Julia Gillard Quotes

Gillard is as likeable as Rudd is charmless. She is self-deprecating; he is ludicrously vainglorious. She is a mistress of understatement; he is a ranter.

I was not going to stand before the nation as prime minister and cry for myself. I was not going to let anyone conclude that a woman could not take it. I was not going to give any bastard the satisfaction. I was going to be resilient one more time.

The car bumper sticker for the discerning Sydney motorist, ‘Is it true, or did Alan Jones tell you?’, should be letter-boxed around the country.

Indigenous children, children from the poorest of homes, can succeed to the highest of standards if we, the adults, are prepared to do everything necessary to get them a great education.

Who do we know in Canberra who wears a suit?’ Libby asked. ‘More importantly, who looks good?’ I asked. ‘Stephen Smith,’ Libby offered. ‘Wayne Swan,’ Denise countered. ‘Peter Garrett?’ Libby asked ‘Greg Combet, most definitely,’ I insisted. ‘Julia Gillard,’ Libby said adamantly. Both Denise and I looked at her strangely. ‘What? Seriously, she wears a suit better than any of those guys. Especially that purple one she has.

From the moment Julia Gillard became prime minister, Abbott’s mantra has been: “If you want to stop the boats, you have to change the government.” But for that to keep working in his favour, it’s best the boats keep coming.

There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead, but let me be clear: I will be putting a price on carbon and I will move to an emissions trading scheme.’ This is what she announced, but not as far as those in the Opposition and hysterical commentariat were concerned.

Long gone were the days when, for an individual, a second-class education was a ticket to a secure, full-time menial job. In the 21st-century economy, with its new technology, many of those jobs had been destroyed. That second-class education was more likely to precede a marginalised life with no continuing work.

Nurture your sense of self, who you are in your own eyes, not as seen through the eyes of others.

I found Chancellor Merkel’s frankness admirable. When I met with her at this G20 meeting, with deep cynicism she described how for photos Germans no longer said ‘cheese’. Instead they would grit their teeth and say ‘Greeeece’.

In 2010, on the ABC’s 7.30 program, he made the bizarre qualification that what he said spontaneously couldn’t be taken as his formal position: ‘In the heat of discussion you go a little bit further than you would if it was an absolutely calm, considered, prepared, scripted remark. Which is one of the reasons why the statements that need to be taken absolutely as gospel truth [are] those carefully prepared, scripted remarks.’ In a comment that wasn’t off-the-cuff, Abbott was exempting himself from being held to his own words – a privilege he never gave prime minister Julia Gillard.

constant marking down of her performance is wildly at odds with the reality of the minority government. Despite the government’s wafer-thin margin, the parliament is remarkably stable; but it’s depicted as though we are living through the last days of Rome. Gillard is implementing reforms and the parliament has passed a record amount of legislation—around 180 bills to date—but the press talks endlessly of a government close to collapse. Australia is economically robust compared to faltering international economies, but you’d be forgiven for thinking the Australian economy is on the point of disintegration. The media’s primary focus is on personalities and politics, not policies or the running of the country.

change was very difficult,’ he says. ‘But I think the best way to try to protect the legacy and the accomplishments of the past three years was for Kevin Rudd to be our advocate. Once we got into the election cycle, Labor needed to be competitive for the health of Australian democracy and Kevin Rudd provided us with our best chance.’ Shorten says it was difficult to call Gillard and tell her she had lost his support. ‘I really wanted someone else to make the decision. It was really difficult. I somehow wished the issue would fix itself up. I wished that Julia would get more popular or that, you know, Kevin and Julia could work

I soon learnt that even when new benefits are provided, people do not conclude that there is more spare cash in their wallet than there used to be. So

committing political harikari.

offering news grabs or picture opportunities.

There was no real suggestion in 2010 that policy principle might be at stake, or even policy or political competence. Julia Gillard told us that the government had lost its way. A Labor frontbencher famously summed up the depth of thought that went into it when he said to the ABC’s Chris Uhlmann on the afternoon of the coup, “So, do you think we can win with Julia?” Much later, she and many of her colleagues said it was because Kevin Rudd was out of control. It was about personal hatred and about the polls.

They were wary of each other at first, but in time formed a tight alliance that lasted twenty years until it came unstuck over the execution of Julia Gillard.

(according to the rules of NPC, one must not refer to the right-wing disrupters as radicals, whether they are in Hobart Town Hall or outside Parliament House in Canberra under banners reading ‘Julia Gillard: Bob Brown’s Bitch’)

A truism of life is change brings opportunity and risk.

only the impotent are pure.

At the G20 meeting in South Korea, China’s President Hu dug his toes in over some text in the communique President Obama needed politically on currency issues. I watched Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom execute a pincer movement, then he conceded. On Australia’s side of the ledger, tensions had risen when our government had eschewed the involvement of the Chinese company Huawei in building the NBN. We also risked Chinese ire by not stopping a fierce critic of China’s approach to human rights, a leader of the Uyghur ethnic group, from visiting Australia. China was also smarting about the price hikes they had experienced in coal and

It wasn’t the carnage behind that gave me the horrors, but the woman standing in front of it,’ Gai expounded.4

There was a policy question to be debated about how to properly position the economic relationship. Australia had never been in a position before where our major trading partner is neither an ally nor a democracy. It posed new challenges and required us to ask new questions. We resolved to seek the two-track structure Wayne advocated. The

Senator Bill Heffernan for being ‘deliberately barren’ and then had to stomach reading follow-up pieces like the one entitled ‘Barren Behaviour’ in The Australian, which stated:

Struggling for survival and relevance, we as a profession of political journalists and commentators have collectively debased our craft to the lowest common denominator—writing articles confected out of barrel-scrapings and hectoring. In such stories, the public interest doesn’t figure.

Windsor is contemptuous of the way the media is caught up in personality politics, saying the real story of the government and the revolutionary new workings of a minority parliament are being ignored as the media continues to report as if it’s still a two-horse race.

Opposition leader Tony Abbott also promptly set his tone about her, taunting her as an untrustworthy political assassin—a rich description from a man who had ambushed his own leader, Malcolm Turnbull, and snatched his party’s leadership by just one vote on 1 December 2009.

Tony Windsor puts the economic doomsaying down to the Opposition Leader: ‘Abbott’s behaviour in relation to a lot of this has been absolutely disgraceful.

There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead, but let me be clear: I will be putting a price on carbon and I will move to an emissions trading scheme.’ This is exactly what she announced in February, when she laid out a path to an emissions trading scheme via a fixed carbon price. It was Abbott who labelled it a ‘tax’, and it stuck.

John Howard performed a triple reverse somersault on his promise to never, ever introduce a GST under a government he led, and was met with no such opprobrium. Unlike Gillard, he consistently lied to the Australian people about his intentions.

I see prime ministers and ministers and so on going to see Rupert [Murdoch] every time they go to Washington,’ he tells me. ‘The big problem for them is: who do you see first—the President or Rupert? I’m not in that brigade. I am available; I am here. I am representing a section of the Australian people as a result of their vote. I am not in the game of believing that empire must be paid obeisance—or else.

In 2011, when then prime minister Julia Gillard based her opposition to the legal recognition of gay marriage in Australia on her strident belief in the traditional definition of marriage, we could all be forgiven for not knowing exactly which tradition she meant. Was it the tradition of marriage as a contract made between parents to connect kinship groups and reinforce economic and political power? Was it the tradition of marriage as a means to extend family influence into different geographical territories? Was it marriage as a tool for class consolidation or mobility? Was it marriage as a vehicle for women to escape their status as the property of their fathers to become instead the proprty of their husbands? Or was she referring to the tradition of marriage as cemented relatively recently in Australian legalese, to define marriage by what it is not? That is, it is not something that happens bteween a brother and a sister (though it can happen between cousins, or uncle and niece), nor a decision arrived at by force (though what constitutes 'force' is not defined), and it is definitely not the result of a same-sex couple eloping to a more liberal state for a party and a bogus piece of paper. Nevertheless, w all know that every marriage is different, and none can wholly be summed up be a sntence-long definition.

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It is because the issue of gender is so hard to wrestle with that I said in my final address as prime minister that gender ‘doesn’t explain everything’ about my prime ministership, ‘it doesn’t explain nothing; it explains some things. And it is for the nation to think in a sophisticated way about these shades of grey.

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Then there were some particular problems that had been caused by Kevin. Understandably Kevin was proud of his mastery of Mandarin and his expertise on China. On his ascension to the prime ministership, no doubt many in China’s diplomatic and foreign policy community would have expected new warmth to be injected into the relationship. Instead Kevin hit an uneven stride, sometimes over-familiar, sometimes too critical, the most spectacular example of which was his expletive-laden rant post the Copenhagen climate change conference.

Despite the language barrier, I could feel the depths of this man’s distress and visualise the horror that had taken place here. I was chilled, wet and mesmerised. This was strongly evident in the photo taken, which ran in the next day’s papers. Unbelievably the reaction it sparked was not one of empathy for the Japanese people but criticism of my appearance from racing identity Gai Waterhouse. ‘She desperately needs a make-over.