If The Polls Are Right, Gillard Is Set To Kiss Normality Goodbye

The Age

Monday November 19, 2007

Jo Chandler

IN THE disappointed days after the 2004 election, a depleted Julia Gillard and an old girlfriend boarded a plane to Vietnam and the distracting, blessed anonymity of a holiday starting from Hanoi.

There's little likelihood she'll be making a similar journey after next weekend. Odds on, she'll start the next working week as Australia's new deputy prime minister, the highest office achieved by any woman in the federal sphere. She'll not find anonymity again. And even if the polls return a surprise there'll be no flight to escape, she says, just the grind of rebuilding from political ground zero.

She's locked in her support crew for Saturday night - partner Tim Mathieson, and big sister Alison will wait nearby as she rides the count on camera for the ABC commentary. Whatever happens, they have a date for breakfast.

While remaining on song - not too smug, a-week-is-a-long-time-in-politics and all that - she's sniffed the wind and it's coloured her demeanour. In her smart black suit, she's unwilted on a warm Melbourne Sunday that began with a grilling on ABC TV from Insiders host Barry Cassidy, deeply cranky that it was Gillard, not Rudd, turning up to take his questions.

Her response? To tease him for behaving like a "jilted lover", challenging him to get on with it, and he did. The deft parlay neatly exhibiting why the party strategists had put her in the seat in the first place.

Afterwards, she says she admitted to Cassidy that she'd come up with the line in advance as she pondered getting out of the more obvious corners of the closely watched interview. "And I said to him . . . 'if you come back to me (on Rudd) more than once I will have to deploy it'." She's plainly chuffed that the opportunity came.

Gillard has always liked delivering the one-liner. "I like being the person in the room who tries to crack the joke, that's sort of innate," she says. The skill honed among mates over dinner parties has served her well in the brutal world of politics. Humour - frequently self-deprecating - and a quick mouth must be invaluable to a person who claims she is shy by disposition.

Shyness seems inconceivable given her assured, sometimes acid, political persona and her slick on-camera performances, but maybe that's what keeps her hands - with unvarnished, short-cut nails - so feverishly busy with the paperwork she holds out of shot as she stares down the barrel of the lens for yet another media doorstop.

At a time when the big men of politics have never been so impenetrable, unknowable behind their suits and spinners, Gillard is frequently candid and easily accessible. She has had little choice but to allow the Inner Julia - or at least a beguiling impersonation of her - out, perhaps smartly anticipating the tactical benefits (a la Cassidy) with last year's intimate Australian Story profile.

The political is still intensely personal for a woman in politics - few blokes have had to explain their relationship and reproductive history quite so fully. Perhaps with the exception of Tony Abbott. But even he doesn't have to explain hair and make-up.

"There are times . . . when it goes beyond your comfort zone," she told The Age yesterday. "I think in ten, 15 years time when it is as routine to see women in politics as it is to see men in politics, in all the positions, that will abate a little," she says.

But "we are still on the way there", and until that happens, she's resigned to a sometimes discomforting level of exposure.

It means she's used to laughing off all manner of observations from friend and foe on her attractiveness/outfitting/date prospects. Truth be told, a hardline aficionado of the sisterhood would have smacked someone in the mouth at most of her hustings. But the girl thing works both ways, Gillard admits.

There is "an extra reservoir of support from women who unashamedly barrack for women". The "Go Girl" factor. "And I think it is a very mainstream sentiment for women. I'm equally to likely to encounter it in a factory in Penrith or walking down Bourke Street."

What does she think of the weight of that expectation, of achieving a political milestone for women? She's coy. "You've got to confine your emphasis to Saturday . . . but . . . afterwards? Who knows." She comes over all uncharacteristically Scarlett O'Hara, and will think about that then. Because "that's not the thing that has motivated me in politics . . . being the first woman to do this or the other. I've been motivated by my beliefs about change and bettering society. And if that happens along the way, then that happens.

"I think a lot of Australian women will feel good about it, but it is not really the prism through which I see it."

As she wrote in her column in The Sunday Age yesterday, "six sleeps to go". And then? A different life? "My life has changed a fair bit already due to the amount of recognition I get now. The sort of breakfasts where we used to potter out on Sunday mornings and sit there with Tim having a cup of coffee and scrambled eggs . . . in a sense, those days are already gone."

It's been a gradual progression, learning to be recognised, coping with being public. "It's not like my world has changed overnight."

But, it might be about to? She'll worry about that next Sunday.

© 2007 The Age

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