helped by the coup that installed her in power. She had been deputy to Kevin Rudd following the 2007 election. By 2010 most of the government had lost confidence in Rudd as prime minister and believed that the ALP was facing defeat at the imminent election. Gillard stood against Rudd and won the prime ministership, but was thereafter seen as a traitor. Her ascent over Rudd was the same as that of Bob Hawke over Bill Hayden, Paul Keating over Hawke, John Howard over a number of people and Rudd over Kim Beazley, but Gillard was painted as a Lady Macbeth and never transcended that archetype. The fact that Rudd launched a relentless destabilisation campaign against her helped neither Gillard nor her government.
With a massive reform agenda to pursue, the Gillard government was beset with leadership tensions and manufactured scandal. The ALP was in a minority position, governing with the support of independents, and certain members of the party were under investigation for sleazy sex scandals. None of this made the government feel stable. It made its share of mistakes all of its own.
Nonetheless, the government pushed through major reforms, especially in the areas of disability care and education funding. Gillard created and implemented significant climate-change policies and a framework for a market-based scheme to reduce emissions. As a result of her government’s policies, Australia’s carbon emissions are declining.
However, the most significant achievement of the Gillard government was getting sexism and gender equality on the agenda.
There is a general view that successful women should not comment on sexism when they come across it, and that they shouldn’t talk about their own success in the context of feminism. Gillard took that approach during her career: she made little mention of the fact that she was a woman. Others did – such as shock jock Alan Jones, who called her a ‘witch’, and even feminist Germaine Greer, who commented on Gillard’s body shape.
‘My first strategy was to ignore it [sexism], but as time went on, increasingly I thought it was better to name it,’ said Gillard.
I think just for me, you know, the sense that after everything that I as the first woman prime minister had seen happen around me about gender, and to me in that position, I was not going to stand there and get lectured about sexism. And so I think that frustration, even anger, shows in that speech.
For individual women in the moment, there’s always this really difficult judgement call, and this is true whether you’re in the highly exposed world of politics or whether you work in a business or you’re at a university . . . there’s that judgement in the moment of ‘Do you name it, or do you just put up with it?’
She named it, and the genie is now out of the bottle.