Julia Gillard’s case of true bluey ambition; Claire Harvey From: The Sunday Telegraph

JULIA Gillard doesn’t wait for a green light before she crosses the road. She strides up to the intersection, jabs the button a few times, looks both ways and steps off the kerb.

She walks fast, on her regular pre-dawn march from her Canberra flat up the hill to Parliament House. She texts and talks on her phone as she walks. She wears daggy gym gear, and pulls her hair back with a schoolgirl’s barrette.

That simple daily pleasure, like so many of the other freedoms of normal life, is gone now.

From now on, there will always be federal policemen to walk with Gillard. There’ll always be someone to press the button, someone to look both ways and someone to insist the prime ministerial body and brain are no longer Gillard’s own property.

But the 27th Prime Minister of Australia is used to adapting.

This is the little Welsh girl who turned into a broad-accented Australian woman; the university socialist who became a fiscal conservative; the union lawyer who grew into a union-smashing minister; the no-fuss young feminist who learned the power of ladylike grooming; the loyal deputy who knifed her leader.

Julia Gillard is warm, convivial and steely. She pats arms and kisses cheeks and smiles in her dealings with parliamentarians, colleagues and bureaucrats.

She is brutal in mocking and putting down her opponents, but has deliberately toned down the aggression that marked her first appearances in the parliamentary chamber.

She rings her mum and dad every Saturday, and recently gave her mother Moira the three-volume Millennium crime novel set, then worried it might be too racy and violent for elderly ladies.

Gillard has a nickname for everyone. Her chief of staff Amanda Lampe is "The Lampinator", for example, and the environment in her female-dominated office is relaxed enough for staff to address her simply as "Gillard".

Through 12 years in Parliament, Gillard has overseen near-disasters and great successes, from 2005’s hamfisted sales pitch on workplace-relations policy to this year’s hugely successful introduction of the MySchool website.

Through the years, she has worked to win the support and friendship of fellow Labor MPs from across the factions. Over the past two years, she has morphed from the leader least likely – the female, red-haired, Strine-speaking party warrior – to the brilliant stateswoman who wears sharp black stilettos to swear her oath of office at Government House.

As training wheels Prime Minister, Gillard has performed with a constant, brisk efficiency that makes her the Government’s most effective and popular minister.

Nobody questions her competence, although plenty may be confused about exactly what she stands for – and that goes back to her earliest career.

Born in Barry, Wales, on September 29, 1961, the young Julia was simply not robust enough for bitter Welsh winters, and doctors told her mother Moira the only cure for her broncho-pneumonia was to move to a warmer climate.

The doctor had Cornwall in mind, but John and Moira Gillard took the warning seriously and took Julia and elder sister Alison all the way to Adelaide, where John began factory work and trained as a psychiatric nurse, and Moira took on a job as a nursing-home cook.

All roads led to Labor from there.

Gillard was a talented debater at Unley High School, and deeply affected by Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975.

Like so many in her generation, she was shocked and politicised – and when Gillard began her arts-law degree at the University of Adelaide in 1979 she also became active in student politics, joining the Labor Club and the Australian Union of Students, where she soon became education vice-president – a job that took her to Melbourne and to the union’s head office.

Gillard graduated at 25 and began work experience at the law firm Slater and Gordon, which hired her as a junior solicitor. Running cases on behalf of unions and workers, on all manner of industrial disputes and class-action compensation cases, she was made a partner in the firm at the age of 29.

In 1993, by now an active Labor branch president with a record of pushing feminist policies such as the affirmative-action fundraising organisation Emily’s List, Gillard decided to try for preselection in the safe Labor seat of Melbourne, but she didn’t have the factional support to defeat an old rival, Lindsay Tanner, with whom she had shared mutual suspicion since student days, when they knocked heads in the Australian Union of Students.

Gillard tried again in 1996 with an attempt to win Senate preselection, but lost to another left-winger, female union boss Jennie George.

Tanner tried to block Gillard once more in 1998, when she sought preselection for Lalor, recently vacated by ALP ex-president Barry Jones.

Although the seat was "owned" by the party’s Socialist Left faction, of which both Gillard and Tanner were members, Tanner believed Gillard was "a conservative and a careerist who could not be trusted", according to Jacqueline Kent’s authorised biography of Gillard.

Under the guidance of the faction’s boss, Senator Kim Carr, Tanner attempted to marshal votes against her. Carr and Tanner were joined in their campaign by Jenny Macklin, another Socialist Left member who had long felt let down by Gillard. Macklin, now Aboriginal Affairs Minister and one of the Rudd Government’s busiest ministers, had hoped for Gillard’s support in preselection for her own seat of Jagajaga back in 1996, but Gillard had declined to support her.

Faced with the determined opposition of these powerful figures, Gillard set about winning preselection without their endorsement.

To get there, she called upon the support of Labor figures from other factions – including Martin Ferguson from the independent Left, and the Right splinter faction known as Unity, which featured John Brumby (now Victorian Premier) and Stephen Conroy (now Communications Minister). She won the seat and entered Parliament as one of a gaggle of fiery, talented women bolstering ranks for leader Kim Beazley, including future ministers Tanya Plibersek and Nicola Roxon.

On her first day in the House, I visited Gillard in her office, where she was unpacking a toaster and a coffee plunger, clearly planning on many late nights at her desk.

Indeed, as she told me earlier this year during a day of interviews – including a speedy early-morning walk – there have been countless nights when she left her chair only to fill that plunger with coffee and water, then return to her desk.By now, Gillard was Deputy Prime Minister, and she was describing the drama and tension of the early days of 2009’s global financial crisis, when she and her old foe Tanner were part of Kevin Rudd’s "gang of four", along with Treasurer Wayne Swan.

During the group’s meetings, staffers ran in and out with updates on foreign economies nearing collapse and banks toppling – all highly reminiscent of the American political television drama The West Wing.

"Yeah, except no one’s anywhere near as good-looking as any of the characters in West Wing," she laughed.

"If there’s a Josh Lyman somewhere in the building, I haven’t met him yet."

Is it a glamorous, exciting world, or is it more Coronation Street than West Wing? She laughed. "One thing I’ve envied about West Wing, apart from the fact that everyone’s so unbelievably good-looking, is the press conference system, where you push your press sec out the door and they do the presser. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?"She mimed pushing her press secretary, Russell Mahoney, in to a slavering press-pack: "Do your best, Russ."

Politics had brought adrenalin and excitement, she said, "but there are those long days when you’re hunched over paperwork for six or eight hours, and you’d get up to get a cup of coffee, and that’d be about it."

Is it a job that keeps her awake nights?

"I’m a pretty good sleeper, so no – not for me. I’m someone who can be very focused on a task, then let it go and have half an hour to myself having a bath or reading a book, or whatever, then just go to bed and sleep."

So what does our new Prime Minister read to relax?

Not policy briefs or marginal-seat polling, but thrillers.

She’s been hooked on the Millennium trilogy – a brutal series of murders and cold-hearted Swedish sex.

"I’m an addict. With some sense of trepidation, I gave the set of three to my mum for Christmas. She’s a voracious reader and I wasn’t sure because they’re out there violence-wise and pretty racy, but she loved them. She didn’t move for a week, and loved all three."

One of Gillard’s own most difficult political periods was shortly before the 2007 election when, as Rudd’s deputy and industrial relations spokeswoman, she took charge of Labor’s promise to tear down John Howard’s Work- Choices laws. At that time, she had already been through a series of wrenching personal shifts to get to that job. After Beazley’s dumping, she had been a loyal lieutenant to Simon Crean – even volunteering for the immensely difficult immigration portfolio.

That gave Gillard the task of somehow drafting an alternative policy to Howard’s electorally popular, hard-line "Pacific Solution".

After discussing the issue widely throughout the party, Gillard finally presented a far tougher policy than many in Labor wanted.

Its title, Protecting Australia and Protecting the Australian Way, left nothing to the imagination: it promised to uphold Howard’s tight border patrols, offshore processing on Christmas Island and policy of putting all asylum-seekers in mandatory detention – although unaccompanied children would no longer be put behind bars.

Gillard also proposed increasing aid to first-refuge countries and the United Nations – but the policy angered many pro-refugee people within Labor and in the community.

Now established as a pragmatic, conservative voice in the party, Gillard from 2003 became a prot aacg aac of the mercurial leader Mark Latham – to the point when, in 2004, Latham attempted to persuade her to think of herself as a future leader.

"Gillard was reluctant," Latham wrote in his notorious diary.

"She’s never seen herself as a Parliamentary leader.

"I advised Julia to see if she could butter up Albo for the next six months."

There wasn’t much point.

Anthony Albanese is a proud titan of the NSW Left, and he has remained a Gillard sceptic.

After Latham imploded in 2005 and Beazley re-assumed the leadership, Gillard (then Opposition health spokeswoman) concentrated on her running battle with then-health minister Tony Abbott.

She also slowly came to the view that it was time for fresh leadership, as Beazley fumbled on matters of policy and public relations.

Gillard felt unready to be a leader, but knew she could command the votes of about 40 per cent of the caucus, with the help of Left titan Kim Carr, who had become a Gillard fan and marshalled numbers for her joint ticket with Rudd.

They were indeed the dream team – Rudd from the Right, Gillard from the Left – and together promised to unite the party.

Which brings us back to 2007, when Rudd had to to defuse a mounting furore over Gillard’s ill-advised threat that business could be "injured" by trying to defend WorkChoices.

Gillard claimed she was joking, but Rudd had to step in to calm panicking businesses and rebuff Gillard. It was a moment that established his dominance in the relationship.

In government, Gillard remained Rudd’s diligent deputy, presiding over the dismantling of WorkChoices and the introduction of MySchool, both successes, but struggled with the administration of the Building the Education Revolution, a giant school building scheme designed to stimulate the construction sector in the downturn.

The scheme, hammered by talkback radio over rorts and blowouts, has left the Gillard brand tarnished in marginal seats, particularly in western Sydney.

Unmarried and childless, Gillard has become used to curiosity about her boyfriends, including union officials Michael O’Connor and Bruce Wilson.

O’Connor was her university boyfriend and has remained a lifelong friend, and Wilson was the Australian Workers’ Union secretary whom she met in 1995 when she was a lawyer with Slater and Gordon.

Their relationship ended when it emerged Wilson had allegedly blackmailed employers at construction sites.

The issue became public when a Victorian Liberal minister made untrue allegations that police were investigating possible misuse of extorted funds in redecorating Gillard’s own house. These allegations were later rehashed in the media, to Gillard’s great frustration.

In 2002, she began a two-year relationship with Craig Emerson, the then-married federal minister who left his wife and children for her.

Until last week, Emerson sat seven seats along from Gillard on the Government’s front bench, and he firmly came out in support of Kevin Rudd as the elected Prime Minister – an awkward moment for all involved.

Gillard, meanwhile, was beaming as she held hands with her boyfriend of several years, hairdresser Tim Mathieson, at Government House.

The exact state of Gillard’s swirling political allegiances will become clear when she names her Cabinet but, by taking the leadership, she has thrown her lot in with the ruthless Labor hardheads who orchestrated Rudd’s demise: factional leaders Mark Arbib, Karl Bitar, Bill Shorten and David Feeney, deputy PM Wayne Swan, and unionists Paul Howes and Bill Ludwig.

Latham, who now dislikes Gillard along with almost everyone else in Labor, is doing his best to destroy those bonds already, revealing that back in 2004, Gillard "routinely referred to the likes of Albanese, Swan, Mark Arbib and Billy Shorten as the ‘dark side’ of the ALP: numbers men who believed in nothing but themselves.

"Like Rudd before her, Gillard’s only claim to the leadership is popularity. After her honeymoon period subsides – as it will when the prying media dust off the many skeletons in her closet – the factions will strike again," Latham wrote. "She’ll be the next one for the knife."

But Gillard is weary of Latham and has repeatedly said she doesn’t read his columns or listen to his interviews.

She also says she won’t move to The Lodge, and wants to maintain her Kingston flat, and perhaps preserve that morning walk, accompanied by the sound of Canberra’s morning magpies – and occasionally the iPod.

"I’m a pretty bad ’80s dag," the Prime Minister told me.

"David Essex, the Rolling Stones, Cold Chisel, Flame Trees: Adelaide gave Cold Chisel to the world.

"At heart, though, I’m a Bruce Springsteen girl.

"Born To Run is definitely one of the greatest rock songs of our age."

SOURCE: Claire Harvey From: The Sunday Telegraph

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