Julia Gillard: A Mad Max fishwife in love with power

Until last week Gillard was deputy prime minister, with a reputation as a loyal lieutenant to Kevin Rudd, swearing fealty when his popularity plummeted and dismissing siren voices urging her to stand in his stead. Yet in the end she acted ruthlessly in challenging the prime minister. She in effect led the coup that unseated Rudd after he committed the cardinal sin of doubting her word.

In interviews Gillard comes over as controlled and calculating. “You can almost see her mind turning over with extraordinary speed,” says one journalist. “She gives the impression of being media-coached to the eyeballs. But when she’s off the record, she can be personable to the point of being quite flirty.”

Men tend to like her feisty style: she was voted Australia’s sexiest female politician in 2005. She denies that she intimidates her male peers: “I haven’t had the sense of, you know, men quivering around me — I wish.” Gillard’s love life has long been a subject of scrutiny — she has had relationships with a union official and a fellow minister. Now the spotlight has intensified on the boyfriend who becomes her Denis Thatcher — Tim Mathieson, a hairdresser turned estate agent whom Gillard met six years ago in the salon where he worked. In 2008 he was appointed as a government “ambassador” to encourage men to seek help about their health. “Wait and see,” he replied to questions about wedding bells and children.

Despite her left-wing stance and links to union leaders, Gillard was happy to describe herself four years ago as a reformist Blairite Instead of moving into the Lodge, the prime minister’s Canberra residence, “until we have an election and I have fulsomely earned the trust of Australian people to be prime minister”, Gillard is running Australia from a modest home in Altona, a Melbourne suburb. The place is so stark, illuminated by flaring petrochemical plants at night, that the first Mad Max movie was filmed there.

Despite her left-wing stance and links to union leaders, Gillard was happy to describe herself four years ago as a reformist Blairite — “though I spectacularly disagree with Blair on the Iraq war”. Last week she was anxious to reassure President Barack Obama of her full support for the military campaign in Afghanistan.

The recent death of five Australian soldiers — part of the country’s 1,550-strong contingent — sparked calls for the troops to come home, with Australian government hints that its forces could pull out by 2013. Gillard reinforced her words by declaring that the US alliance was the foundation stone of Australia’s security policy.

According to Christine Wallace, Gillard’s biographer, what distinguishes her from most other women who have gone a long way in Australian politics is that Gillard genuinely loves power: “The more power she gets, the better she performs and the more she accumulates as a result. She is always ‘on’ politically and people respond to that certainty.” However, the notion that a girl from Wales might one day lead a country on the other side of the world seemed as remote as becoming “an astronaut or a movie star”, Gillard observed in 2007, when she made history as the country’s first female acting prime minister during Rudd’s absence abroad. Yet her family’s hardships and Welsh roots have undoubtedly helped to forge her political persona.

Born to a working-class family in Barry, a seaside town in the Vale of Glamorgan, on September 29, 1961, she was the second daughter of John, a policeman and clerk, and Moira, who worked for the police as a civilian. John, one of seven children from an impoverished coal-mining village, passed the 11-plus exam and was offered a scholarship that he was unable to pursue because of the family’s circumstances.

“In a different time I’m sure Dad could have been a history professor or something like that,” Gillard recalled. “It’s always burnt in me, a sense of indignation about what happened to him.”

Concerned by her bronchial pneumonia, Gillard’s parents were advised by a doctor to move her to a warmer climate. “If I stayed in Wales I was at risk of being forced to stay at home for all of the winter months and probably away from school,” Gillard recalled. Her aunt, Mildred Girling, told The Guardian last week: “We thought we were going to lose her. She spent a time in hospital and she was ever so frail.” Her parents joked that when they told the doctor they were going to migrate to Australia, he said: “Oh, when I was thinking of a warmer climate, I meant Cornwall.”

When Gillard was four, the family embarked for Australia as “£10 Poms” — receiving assisted passage and migrant status in exchange for a £10 fee — and settled in Adelaide in 1966. Gillard struggles to recall her Welsh childhood, but has vivid memories of the voyage down under — “of our ship, the Fairsky; of how every child received a present on the day the ship crossed the Equator; of the storms and seasickness; of how I screamed when I dropped my newly acquired koala toy over the side of the ship when it was docked in Fremantle”.

An Australian accent came quickly to Gillard, but her parents struggled to acclimatise. Her father, who got a job as a psychiatric nurse, was mystified when a bus driver said, “See yer later, mate”, expecting him to drop by for a cup of tea.

Encouraged by her mother to read and write before she went to school, Gillard got “a flying start”, although she “was always completely hopeless at sport”. She was a high achiever at Unley high school, not afraid to stand up to men in authority, on one occasion chiding her physics teacher for favouring male students.

With straight As, she was accepted by the University of Adelaide to study law and the arts. Coming from a family that was “Labor by instinct”, in her second year at university she was introduced by a friend to the Labor club and found she was quite good at politics — to the extent that it became “consuming” and led her to run for national student political positions. She became vice-president of the Australian Union of Students and moved from Adelaide to Melbourne.

Her first job was with a well-known legal firm, Slater & Gordon, where she worked on labour relations, winning allies in the powerful union movements. Politics proved tougher: it took three selection attempts before she was elected in 1998 as Labor representative for the west Melbourne seat of Lalor.

Her star rose quickly: she won a reputation as a formidable debater and a professional operator. In 2006 she joined forces with Rudd to wrest the leadership of the party from Kim Beazley. The left-wing Gillard complemented Rudd, a rightwinger and former diplomat to Beijing, in a “marriage of convenience”. The pairing delivered a Labor landslide in 2007, ending 11 years of Liberal rule.

Rudd’s undoing was caused by his “backflips”, or U-turns. Wildly popular through most of his term and regularly scoring above 60% in opinion polls, he saw his ratings nose-dive when he shelved plans to make Australia’s worst polluters pay for their carbon emissions. Last week a poll showed the government would lose if a snap election were held. Gillard, who had repeatedly assured Rudd that she would not stand against him in a leadership challenge, reportedly became angry with his tactics in trying to hold on to his job. It triggered Gillard’s move in deposing him.

At present she is enjoying her prime ministerial honeymoon, with women and activists rallying around and one poll giving Labor a 10-point lead yesterday. However, her role as one of Rudd’s “gang of four” may tar her with the same brush as Rudd, despite her attempts to distance herself from his more unpopular decisions.

“Many people feel a bad taste in the mouth at the manner in which she was propelled to power,” said a political analyst. “She will have a period in the sunshine, but she faces ferocious political opposition.”