Australia's first female, and very fine Prime Minister - Julia Gillard

Since Australia federated and became a sovereign nation on the 1st January 1901, prime ministers have come and gone. Some were intelligent, some were learned, some were ideologically principled and some were heroic during tough times facing the nation. But until 2010, they were all male. This was a tragedy for the 51% of the population who were not male.

Julia Gillard (born 1961) was the first woman to become leader of the Labour Party and as that party was in power, the first woman to become Prime Minister of this great nation. From 24th June 2010 to 27th June 2013 she was a prime minister with vision, particularly in the areas beloved by ordinary families - education, universal health care, disabilities, the environment and climate change. I did not like the Labour Party's policies on asylum seekers, but no party can be perfect.

Yesterday she was shafted by males who could not tolerate being led by a woman. 

Julia Gillard, prime minister

How do we know that the three years of her prime ministership, when the world was turned upside down by staggering unemployment, a falling USA dollar and rapidly shrinking markets, were hugely successful? Examine the credit ratings by the three international ratings companies: Standard and Poor's, Fitch and Moody's. Of the 193 nations on earth, very very few nations sustained a Triple A rating from all three ratings companies:

Australia
Canada
Denmark
Finland
Germany
Luxembourg
Netherlands
Norway
Singapore
Switzerland
Sweden 

Australia is one of the few.

The Sydney Morning Herald got it right. The hypocrisy in this nation is breathtaking as well as shameful. We treated our first female prime minister disgracefully while she was in office, and now that she has been driven out, it seems she is going to be denied even the solace of having her extraordinary raft of achievements recognised. The prime minister's amazing three years have been thoroughly trashed – by the opposition, by the media and now by the Labour Party caucus. Not even the nine women ministers on Parliament's front bench showed any sisterly solidarity.

Shame, Australia, shame.

**

My nephew, not an insensitive young man at all, said women should just get over the Labour leadership vote. There was no gender issue; just a party trying to win the next election. I shall send him a copy of Nikki Gemmell’s column in the Weekend Australian Magazine (29/6/13). Nikki’s key issue was as follows.

Becoming prime minister, aiming for it, was the holy grail for my generation of women, the daughters of the tide of feminist euphoria that swept the western world 40 years ago. (Me too, Nikki. My crit­ical years as a feminist were 1963-1972). You can be anything, we were repeatedly told – political leader, soldier, captain of ind­ustry, crusader, whatever you want. Blaze the trail.

But now with the insidious destruction of Julia Gillard’s prime min­istership, do we want our shining girls to be harangued, ridiculed, mocked in sustained verbal stoning; reduced to nothing but their body parts, their genitalia openly discussed in public; to be treated so shockingly differently?


A lot of women felt grubbied after that ignominious week.

People might like to read the book The Stalking of Julia Gillard: how the media and Team Rudd brought down the prime minister by Kerry-Anne Walsh. Published by Allen & Unwin just now (July 2013), focuses the right wing, anti-woman media's treatment of on Team Rudd and the slow-death campaign of destabilisation, with its disastrous effect on Gillard and the government's functioning. It is about a politician who was never given a fair go; not in the media, not by Rudd, not by some in caucus.