Julia Gillard's memoir is insightful, unflinching and revealing

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/24/julia-gillards-memoir-insightful-unflinching-revealing

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Political memoirs are their own thing. There is inevitable self justification, sometimes outright delusion. There is record setting and score settling, foes touched up, fellow travellers flattered.

Some are stagey and allegorical, their true purpose all too transparent – the text is a bridge to life on the speaker’s circuit after politics, a crude marketing exercise. Some hold back, constrained by dull instincts, cramped rooms, cut lunches and wooden formulations. Some are gossipy and gonzo, like Bob Carr’s magnificently picaresque romp through the foreign affairs portfolio published earlier this year.

The best contributions tell the truth, or if not the truth (a vexatious and flexible concept, given history’s tendency to be somewhat in the eye of the beholder) – then at least truth according to the person providing the story. The reflections are authentic, and ring true. There is an attempt to interrogate events and emotions and experiences.

It should be noted that this process of self reflection and self analysis is actually quite hard for politicians. Ambitious and able politicians are wired to project outwards, to project their voices to the back row. They are people of action and perpetual motion, people of combat – conditioned to seek and land their various moments of opportunity, rather like the restless entrepreneurs of the business world.

Politics is not about stillness. Writing needs stillness and solitariness to find moments of truth and resonance. Meaningful reflection struggles in a maelstrom, and national affairs blows like a destructive typhoon. One of the other major problems with the batch of political books on the shelves this year, books providing different yet overlapping versions of the Rudd-Gillard period, is all these contributions are coming too soon. It’s all still too raw. The accounts, in my view at least, are not sufficiently sifted and leavened and tempered by time and distance. The long view can hardly be formed in only 12 months.

With all that preamble noted – and with a further declaration to readers that I’m currently about three quarters through My Story, not quite to the conclusion – Julia Gillard’s memoir provides real, detailed, forensic, and clinical insight into the government from her central, completely unique, vantage point.

Gillard occupied the office she quaintly terms the gumnut room. Before the “dream team” of Kevin and Julia fractured into mulish remonstrance, Gillard maintained sufficient trust to be able to wander in and out of Kevin’s gumnut room at will. As a consequence of her own leadership, and her window on Rudd’s, she can plunge the reader into government at a deeper level than most other protagonists of this historical period; and the memoir strives to not only recount first-hand experiences, but also analyse.

She certainly does not spare others but, when she can push herself past the basic forgiveness reflex that all humans possess, she does not spare herself either.

The best of the material comes in moments of reflection rather than juicy anecdote. I know that won’t be the Canberra view, but it is my view.

Gillard senses both strength and something of a blockage in her disciplined, structured, brief reading, alarm clock setting self, and tries to push both herself and the reader past it – not in over-egged bursts of psycho-babble, (“I’m no guru” p129), not for some manufactured bout of catharthis (she’s actually too balanced and self confident a person to require it) – but in an effort to find new some personal ground courtesy of her experience as a leader of a country intent on finding its way in the world.

In a chapter on resilience Gillard notes that her capacity to control her feelings set her up well for political leadership, particularly political leadership carried out in an environment of hyper partisan, punishing, and repulsively sexist nonsense. The viciousness and carping negativity of the period still unsettles people, it divides people, it plays out in the strong feelings voters still have about the complex events from 2010 to 2013; or perhaps more pertinently, how the events were construed by a hostile and jittery media that Gillard regards as largely having failed to do its job. (On this front, names are named. The critique isn’t passive aggressive, it’s direct.)

But like all complex human conditions, a general disposition towards discipline and restraint, and a phlegmatic temperament, can be a double edged sword. It can create a barrier. It can be a place to which you retreat, when you might be better placed venting, not out of pique, but out of an instinct to connect with human experiences that are universal. “In the middle of it all, it seemed to me as though if I gave an inch, if I let it hit me, then I would be drowning in the emotional reaction before I knew it,” Gillard says. “Better to keep running in front of the tidal wave and not look back.” (The exception to the general pattern of stiff upper lip, she notes, was the misogyny speech – a moment to give force to frustration. That small fury whipped around the world – the power of that universal experience – it opens the deep desire for sharing.)

Gillard wonders whether the instinct to prevail rather than yield to feelings she would regard as self indulgent, like fury about relentless negativity, meant she was “more defensive in public appearances, less confident than I might have been? Did it show in the tendency to appear more wooden, less open, less engaging than I am in casual situations?”

The she poses a really tough question to herself – one political leaders normally avoid. “Should I have let myself feel more?” It’s the question of the memoir in my view, not because it’s a womanly question, that interpretation would be truly ghastly – but because it’s a question politics doesn’t dare ask itself. Politics should ask itself this question. By cutting off empathy, by limiting opportunity for displays of natural human instinct, politics is gradually consigning itself to estrangement with the people it seeks to serve.

(The answer I think she provides, on balance, is yes, a little bit more, but not a whole lot more.) Gillard notes the “inner reserve” and the sense of purpose that drove her on in times when most normal people would have given up and walked off the field was a quality which grew stronger during the course of her prime ministership, “because it had to”. Existing in a “binary world of good women and bad women – the one dimensional portrayal meant it was impossible to be received as a full human being, with the normal complexity that comes with being neither perfect, nor evil. Living in the middle of all of this name calling and double standards, I had to harden my heart.”

It’s an insight, and an interesting one for a political character who was at once direct and plain speaking – yet often frustratingly enigmatic, a chameleon who would fade in and out of sight.

There are plenty of anecdotes and intrigues, running to 500 pages. Did Penny Wong really cry when she told Gillard she wouldn’t vote for her in the leadership ballot in 2013, and did she cry again because she couldn’t work out what Rudd wanted her to do with the first carbon pricing scheme – save it or sink it? Tony Burke was the first person Gillard told about her intention to challenge for the leadership – really? Gillard crying with John Faulkner before the confrontation with Rudd – her regret about toppling Kim Beazley in opposition. Was Rudd “completely spooked” by the politics of carbon pricing in 2009? Was Rudd in January 2010 really described by one of his senior staff as being in lodged in “funksville with no map about how to get out”? Did Women’s Weekly editor Helen McCabe stiff Gillard in a photo shoot because she seemed “strongly motivated by the desire to avoid disapproval from the Liberal party”? Was Andrew Wilkie really “increasingly transactional and disingenuous” – or was he just browned off when Gillard stiffed him on pokies reform?

These snippets will be contested and pored over and parsed in the days to come. Kevin Rudd, who is presented in this book as a man who systematically, comprehensively, cravenly, viciously, destabilised her and her government will have to explode at some point, surely. He’s already turned up in The Australian with his private campaign submission – virtually at least – characterising her as a backstabber driven by ambition. A leak, a shot across the bows on the day of her book launch. This could have been predicted.

She’s pitiless with him, even with the polite hat doffing on managing the global financial crisis and projecting Australian interests through the G20. Rudd is a man who on Gillard’s account traded an election photo in 2010 faking peace love and harmony for the foreign ministry. The thin-lipped contempt embedded in that allegation is palpable.

Only Julia Gillard can tell us the story of what it’s like to be Australia’s first female prime minister. For this reader, that’s an important story to tell, whatever its periodic stiffness, or rancour, or rhetorical limitations. Gillard takes us to the two places that most defined her period in the prime ministership – her move against Kevin Rudd, and the carbon “tax” promise.

Gillard stands by the Rudd decision. She doesn’t countenance the alternative scenario that many colleagues now openly countenance, at least in part in an effort to soothe their post-traumatic stress; the scenario where Rudd was not deposed as leader before facing his first opportunity for re-election.

It’s a foundation decision. It cannot be repudiated despite everything it cost her, and cost the Labor party. She can only explain the sum of the parts, she can only construct the events as rational in the face of the prevailing pressures of that time and that moment, and tell her own story after the fact – and she does that, from her perspective, in some depth. She shares her conflicted instincts, the personal frustration, the gritted teeth effort to stay afloat when the team was coming apart ... a declaration a lot of women will recognise: “I felt I could hold things together.” The eventual decision that the show could no longer stay afloat. The things regretted. The things not regretted.

On Gillard’s account the entire battle is recast. She is not the aggressor. She is the rational actor. Events, not ambition forced her hand in 2010. Rudd by contrast is the man who wouldn’t accept his fate, who wouldn’t do the proper thing and accept his redundancy. He put his own interests above the interests of the group. He is the irrational and destructive player, not her. So just as these two figures once wrestled and jostled for the loyalty and fidelity of the party they led – I suspect they will now compete with versions of history that can likely never be reconciled.

The carbon reflection is interesting, too. This was her stuff-up. She doesn’t seek to implicate anyone else, or cast herself as caught in someone else’s relentless machinations. “I compounded my error in the election campaign of not qualifying my statement – there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead – by conceding the use of the incorrect term ‘carbon tax’. I did not fight the characterisation.” Gillard explains the context sitting behind the words, the sense of urgency – not enough time to war game and prepare, the imperative of bedding down her fledgling minority government. There is the reality of government – running at full tilt, weighted by complexity, buffeted by events, no time to plot things through.

As a final index of authenticity and honesty, this reckoning of a critical misstep meets the sniff test. “The circumstances help explain, but do not excuse it. The political responsibility for the error is absolutely mine.”