Life’s Work: An Interview with Julia Gillard
Julia Gillard was Australia’s prime minister from 2010 to 2013 and is the only woman to have held the position. Drawn into politics as a student activist, she persevered through early election defeats to win a Labor Party seat and then served as deputy prime minister under Kevin Rudd before eventually challenging him for the top job. In 2012 she gained global fame for a speech decrying misogyny. A year later Rudd won a leadership contest against her, and she left government. She now focuses on advocacy for causes including education, gender equity, and mental health because, as she recently told the Simmons Leadership Conference, “If you are really passionate about something and raise your voice, you can make a difference.”
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.
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.
Alison Beard is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review.
Life’s Work: An Interview with Julia Gillard
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