Julia Gillard

• 1. Introduction

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  Julia Eileen Gillard was sworn in as Australia's 27th prime minister on the 24th of June 2010, and at that moment, two firsts converged on a single country. For the first time in Australian history, both the head of state and the head of government were women: Gillard stood alongside Governor-General Quentin Bryce. Born in Barry, Wales, on the 29th of September 1961, Gillard had travelled a long way to reach that point. She was a migrant child who arrived in Adelaide in 1966, a student who switched universities mid-degree, a lawyer who made partner at 29, and a politician who spent years being spoken of as a future leader before actually becoming one. But the circumstances of her ascent were contested from the start. The man she replaced, Kevin Rudd, had not been voted out by the public. He had been removed in a party-room challenge. That shadow followed Gillard across her entire tenure. What she built during those three years, and what kept trying to tear it down, is the story worth examining.

• 2. Wales to Adelaide

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  John Oliver Gillard worked as a psychiatric nurse. His wife Moira was born in Barry, Wales, the same town where Julia arrived on the 29th of September 1961. Julia was the second of two daughters; her older sister Alison was born in 1958. When Julia suffered bronchopneumonia as a child, her parents were told a warmer climate might help her recover. That medical advice set the course of a future prime ministership. The family sailed for Australia in 1966, and their first month in the country was spent at the Pennington Hostel, a migrant facility in Pennington, South Australia, which has since closed. Eight years after arriving, in 1974, the Gillards became Australian citizens. Julia held dual British and Australian citizenship until she renounced her British citizenship before entering parliament in 1998. Her parents had cited Welsh Labour politician Aneurin Bevan as a political hero she inherited. That inheritance was not just rhetorical. Bevan's emphasis on public health and working-class dignity shaped how Gillard thought about the purpose of government long before she held any of it.

• 3. The Making of a Lawyer and Organiser

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  At the University of Adelaide, Gillard was president of the Adelaide University Union from 1981 to 1982 before a classmate, the daughter of a state Labor minister, introduced her to politics. She joined the Labor Club and threw herself into a campaign against federal education budget cuts. In 1982, she cut short her Adelaide courses and moved to Melbourne to work with the Australian Union of Students. In 1983, she became the second woman to lead that organisation, serving until it was discontinued in 1984. She also served as secretary of the Socialist Forum. After transferring to the University of Melbourne, she graduated with a Bachelor of Laws in 1986 and a Bachelor of Arts in 1989. In 1987, she joined the law firm Slater and Gordon in Werribee, Victoria, working in industrial law. By 1990, at the age of 29, she had been admitted as a partner, becoming one of the youngest and one of the first women to hold that position within the firm. Her legal specialty was industrial relations, and her work drafting the affirmative-action rules for the Labor Party in Victoria, setting a target of pre-selecting women for 35 per cent of winnable seats, was a direct extension of that world into politics. She also played a founding role in EMILY's List Australia, the pro-choice fundraising network for Labor women.

• 4. Rising Through Opposition

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  Gillard first won election to the House of Representatives at the 1998 federal election, representing Lalor, a safe Labor seat near Melbourne. She made her maiden speech on the 11th of November 1998, replacing the retiring Barry Jones. After Labor's 2001 defeat, she entered the shadow cabinet under Simon Crean with responsibility for Population and Immigration. She later shadowed Tony Abbott as Shadow Minister for Health, and the rivalry between the two attracted persistent media attention. When an Ipsos Mackay poll conducted for Meet the Press asked Australians who they wanted as Labor leader in early 2006, Gillard polled 32 per cent, ahead of Kim Beazley at 25 per cent and Kevin Rudd at 18 per cent. Despite that cross-factional support, she announced on the 25th of January 2005 that she would not contest the leadership, letting Beazley take it unopposed. Her path to the top came through alliance rather than contest. On the 1st of December 2006, she challenged Jenny Macklin for the deputy leadership as part of a cross-factional partnership with Rudd. After Rudd replaced Beazley on the 4th of December 2006, Macklin chose to resign, and Gillard became Deputy Leader unopposed.

• 5. Deputy and the Education Portfolio

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  On the 3rd of December 2007, Gillard was sworn in as the first female Deputy Prime Minister of Australia. Alongside that role, she was given what colleagues described as a super ministry: the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. On the 11th of December 2007, while Rudd attended the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, Gillard became the first woman to serve as acting prime minister of Australia. She would hold that role for a total of 69 days across Rudd's overseas engagements. Her parliamentary performances earned her a reputation as a formidable debater; Peter van Onselen described her as "the best parliamentary performer on the Labor side." In 2008, she oversaw the launch of the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy, known as NAPLAN. She also began the Building the Education Revolution program, which allocated $16 billion to construct classrooms, libraries, and assembly halls in public schools. In Washington in 2009, she signed an agreement with US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to increase policy collaboration on education reform between the two countries. On the 29th of January 2010, she launched the My School website, which made school-level data publicly available to parents. She had also commissioned David Gonski to chair a review of education funding; his recommendations, later known as the Gonski Report, would become a defining policy legacy of her prime ministership.

• 6. The Leadership Spill and a Minority Government

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  As late as May 2010, Gillard was publicly joking to journalists that there was more chance of her becoming the full-forward for the Dogs than of any change in the Labor Party leadership. Six weeks later, she was prime minister. On the 23rd of June 2010, factional figures including Bill Shorten and David Feeney approached Gillard about a challenge. Rudd, facing the loss of internal support following controversies over his government's insulation program, a mining tax dispute, and the collapse of his carbon trading scheme, resigned before a vote was held. Gillard was sworn in by Governor-General Quentin Bryce on the 24th of June. She then called an election for the 21st of August 2010, just 23 days after taking office. The result was the first hung parliament since 1940. Labor and the Coalition each won 72 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives. Four crossbench members, including Greens MP Adam Bandt and independents Andrew Wilkie, Rob Oakeshott, and Tony Windsor, declared their support for Labor, allowing Gillard to form a minority government. Governor-General Bryce swore in the Second Gillard Ministry on the 14th of September 2010. Gillard declined to move into The Lodge until she had won an election in her own right. She did not move in until the 26th of September 2010.

• 7. Governing at the Margins

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  The National Disability Insurance Scheme, one of the most significant social policy changes in Australian history, was introduced under Gillard's government. So was the Gonski school funding reform and the early rollout of the National Broadband Network. The carbon pricing scheme, introduced through the Clean Energy Act 2011, became one of the most divisive measures of her tenure. During the 2010 campaign, Gillard had said no carbon tax would be introduced under a government she led. When the hung parliament required negotiations with the Greens, she adopted the carbon tax as a transitional step toward an emissions trading scheme. The Opposition described this as a broken promise. The Clean Energy Bill passed the Lower House in October 2011 and the Upper House in November 2011. On the 21st of March 2013, Gillard delivered a national apology in the Great Hall of Parliament House to those affected by forced adoption practices in Australia from the late 1950s to the 1970s. Around 800 people attended. She committed $5 million to specialist support and records tracing for victims, and an additional $1.5 million to the National Archives of Australia to document survivors' experiences. The Perth Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in October 2011 saw Gillard and British Prime Minister David Cameron jointly announce changes to succession laws for Commonwealth realms, ending rules that privileged male heirs and barring Roman Catholic consorts.

• 8. The Misogyny Speech

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  On the 9th of October 2012, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott moved a motion in the House of Representatives to remove Peter Slipper as Speaker. Gillard rose to oppose it. What followed was a fifteen-minute speech that became one of the most widely shared pieces of parliamentary oratory of its era. Standing in the chamber, she told Abbott: "I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man." She catalogued what she described as a pattern of sexist conduct in Abbott's public comments. The speech was broadcast and watched around the world. In Laos for an Asian-European leaders conference shortly after, Gillard described being congratulated by French President François Hollande and Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt. US President Barack Obama reportedly complimented Gillard privately after his re-election. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described the speech as "very striking." Former Labor advisor Anne Summers said in 2012 that Gillard was "being persecuted both because she is a woman and in ways that would be impossible to apply to a man." The debate over how much of the hostility she faced was gendered remained unresolved throughout her time in office and after it.

  Kevin Rudd never fully accepted his removal from the prime ministership. Tension between the two leaders ran beneath the surface of the government for three years. Rudd resigned from cabinet on the 22nd of February 2012 and told the media he could only serve as Foreign Minister if he had Gillard's confidence. A Four Corners investigation revealed that Gillard's staff had written her victory speech for the 2010 leadership ballot two weeks before she challenged Rudd, contradicting her insistence that she had only decided to stand the day before. Labor MP Darren Cheeseman called on Gillard to resign. His colleague Steve Gibbons called Rudd a "psychopath with a giant ego." In the leadership ballot held on the 27th of February 2012, Gillard defeated Rudd by 71 votes to 31. A further challenge followed on the 21st of March 2013 when former leader Simon Crean called a spill and backed Rudd, who ultimately did not contest it. By June 2013, one poll showed Labor could be reduced to as few as 40 seats at the next election. On the 26th of June 2013, Gillard called a leadership ballot live on television, challenging any opponent to pledge that the loser would retire from politics. Rudd stood, and that evening he defeated Gillard by 57 votes to 45. She resigned the following day. Her parliamentary service ended on the 5th of August 2013, when the parliament was dissolved.

  By the time Gillard left office, she had served three full years as prime minister, overtaking Gough Whitlam as the 15th longest-serving prime minister in Australian history. The record she set for the longest continuous tenure since John Howard's 2007 electoral loss stood until August 2021, when Scott Morrison surpassed it. Her successor in the seat of Lalor was Joanne Ryan, a former school principal whom Gillard had publicly supported. In February 2014, Gillard was appointed chairwoman of the Global Partnership for Education, an organisation focused on getting children in the world's poorest countries into school. She joined the board of Beyond Blue in December 2014 and became its chair on the 1st of July 2017, succeeding Jeff Kennett, who had founded it almost 17 years earlier. Gillard published her memoir, My Story, in 2014. A defamatory passage about Nick Xenophon led to a public apology she published in Australian newspapers on the 6th of August 2015. In 2017 she was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia. Her nominator was reported to be Tony Abbott, who wrote a letter in 2014 testifying to her suitability for the honour. In April 2021, she became chair of the Wellcome Trust, one of the most generously funded philanthropic organisations in the world, succeeding Eliza Manningham-Buller in the role.