If you’re looking for a role model who is seriously resilient and cool, calm and collected during the most difficult days of her career, look no further than former prime minister Julia Gillard.
It’s a comment I made during the hours after her leadership of the Labor party came to an end last year, and one I saw re-affirmed as she spent more than four hours giving evidence yesterday at the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance, answering a barrage of questions regarding any financial benefit she may have received from a slush fund set up by a former boyfriend in the 1990s.
Of course, they were questions Gillard has answered many, many times before. And it was hardly surprising that she never lost her nerve during the well publicised and highly anticipated appearance, nor deviated from the answers she’s previously outlined. She was direct, concise and very much in control during the whole process.
Gillard was on the receiving end of a grilling, and yet it was the man firing the questions at her who you couldn’t help feel a little bit sorry for — the Barrister for the royal commission Jeremy Stoljar. He was no match for our first female PM on the day. No matter how many variations on the same question he asked he just couldn’t seem to trip Gillard up. On certain matters, Gillard even agreed with her interrogator, disrupting his line of questioning with answers like, “I think we’re in agreement, Mr Stoljar.“ At one point, Stoljar was told by the presiding judge that he was going over “well trodden ground”.
Yesterday, Gillard had legal work she’d carried out decades ago, as well as her taste in men, painfully deconstructed in public. And yet she never once looked particularly stressed about being there.
We’re looking forward to Gillard’s memoir My Story, released in two weeks. Time to put this non-story away, and hopefully pick up a few bits and pieces regarding how she’s always, and continues, to keep her cool.