Mark Harrison/Camera Press/Redux
HBR: Why did you go into politics?
Gillard:
When I was young, it never occurred to me that people from families
like mine were the sort who could. I was never the kid who at seven, 10,
or 12 said, “I want to be the prime minister when I grow up.” That was
like saying, “I want to be an astronaut”—undoable. But I went to
university and studied for law and arts degrees and got involved in the
student movement, protesting education cutbacks. That’s what spurred an
activism and engagement in public policy in me, and I went on to lead
the student movement nationally. I did get those degrees and practice as
a lawyer. But people had said, “You really should consider politics.”
It was a slow dawning over time that it would be a fantastic way of
putting my values into action—and realizing that someone like me could
do it.
You suffered some early defeats. Why did you keep going?
Once
I decided this was what I wanted, I became determined—some might say
stubborn. I stood for preselection, which is like a U.S. primary, for a
lower House seat in my party, and I lost. I stood for preselection a few
times for the Senate, and I lost. I was finally preselected for the
Senate, but in one of the more marginal slots and in a bad election for
Labor, and I lost. That was a lot of hard knocks, but they just made me
hungrier. I also think being an even-tempered person put me in good
stead. I’m not prone to exaggerated highs or huge depths of despair. I
am a true believer in the power of democratic politics to make big and
important changes, and I wanted to play a personal role in that. So a
sense of purpose and drive, together with a wonderful family and hugely
supportive friends and colleagues, was enough to see me through.
How did you balance campaigning with governing over the course of your career?
They’re
not disconnected. If you campaign with clear messages about what you
want to achieve, that gives you more space in government, and if you
govern explaining to people what you’re trying to do, there’s a greater
likelihood that they’ll give you their consent to keep doing it.
As prime minister, how did you get things done?
The
government machine is so big that I used to say to myself every
morning, “Either I can run it, or it will run me.” Enough gets fed up to
you that if all you did was respond, you’d be busy. But you wouldn’t be
driving your agenda. So you need to be ruthlessly clear about that
agenda and force the machinery to support and prioritize it—in internal
decision making, expenditure reviews, implementation, communications.
Core to my government were education reforms and the National Disability
Insurance Scheme, and whilst we got many other things done, we were
always determined to see those things through.
Apart from that ruthless prioritization, what kind of day-to-day manager are you?
I’m
not a yeller. I don’t think anybody works smarter or harder because
they’ve been yelled at. I have a very loyal staff, and I always wanted
them to feel bonded to the project. I’m a very methodical person, and I
wanted that sense of method in the whole team. And even in the most
difficult days we were a united, happy group. There was fun to be had.
When hiring people, then and now, what do you look for?
It
depends what you’re recruiting for. What you look for in the public
service or your political office would be different. But I’ve always
wanted to see people who are clear on why they want to do the job and
what they want to achieve in it. I never wanted people who would just
agree with me. I wanted people who would put a contest of ideas into the
system.
In your parliamentary system, how did you form alliances?
It
was a very partisan era, and the opposition had decided that they
wanted to tear the government down and be negative about everything. So
there wasn’t much across-the-aisle work between our Labor Party and the
Liberal Party, which is the conservative party in Australia. But because
we were a minority government, we reached out to minor party players
and independents and took their views into account. Politicians spend a
lot of time being the ones in the room who are talking. I spent time
thinking about what was core for me and what I could negotiate but then
also really listening to my counterparts and trying to identify what was
core for them and what they could negotiate. Sometimes they aren’t good
at picking, so you have to help them. We didn’t just use this within
Parliament, either. We had outreach into the business community, the
trade unions, the environmental movement, to also get their perspectives
brought to the table.
Is the approach different when you’re building relationships with foreign leaders?
You
should neither overestimate nor underestimate personal relationships in
foreign policy dialogue. You don’t do a trade deal that’s bad for your
economy or sell the weapons that you otherwise wouldn’t have to someone
just because you like them. But within the circumference of what is
possible, I think you can get more done if there’s some personal
rapport. So you do have to think about how to build it, and although
there’s extra complexity when it’s cross-cultural, it’s the same set of
skills.
How did you build personal support—allies not just for your party or platform but for you as a leader?
It’s
the same thing. People respond to ideas and vision, absolutely, but
they also respond to being taken seriously and treated decently. Then,
even when you have intense engagements and end up agreeing to disagree, a
human bond is formed. That sustained me in leadership for the period I
was there. I focus on education now, and I view it as not a body of
knowledge poured into people’s heads but the skills of collaboration and
teamwork and emotional intelligence. The days of command-and-control
leadership, if they ever truly existed in politics, are long gone. The
big boss telling people what to do is not the model that will hold
people in for big change projects any longer.
But it seems that leaders like that are being elected.
Yes,
but if you look at what they claim and what they’re actually getting
done, there’s often a very big gap. So I think that in politics, in
business, in all walks of life, people will ultimately get through this
phase of the strongman leader and be looking for enabling leaders who
give them the opportunity to prosper, develop, live the lives they want.
You were attacked by the opposition, the media, even people in your own party. How did you cope?
By
working on my own sense of self. I couldn’t let myself feel good or bad
depending on the headlines. There was a woman who would get the papers
early for me at the official residence, and she told me after I left
office that she had always tried to put the one with the nicest headline
on top, but some days she’d get close to tears because she couldn’t
work out which was the least negative. But that didn’t mean I’d turned
from being ordinary Julia Gillard into some monster. I couldn’t let it
get in my head. I knew that ultimately what would count would be what I
achieved during my time in office. It takes discipline and resilience,
but I’ve always believed those are muscles. If you work them, they get
stronger. And I gave mine a fair old workout.
Why did you decide to speak out on sexism when you did?
I
wish there was some intricate backstory. The truth is, I hadn’t decided
that it was the moment. That day a man from another party whom I had
supported to be speaker of the House of Representatives was unmasked as
having sent some sexist text messages. So I was expecting criticism,
even though I couldn’t have known about the texts. When we got into
question time in Parliament, the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, moved
into the debate, and so, whilst he was speaking, I handwrote a reply.
Because I’d been expecting him to talk about sexism, I’d had my office
give me his top sexist quotes. But it wasn’t some thought-through
strategy with a wonderfully chiseled speech that we’d been working on
for days. It welled up. I got a blank piece of paper and just scribbled
down words to help guide me from one point to another. Looking back, I
think it was driven by a deep frustration that after every sexist thing
directed at me that I’d bitten my lip on, now I was going to be accused
of sexism—the unfairness of that. That anger propelled it.
And how did you deal with the fallout?
I
thought it was a forceful speech because the opposition leaders had
dropped their heads during it. But I had no sense of how it was going to
resonate outside the parliamentary chamber. Afterward, when I sat back
in my chair, my deputy prime minister, Wayne Swan, had this odd
expression on his face and said, “You can’t give that kind of j’accuse
speech and then sit down.” Then the leader of government business,
Anthony Albanese, said, “Oh, I felt sorry for Tony Abbott.” So I could
tell there was something in the air. By the time we’d been released from
the debate and I’d walked back to my office, phones were ringing, and
people were sending emails. But it was only over the next few days that
it was reported around the world. At first I was somewhere between
confused and amused that it could get so big. Nowadays, with social
media what it is, you might realize. But this was then. Then there was a
period when I felt almost resentful about it—“You know, I was in
Parliament for 15 years, deputy prime minister for three, prime minister
for three, and apparently it all telescopes down to this one speech.”
But I’m at peace with it now. At the end of the day, if it’s the only
thing people overseas know about Australian politics—and it often
is—it’s a pretty good one thing to know.
When
you were Kevin Rudd’s deputy and didn’t feel that he was leading
effectively, how did you make sure that things still got done?
For
a long period I stepped in behind the scenes as much as I could to try
to make up for the deficits—even things like diary management, political
communications, intermingling with his staff. Whilst the workload was
intense, it would have been sustainable provided there was a strong bond
of trust between Kevin and me. But one fateful day some newspaper
coverage indicated that even that had fallen away on his side. And I
thought, Well, that means I can’t keep doing all that I am to hold the government and the prime minister up. So there has to be change.
As my great Labor predecessor Paul Keating always said, “Not a day to
waste.” Political leadership for me was always about what you could
achieve through governing, not a status thing.
You stayed quiet for so long about those pressures and your reasons for challenging Rudd. Why?
Well,
when I became prime minister, we needed to get ready to fight an
election, and I wanted it to be about the big things we believed in and
would do as a Labor Party, not about internal matters. Unfortunately,
there were several big leaks during the campaign—distorted versions of
internal discussions—which kept hijacking the agenda. There was some
shock about how I emerged, and all sorts of static around being the
first woman prime minister. But I wanted to form a government and get on
with governing.
Australia’s carbon tax was a big issue during your administration. Why did you back away from it?
My
underlying beliefs never changed. Climate change is real, we have to
address it, and the best way to do that is through market-based
mechanisms. But it takes judgment about the politics, about when you can
press and succeed, and when you can’t. And what prevented Kevin Rudd
from succeeding with the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was the
inability to get it through the Senate. The Conservatives were opposed
to it; the Greens refused to support it. In the days of our minority
government there was a window to get an emissions trading scheme
instead, and we went for it.
After you lost the 2013 leadership challenge, why did you leave politics?
I
said that if I lost, I would. I thought it should be a clean decision. I
didn’t want to give instability to my political party. So I exited and
laid low, lived my life like a fugitive to make sure that I didn’t get
caught by the media and create any distraction during that election. It
was kind of an act of loyalty to the Labor Party. And personally, I
think that if you’re not on the way up, you’re on the way down, so maybe
it’s time to think about a new future.
How did you decide on that second act?
I
was suspended in time for a period. When you have an absolutely
relentless work schedule, you don’t realize how tired you are until you
stop. There’s a physical recovery and an emotional decompression you
need to do. After I came through that, I started to think about what in
life I wanted to take with me or discard. I didn’t want to be a
continuing combatant commentator in Australian politics, but there were
some things to which I wanted to contribute. So I structured my new
engagements around those, a number of them at a global level.
Do you miss governing or politics?
I
miss bits of it dreadfully—the ability to do the big things you believe
in, the intensity of the bond you have with the best of your
colleagues. But the sheer relentlessness of it I don’t miss. I’ve never
woken up any morning and said, “Gee, I miss the press gallery.”
You chose the public sector. Is that the best way to make a difference in the world today?
I
am 100% biased. There are other ways, but I don’t think anything
surpasses what politics can bring. At its best, it’s a noble cause; we
want the best, brightest, most motivated, passionate, concerned, to go
into it. But you can’t insult people’s intelligence by pretending there
will be no nasty bit, no gendered bit. The political life is not for
everyone. But to lead a nation and make a huge difference to its future
is an absolute privilege.
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