Julia’s women’s mag. Julia Gillard has continued her flirtation with the nation’s women’s magazines this week with an 11-page spread in The Australian Women’s Weekly, which hit newsstands this morning. The magazine gets up close and personal with the nation’s first female prime minister, promising Gillard’s “most revealing” interview to date.
At Crikey we thought we would save you $6.80 and give you a look at just how much the PM revealed:
On living in The Lodge with her boyfriend:
“I really don’t think people would much care. I’m not preaching my life choices as a model for other people. It’s my life, I made my choices. I don’t regret my choices nor am I urging anybody to mimic them.” (p.44)
On drugs and alcohol:
“I have been asked before if I have tried marijuana and the answer to that is yes… In university, we would go out to the pub and perhaps drink more than we should have on occasions. But that would be the limit of it.” (p.46)
On motherhood:
“I don’t regret not having children because, you know, you make each choice along the way in life and they add up to big choices in the end.” (p.53)
On donning leopard print pumps:
“I don’t think I’m really a leopard print kind of person.” (p.56)
The interview also featured some illuminating quotes from others in Julia’s life. Like Victoria Premier John Brumby:
“One morning, I came into the office and Julia was sitting at her desk just bawling… So I start thinking maybe the doubters were right, maybe she’s not tough enough. It turned out that her cat had just died, a cat she obviously loved dearly. She never cried again in the job.” (p.46)
According to Mum Moira, Julia got the occasional ‘smack’ as a child and was also “very good at the hula hoop” (p. 50). And veteran reporter Glenn Milne gave this juicy snippet on Julia’s relationship with the current Minister for Small Business, Craig Emerson:
“…nobody ever knew whether the relationship preceded Craig’s marriage break-up, or if it was the trigger for it.” (p.56) — Eloise Keating
Married to the campaign trail. The younger members of the Canberra Press Gallery wouldn’t know it, but it’s not the first time a prime ministerial candidate has been asked if they might be getting married soon. The question was put to Julia Gillard yesterday about whether her partner Tim Mathieson might be putting the big question to her soon — or vice versa, of course. But some 36 years earlier, in the run-up to the December 1984 election, Liberal leader Andrew Peacock, by then divorced from his first of three wives, was also asked whether he would tempt electoral fate by going into the campaign as a single/unmarried candidate, or whether marriage bells might be ringing soon for him?
The luncheon audience at the National Press Club at the time jeered the journalist asking the question, and Peacock waved it away as mildly insulting. But sure enough, within weeks in mid 1984, Peacock married public relations consultant Margaret St George, just in time for the election campaign. Peacock scared the heck out of an over-cocky ALP prime minister Bob Hawke during a marathon seven-week campaign called 18 months early by Hawke — Labor suffered a 2% swing against it, with its majority cut from 25 to 16.
The marriage fun didn’t last for Peacock, with the couple divorcing some years later. But there was plenty of fun on the 1984 campaign trail, as his former wife, now Margaret Ingram, recalled in an interview in 2004: “Well, one of the tasks I saw myself as doing was really shouting the media drinks. We’d be on a plane every day and we’d go from city to city and then at night we didn’t have that many engagements or they’d start early in the morning so I’d retire to the bar with some of the media and — I mean, I knew them all anyway and the Liberal Party seemed to have a running tab at every bar I went to, so I’d just book the drinks up to them.”
So come on Tim Mathieson — there is a great tradition of nightly drinks with the media just waiting for you to revive in this campaign. — A long-time election observer
S-X TRADE … called off. We’re coming to the business end of the preference season and it seems that Stephen Fielding’s Family First Party are not immune to the wheeling and dealing. Asked if the party were considering a deal with the Australian S-x Party (where ‘voters come first’), a spokesperson confirmed that Family First had “spoken to everyone” but they hadn’t come to an agreement with any party at this point in time. “One thing is for sure, the Greens will be preferenced last,” the spokesperson told Crikey.
Well, they did speak to everyone — including the S-x Party, The Advertiser reports today. But while the party is all about getting down and dirty, it seems a preference swap with Steve Fielding was stooping too low, says party president Fiona Patten: “It was really just them trying to grasp at what they thought was possibly a strong vote for us and hypocritically get in on our coat-tails. Frankly we just couldn’t go there.” — Tom Cowie
Someone needs to call the RSPCA. It seems Malcolm Turnbull has recruited some canine help in his hunt for votes in Wentworth. Here’s a shot snapped by the Silvertail himself while having a coffee in Darlinghurst, which he broadcast via Twitter:
Thanks for reminding me again just what an ar-ehole Milne is. He and Oakes should spend time together in a padded cell.