Tony Abbott calls Julia Gillard’s famous misogyny speech ‘over the top’ and ‘unjustified’
Australia’s first female prime minister is recalling Tuesday 9 October 2012 – the day she delivered her famous misogyny speech.
Gillard, her adversary at the time, Tony Abbott, and others who were there have relived it for an episode of I Was Actually There, to be aired by the ABC on Monday night.
As it went viral – and global – it became a rallying cry for women and an unforgettable moment in Australian political history, and television history.
Speaking on the program, Abbott recalled his relationship with Gillard – one of mutual respect – had deteriorated prior to the speech.
“I thought it was a pretty over the top and unjustified attack,” he said.
“Gillard trotted out a whole lot of things where I was regarded as having acted in, I guess, an old-fashioned, ham-fisted, insensitive way.
“But again, I think most of those accusations were either over the top or slightly unfair.”
At the time, many in the press gallery and parliament saw the speech as Gillard’s attempt to distract from a scandal engulfing speaker Peter Slipper and threatening Labor’s hold on power.
Gillard’s government was in minority and reliant on independents to pass new legislation. Every vote was critical.
Slipper had quit the Liberal party to take up the speakership, removing himself from that side of the ledger, but it remained a precarious time for the government.
And Abbott was keen to savage Gillard on the Slipper issue, which was dominating the headlines on 9 October.
“He was essentially a Liberal party turncoat put into the speakership because Julia Gillard was desperate to prop up her numbers,” Abbott says.
Slipper had been accused of sexually harassing a staffer, James Ashby, who went on to become Pauline Hanson’s right-hand man and is now the party director of One Nation.
The court proceedings revealed texts from Slipper in which he likened female genitalia to molluscs. Slipper denied the allegations, and they were struck out in 2012. Ashby challenged the findings in the federal court and won the appeal against that decision but later dropped the case.
Gillard’s office knew the opposition would weaponise the issue, particularly its sexist nature.
The irony, Gillard says, was that Abbott was “almost … rent-a-gaffe about sexism issues”.
He famously referred to what “the housewives of Australia” needed to understand about climate change, and stood in front of “ditch the witch” and “Bob Brown’s bitch” signs at a protest.
“I always thought, you know, in the early days of my prime ministership that I didn’t need to answer the gendered critiques because over time they would fall away,” Gillard says on the program.
“And here I was two years later, and it was as bad as it had ever been, if not worse. Now all of this was going to be weirdly spun against me, that now I was going to be the one who was, you know, sort of skewered on this sexism critique.
“There was a phrase going through my head. That phrase, unpleasantly, was: ‘For fuck’s sake, like, how did we end up here?’”
So she and her staffers gathered some of Abbott’s “greatest hits” for a potential response. That handful of quotes would eventually become part of the otherwise unscripted speech.
She describes the adrenaline kicking in as she approached the chamber for question time.
Abbott stood up, and called for a vote to sack Slipper over the text messages.
The prime minister wouldn’t usually reply for the government during such “shenanigans”, Gillard says.
But in his motion, Abbott said the government should have “died of shame”, an echo of a phrase used by shock jock Alan Jones.
Jones, now on trial for charges of indecent assault and sexual touching (which he denies and has pleaded not guilty), had said after Gillard’s father died that he had “died of shame”.
Abbott is still unrepentant about the remarks, describing them as “a bit of niggle”.
“I think it was reasonable of me to say that it was a government that should be a little bit ashamed of itself,” he says.
“Given that, I say, I am not conscious of ever treating women differently simply by virtue of them being women, I certainly am not conscious of ever having treated women in a lesser way.”
Slipper’s resignation as speaker the next day was a vindication of his position, he says.
Abbott using that same phrase spurred Gillard into action.
She felt “a kind of cool anger”, she says, as she rose to speak.
“I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not,” she told parliament in response.
“And the government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man.
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