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Home , Julia Gillard, Simon Crean

Issue #31 May 07

This time it’s personal: through the eyes of her friends, family and boyfriend Going, going green: why restaurant king Paul Mathis fi nally fl ipped over meat The bionic man: Professor Graeme Clark on eyes, ears and Eltham Plus: how to really get away from it all – our guide to island escapes

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If the opinion polls are right, Julia Gillard is on her way to becoming the most powerful woman in Australian politics. It’s no surprise to those who know her well, writes Dani Valent.

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Photography Simon Schluter, Eamon Gallagher

Julia Gillard is handed a water balloon and invited to take her best shot. She palms the such as the Dunny Race may have to go by the wayside. Gillard hopes not. “When I do quiveringly full blue missile, assessing its weight. “I’m not sure about chucking it,” she says things like that in the electorate, I can exhale and be myself,” she says. “They like it that to the cheerful middle-aged woman who proffered the ammunition. Who’s the target, I’m in the media and I’m doing well. That gives the community a sense of achievement. anyway? Is it , the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Gillard’s But because I’ve known them for so long, most of them think, well, that’s just Julia.” industrial relations opponent in Parliament? Is it long-time sparring partner ? Being “just Julia” is a big deal for Gillard, even if she is headed for one of the top jobs Or is she going to sneak a shot at and wrest the Labor leadership after all? in the land. She’s hung on to the ocker voice that has earned her a lot of snobbish stick No. Today’s victims are contestants in the Great Australian Dunny Race, part of the annual (the accent, by the way, doesn’t stand out at all in her home seat). She’s unapologetically Weerama Festival in Werribee, which is in Gillard’s seat of Lalor. Teams pushing homemade childless, cheerfully unmarried (though she has a boyfriend) and blithely admits she’s rickshaws mounted with toilets thunder along Watton Street while the crowd piffs water a terrible cook. “I can do toast and cheese on toast. I did make soup once last year. balloons at them. Julia Gillard decides not to join in. She gingerly lays down her weapon, It was edible,” she says, noting that she stood in the supermarket for 15 minutes wondering making sure it doesn’t explode over her black trousers and chunky-heeled boots. “I can’t whether it would be OK to substitute a swede for a turnip. afford to lose a vote,” she says, sipping a latte she picked up at McDonald’s on her way to the Her dyed red hair will still often look just one bad-hair-day away from unruly (even though festival. It’s not true – in 2004, she could have thrown away a few thousand votes and held the boyfriend is a hairdresser). She’ll still be a member of Labor’s left faction, which has Lalor, a safe Labor seat. Still, an election year probably isn’t the time to be taking chances. historically been locked out of leadership positions at federal level. She’ll still be clumsy, funny, Gillard’s day continues as she clambers down from the knee-high VIP stage and mixes unflappable and – as everyone who knows her says with robotic predictability – “down-to- with constituents, including a shy year 12 student who is presented by her mother (“It’s a earth”. It seems a fair assessment. The first time we meet, at this magazine’s photo shoot in hard year. You can’t study all the time,” says Gillard brightly) and an unshaven old codger March, Gillard jokes about her small “inbred Welsh coal miner” feet as she flaps around in too- who wants to talk tariffs. “We need good industrial policy, not tariffs. Not even Toyota asks big pumps supplied by the stylist. She tries on a cropped, padded jacket and checks herself for tariffs,” she says firmly, thinking perhaps of a recent meeting with Toyota executives who out sceptically in the mirror. “I could be an extra in Star Trek,” is the verdict. Later, she hops were stunned that Gillard managed to ding her late-model car despite its parking sensors. into the front passenger seat of her chauffeured Commonwealth car then, when the driver (“A bollard jumped out at me,” she explained.) Then, black tea and a strawberry with local traps her by parking hard up against a lightpole, she scrambles across his seat, makes a joke mayor Shane Bourke, a doorstop interview about industrial relations that turns up on the about stealing the car, then tumbles out onto Elizabeth Street. She ad-libs her way through an evening news, a Lutheran school opening in Newport, a quick trip back home to Altona address to a small crowd of union workers gathered in Bourke Street Mall for an International to grab supplies for a week in Parliament (“I pack quickly”) and a 7pm flight to , Women’s Day rally, then deems the gathering “cute” as she strides up Bourke Street. where she bunks down in a Deakin hotel. So much for Sunday. Gillard crosses the tram tracks halfway up the hill (“Ooh, look, Deputy Leader jaywalking”) If you place any store in the opinion polls, Julia Gillard, 45, is going to be Deputy Prime and bursts into Il Bacaro restaurant laughing. Her throaty giggle gets a good work-out over Minister of before the year is out, the first woman ever to be so. Folksy distractions lunch where she seems delighted to be upsold calamari (“Now, that’s Melbourne”), waves ➔

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“It’s nice to meet a girl who’s grounded. I hate spin and there’s no pretence about her in any way.” Tim Mathieson

Mathieson, a sales representative for PPS Hairwear products, doesn’t fit the same mould as her other big loves (university sweetheart Michael O’Connor and 1990s squeeze Bruce Wilson were both union officials; , her boyfriend in 2002, is a federal MP). “It’s just the way it’s worked out,” says Gillard. “In the heady days of student politics it wouldn’t have occurred to you to have a relationship with someone outside of politics because it was so intense and so much of your life.” Strangely, the closer she’s got to real power, the easier it has been to love someone who isn’t involved in that world. “It’s the right thing at the right time,” she says. Part of what makes Mathieson, 50, right is that he doesn’t care to talk about the finer points of IR over dinner. “I’m sort of a lightweight in that area anyway,” he says. “She’s talking about that with high intellects all day, every day. We just talk about life or joke around. She can switch off.” Mathieson has been the subject of snide whispers. What does she see in this hairdresser? Shepparton-born Mathieson has been cutting hair on and off for 25 years, including at his own salons in Shepparton and on the Gold Coast. He spent much of the 1990s in San Francisco where he and an old Shepp mate exported vintage Levi’s and supplied marble interiors. In 2004, he was head stylist at Fitzroy’s Heading Out salon and it was there he first chatted with Gillard when she came for appointments with another stylist. “There was a nice connection there,” he says. They bumped into each other on a Collins Street tram just after the 2004 election defeat and “there was a bit of a nice spark”, but Mathieson moved back to Shepparton to run a salon two weeks later and Gillard had a busy few months considering whether to run for the Labor Party leadership. They didn’t meet again for a year, when Mathieson moved back to Melbourne and gave her a call. Their first mineral-water-only Tim Mathieson: bumped into Julia Gillard on a tram. “There meeting was over lunch at Enoteca Vino Bar in Carlton North (“I got chastised by her friends was a bit of a nice spark.” – ‘What! He didn’t buy you any wine? Get rid of him…’,” says Mathieson.) They saw Syriana at Cinema Nova, in Carlton, the next week. By their third date, at Fitzroy’s Provincial Hotel, the spark had turned into a bit of a flame. “It’s nice to meet a girl who’s grounded. I hate spin and there’s no pretence about her in any way,” he says. Mathieson is divorced and has one daughter, Sherri, 22, who works in Melbourne as away the wine list (“On the wagon,” she stage-whispers to the waiter) and wonders whether a beautician. The two women get on well. “Sherri has done Julia’s make-up for a photo shoot my microphone will pick up business talk from adjoining tables (“Sell BHP!”). She’s good and I think we’re going to the opening of the netball,” he says. Gillard doesn’t see herself as company. She listens. She’s that winning kind of smart person who doesn’t let the rest of a step-mum. “No, I wouldn’t say that,” she says. “She’s an independent adult. We see a little us feel dumb. (When a host on Channel Nine’s The Catch-Up asked Gillard’s media adviser bit of her but she’s got better things to do with her life than hang out with a couple of old whether could still be Prime Minister if he lost his seat, Gillard considered it people.” Having Sherri on the scene doesn’t seem to have awakened a desperate hunger for a “reminder” that we’re not all politics buffs rather than an opportunity for dismayed mirth.) children. “It’s human to ponder it but not with a sense of anxiety and regret,” says Gillard. Of course, Gillard is selling herself, but the pitch is seductive; if she was flogging TVs, The couple don’t share a house. He lives in Northcote with “two crazy guys”, old you’d probably come home with a plasma. schoolmates who work in construction. “I’ve joked that living with me is a bit of an academic concept,” says Gillard, who is usually in Melbourne just a couple of nights a week. So what is she actually offering? Julia Gillard flew high through student politics, “We’re used to it. It’s our version of normal.” industrial lawyering and Labor Party backrooms, then battled her way through a jobs-for-the- When she does come home, the sleepovers happen at her place. Mathieson will boys ALP to stand for the safe seat of Lalor in 1998. After nine years of wrangling, wangling, often have dinner ready. “Fresh vegie soups and pastas, a whole lot of vegetables and beans. finagling and finessing, she’s vice-captain of the ALP “dream team”, the personable foil to She eats out all week so it’s nice for her to come back to something healthy,” he says. Home an upright, uptight Kevin Rudd. She’s the Opposition’s attack dog when it comes to industrial life is prosaic: sleeping in, strolls along Altona beach, coffees out, and evenings in front of relations, laying into Hockey and Howard whenever opportunity presents and promising to roll the telly (she likes The Bill, he likes motor racing). Gillard doesn’t find switching gears hard. back the Government’s WorkChoices laws should the ALP win government. “It doesn’t take much for me to feel relaxed and away from it,” she says. “We dag out, fairly Her other portfolio, Social Inclusion, is a new one at the federal level. “It’s about cross- significantly, pretty quickly.” government co-ordination to try to help people who get left behind in a time of economic Friends say that Gillard is content. “He seems to have given her a bit of a stronger prosperity,” she explains. It sounds like an easy one to write off as amorphous “fair go” fluff grounding,” says Julie Ligeti, a mate from student politics days who is now chief of staff to but, if you believe Gillard, this stuff goes to her core. Victorian Attorney-General . Robyn McLeod, who has been close to Gillard for 15 At the very least, it’s a way she can display her skill for connecting the political and years, says, “They’re a very grounded, sensible couple, dealing with an extraordinary time the personal. You see it when she’s talking to her “constits” in Werribee. You see it in in her career.” She compares the situation to a couple of years ago: “Julia wasn’t in a doorstop interview when she describes how a cleaner loses money under an Australian a relationship and my was ending and we’d sit around talking about . Workplace Agreement. And you see it when she turns up to Question Time with flyaway hair. She said, ‘Men, they’re just net energy takers.’ And we’d talk about whether we had time for She reckons people should be able to fulfil their potential, despite inauspicious beginnings, them or not.” She’s glad Gillard has made time for Tim Mathieson. “I love seeing her despite the fact that they’re a woman. As both an example and a proponent of this so happy.” philosophy, Julia Gillard’s most important offering is herself. Mathieson describes himself as “fairly bipartisan” but “definitely aligned with Labor Party You wouldn’t doubt her commitment, but Gillard isn’t 100 per cent focused on the main values”. He doesn’t plan on playing much of a role in the election campaign. “Her and Kevin, game. For the first time in her life, she’s with a man who does not breathe politics. Tim the dream team scenario, they’ll be campaigning on that,” he says. But he has pitched in

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May_38-42_Gillard.indd 40 5/4/07 12:50:18 PM with his expert skills in hairdressing. After she took on the deputy leadership last December, home late from a school dance). High jinks were restricted to pursuing Goldie the cat, who Mathieson thought “the focus needs to be on the topics, not on everything else”, chased a series of escapee budgerigars. There was some mild mean-big-sister stuff from so “I thought we might just cut the hair and control it a bit more,” he says. The haircut Alison, who scared little Julia with the spectre of toxic trees on a nearby street. “I used to try took an hour-and-a-half. “It was more daunting that she was my girlfriend than Deputy to push her into these ugly, knobbly trees and tell her she would catch an awful disease,” Opposition Leader,” he says. “There was a slight bit of nervousness but I’d worked recalls Alison. Both girls were good students and Julia, especially, didn’t need to be coaxed to on it in my mind. Nothing was left to chance.” Which is probably how Julia Gillard likes it. study. “Quite the opposite, we had to hold her back a bit. She was hitting the books,” says her father. Her first taste of public speaking was as part of an debating team In many ways, she is the arrow shot from her father’s bow, the bullseye fulfilment of that often trounced the local private schools. The time her team was forced to argue “that his migrant dream. John Gillard grew up in Cwmgwrach, an impoverished Welsh coalmining the man should lead” was an exception. “I don’t think we were very persuasive that night,” village, where his father worked as a labourer. The eldest of seven children, John Gillard relied she allows. Gillard also played hockey “really badly” and was elected prefect in a “muted form on milk and treacle dished out at school and he remembers “chasing kids in the yard for of democracy,” in which students could vote for students preselected by the teachers. Would a bite of their apple”. Even so, he developed a love of literature, history and politics, which that all her elections were so easy. even then he saw as a way to bring change for families like his own. At 12 he was reading Political discussion was part of the fabric in the Gillard household. “We’d be out in the the newspapers (“I could give you the wartime cabinet in England,” he threatens, speaking kitchen getting the lamb chops for the evening meal and the cry would go out, ‘Gough’s on! on the phone from his retirement village in ) but at 14, despite being one of the Gough’s on the TV!’ ” says John Gillard. “We’d leave the chops and listen to the commanding, top students in his area, he was forced out to work. Jobs with a grocer, the Royal Air Force, towering Gough.” Julia remembers her father tuning into Question Time on the radio, “yelling the Coal Board and the police department followed. While working as a policeman at Barry, back and forth as if he was a participant. Maybe that was the start of it all,” she muses. where his duties included shining a torch on courting couples at a local lovers’ lane, John Certainly, she can’t remember a time she wasn’t interested in current affairs. Gillard met Moira MacKenzie, a local girl from a slightly more genteel family, who worked at She earned straight As in her matriculation, enrolled in law at the in police headquarters as a clerical assistant. After they married, John Gillard left the police force 1979, and snared a spot as student representative on the University Council where she sat to become a booking clerk for British Railways. At night, he studied. “I’m a frustrated scholar,” alongside “intimidating but kindly” judges and dames and had her first experience of lobbying he says. “I would love to have gone into politics. I always felt I didn’t have the academic for change, in this case for student services. She joined the Labor Club to campaign against requirements or the drive.” Bring on “social inclusion”. education funding cutbacks (John Howard was Treasurer). Gillard loved the energy of student When John and Moira Gillard had Alison in 1958 and Julia in 1961 they devoted politics but railed against “10-hour meetings in which nothing actually got done”. She found her themselves to ensuring the children were able to fulfil their potential. Moira Gillard used Dick place in reining in the debates, bringing structure and order to “politics unplugged”. She also and Dora books to teach the girls to read and write by of four. “Other women would realised she was a good speechmaker even though it made her “very scared”. tell her it was bad for the baby’s brain, you’ll do them damage, but she kept on with it,” says When she was elected education vice-president of Union of Students a non-brain-damaged Julia Gillard. The initial catalyst for leaving was Julia’s health. (AUS) in 1982 she deferred her studies and moved to Melbourne, into a share house in She had recurring bronchial infections and a warmer climate was recommended. But it was Brunswick. Old friend Julie Ligeti was struck even then by how serious Gillard was about the chance to improve the family’s prospects, as much as the Australian sunshine, that saw politics. “We were all trying to work out how we were going to buy our first car or which the Gillards take a £10 passage to Adelaide in 1966. share house we were going to live in. Julia had this other level happening. She was You get the sense that life was rather intense and quiet in their bungalow in aspirational beginning her career in politics.” Personal ambition and agitation for change appeared to Kingswood, a southern suburb of Adelaide. John Gillard worked in a cheese factory before dovetail. “She had a clear view at a very young age that she wanted to make a mark in training as a psychiatric nurse. He worked long shifts, often at night. Moira Gillard looked Labor politics. But it wasn’t just about identifying her own opportunities, she was also trying after a couple of local preschoolers then, when Julia started school, took a part-time cooking to push society along,” says Ligeti. job at a Salvation Army home for old women. “Our whole thrust was to earn the money, In 1983, Gillard was elected president of AUS for the year. She worked to make pay the mortgage, get the kids through uni. We both worked like Trojans,” says John Gillard. the organisation relevant, shelving long-running debates on Palestine and the distribution Julia Gillard doesn’t recall any arm-twisting, “But I had a sense that your parents have moved of water from the Ganges River and turning attention to student concession cards, housing, halfway around the world to give you a better life. There was an expectation you’d go as far welfare and travel. “I learnt a lot about the need for whatever you are doing to be connected as you could. It was in the ether,” she says. to what people are worried about,” she says. Neither girl was terribly naughty (the worst anyone can remember is that Julia came Her term up, Gillard completed law and arts degrees while working part-time for Socialist ➔

1983 As president of 1985 Gillard was still 1994 Gillard was a partner 1998 Gillard won Barry 2004 A couple of weeks 2006 Gillard was the Australian Union of fi nishing her arts and law at Slater and Gordon law Jones’s old seat of Lalor after Labor’s loss in the suspended from Parliament Students, Gillard refocused degrees when she worked fi rm when she made a in the federal election October 9 election, Gillard for 24 hours after she used the agenda from issues for left-wing think-tank bid for a position on the in October. bowed out of the running the term “snivelling grub” in such as Palestine to Socialist Forum. Victorian ALP Senate ticket. for shadow treasurer in a gag motion against Tony student housing, welfare ’s team, saying Abbott, who had earlier and travel. it would be interpreted used the same form of as a defensive move. words in Parliament – but escaped a ban. The evolution of Julia Gillard (and her hairstyle)

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May_38-42_Gillard.indd 41 5/4/07 12:50:25 PM “There’s nobody else like that in our family, not that we know of. Sometimes I wonder where the heck she came from.” Moira Gillard

Forum, a left-wing think-tank formed by disaffected says Gillard is a good negotiator. “She stands by what she Communist Party members in 1984. She became a member says but she doesn’t insist on her outcome. She might of the ALP’s Carlton branch in 1985. In 1987, she joined say, ‘Well, if that’s what we’ve got for now, let’s make this Slater and Gordon as an industrial lawyer, then became the our way forward.’ ” She’s a big believer in shades of grey. firm’s youngest – and only its third female – partner in 1990, “The sort of policy decisions that face modern society aged 29. While Gillard represented unions in their battles – inter-generational disadvantage, indigenous health, the with employers, the personal negligence arm of Slater and drug problem – they’re not the stuff of black-and-white Gordon went after the top end of town (BHP over Ok Tedi, solutions,” says Gillard. She enjoys crafting policy solutions CSR over asbestos and Dow Corning over breast implants) from muddied waters, finding a mid-point between pragmatic and pushed the firm into the red to do so. politics and “the vision thing”. “I actually like those sorts of “They were very expensive cases. We often worried tasks. That’s what sort of politician I am,” she says. about whether we were going to make next month’s payroll,” In mid-2003, Gillard became Labor’s shadow minister for says senior partner Peter Gordon. Julia Gillard “made an health. She became known as much for bantering repartee important contribution” to managing the accounts, and with Health Minister Tony Abbott as for millstones such as always supported the social justice cases. “She was always Medicare Gold. “Most days Tony Abbott is worth a laugh,” a proponent of doing the more visionary things. It went to she says. “He’s an amusing and eccentric character.” Gillard her core.” She was well-liked, at least until “tensions in the was a loyal and Mark Latham supporter and partnership” (as Gillard describes them) set in. considered running for the leadership herself when Latham “It was a robust environment, it was working-class male resigned in early 2005. Instead, she pulled behind Kim dominated, not a place for shrinking violets,” says Peter Beazley for one last hiding-to-nothing. Then, in December Gordon. “She had a knack for injecting a spirit of goodwill 2006, Gillard checked her own ambitions to stand at Kevin and consensus into a debate. She had the ability to defuse Rudd’s shoulder. Surely now that Labor is looking like a good tension and acrimony, whether it was with the lawyers for bet in the next election, she wishes she was leader, not the employers or around the Slater and Gordon partnership deputy. “No, I made the decision and once it settled on me table. It wasn’t a bad training ground for a politician,” says I’m comfortable with it,” she trots out crisply. Gillard doesn’t Gordon. pretend to play squeaky-clean politics, but you get the feeling Gillard must have thought so, too. She had contested she’d look you in the eye as she worked her cut and thrust. two Labor Party preselections but was stymied by a sexist, “I’m not naive about the internal gaming but I haven’t made it undermining culture. “The tougher it got the more my the thing that I do,” she says. determination grew to go into federal politics. There’s a Everyone in her family seems to recognise some sort stubbornness there,” she says. She ran as number three of steel in Julia Gillard. “She always seemed to know what on the 1996 Senate ticket, just missing out on office after she wanted,” says her mother. Still, no one predicted her a six-week vote-count. After the 1996 Victorian election, she trajectory. Alison Gillard finds it hard to reconcile the strident, went to work as chief of staff to , then Victorian forthright politician she sees on television with her pliable opposition leader. Around the same time, she worked with little sister. “She was quite sweet, fairly quiet. She never used mentor and former Victorian premier Joan Kirner and others to yell. I always wonder where that confidence and ability to help form Emily’s List, a support network for ALP women. came from,” she says. Her mother says they sometimes “We were totally browned-off that women had to wait for laugh about it. “There’s nobody else like that in our family, not the grace and favour of the blokes to get in,” says Kirner. that we know of,” says Moira Gillard. “Sometimes I wonder By the time the 1998 election rolled around, Gillard had where the heck she came from.” Her father is full of pride. managed to secure preselection for Barry Jones’s old seat “I’m ecstatic,” he says. “Julia could have stopped in law and of Lalor. Joan Kirner, for one, wasn’t surprised that Gillard got on the gravy train but she’s doing what she wanted to stuck at it. “Julia’s tough. She understands there’s a lot of do. She’s compassionate, she feels for the poor, she has conflict in politics. She doesn’t focus on the person, she idealistic dreams.” focuses on the issue,” she says. After the 2001 election, Julia Gillard took on the At the Weerama Festival, after the dripping Dunny population and immigration portfolio and got plenty of Racers have wheeled their toilets away, it’s Julia Gillard’s job attention for her unstinting pursuit of over to judge floats as they parade past the VIP podium. She claps refugees. But she alienated many in the Labor Party, and waves as the Girl Guides, a dog obedience club, dance especially those in her own Left faction, by crafting the schools, brass bands and the Werribee Tigers football club compromise immigration policy that Labor took to the 2004 shuffle along. The water balloon lies forgotten at her feet. election. Gillard’s proposal retained mandatory detention Well-wishers approach from time to time to congratulate her and temporary protection visas, which many party members on recent favourable polls. “You’re going to get them, Julia,” saw as a sell-out. resigned from the says one man. “Oh, well, you never know until you know,” front bench in response. Detractors say it’s an example of she says, thin-lipped, contained. Later, she says to me that the way Gillard will make soul-destroying compromises to she refuses to become excited. There’s too much work to do. play the political advantage. Supporters praise her knack “You have a sense of tossing fortune to the wind,” she says. for crafting realistic policy. Speaking generally, Joan Kirner Fortune, yes, water balloon, no. (m)

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