Reflections on the State of Political Discourse

Dr Champa Patel

Good evening everyone. Thank you for joining us this evening. It’s so fantastic to see such a full room for this event tonight. Really pleased to be able to announce who our speaker is this evening, Julia Gillard, Australian former Politician, who served as the 27th Prime Minister of Australia, and I believe the only female Prime Minister of Australia from 2010 to 2013.

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

I think that’s a novelty.

Dr Champa Patel

She’s worth applauding. She currently serves as Chair of Beyond Blue, one of Australia’s leading mental health awareness bodies. She’s Chair of the Global Funding Body for Education in Developing Countries and the Global Partnership for Education and is the Inaugural Chair of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London. Delighted to have you with us here today.

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Thank you.

Dr Champa Patel

We’re doing something slightly different to what we normally. So those of you who have come to Chatham House events before, you will know that normally, you know, our speaker will speak for a few minutes and then we’ll have Q&A. But we thought what we’ll do is actually have a conversation with Julia today and then open it out, so you can all be part of the conversation that we hope we can have this evening. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about is, you’ve led such a high profile career, as a woman in leadership, what was it that made you want to invest your time? Because there must be so many calls on your time, but what made you want to commit your time and effort to the Global Institute for Leadership, Women’s Leadership?

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Oh, thank you very much and thank you for the opportunity to be here. I have managed to catch a London cold, so let me apologise for my voice, which even, at its best, is never melodious and is not at its best today. And for the Aussies in the room, g’day, it’s good to be with you. When I left Australian politics, I sat down to write the obligatory book, one needs to always write the book, and I wanted to make sense of some of the experiences I’ve had as the female leader. And I particularly wanted to answer the question in my own mind, how much of this is me, how much of this is because I’m a woman, how much of this is because it’s Australia? And I tried to look across the global research base about, evidenced around women’s leadership, to sort of cite my personal experience, in a broader network of knowledge. And whilst I have found some amazing research out there, given how long we’ve been at the task of gender equality, I thought the research base was quite thin.

I, in the years to follow, was invited to do a visiting Professorship stint at King’s College. So I thought, you know, fortune favours the brave, so I batted up this idea, firstly, over a smoking cocktail, that was my farewell drink, ‘cause I don’t normally drink smoking cocktails, but this was a big night out. Batted up this idea about why couldn’t we have an institute that takes an evidence-based, research-based approach to looking at the barriers to women’s leadership and seeing how best to clear them out of the way? And full congratulations to King’s College, sober and over many months, it worked through that concept with me and that’s what’s led to the institute. So, for me, it’s really borne of my experiences, I’ve been a feminist all of my adult life. I would have hoped that we were further along, by the time I was almost 60, than we are. But if I can spend some of my personal effort making sure we get further along more quickly, then I think that that’s effort well spent.

Dr Champa Patel

And I think it’s really interesting because it’s true, as you say, that if you think about the billions that’s been spent on diversity, inclusion, gender programmes, initiatives, training programmes, it really doesn’t seem to have really cracked through, in terms of, you know, looking at women’s representation at higher levels, whether it’s the corporate setting, government or things like the gender pay gap. What do you think that we’re getting wrong? Wat is it about the approach that seems to still have initiatives stuck more in the realm of the rhetoric, rather than the real?

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Yeah, I think gender is one of those areas where people think they know and it – that’s, you know, the problem of people thinking they know, struck me very powerfully when I was Education Minister. If you go round as Education Minister, everybody knows what you should do as Education Minister because everybody went to school. I went to school, you know, I think, okay, you go, maybe the whole policy thing’s just a little bit more complicated than based on your schooldays. And I think gender is a bit like that, people think they know, and so they start on a series of initiatives that they haven’t tested against the evidence, only to find that many of the things they’re investing in are at best net neutrals, at worst counterproductive. And so, if you look at the Fortune, you know, 500 companies, who are spending large amounts of money on this gender equality work, you can see them embracing initiatives, which the research shows are not impactful. So, one of our missions is to get out there a clear view about what the evidence says works, to get out there a clear view about what the evidence says doesn’t work. And then, with all this fuzzy stuff in the middle, we aren’t quite sure if it works, to deepen the evidence base around it.

Dr Champa Patel

And what’s some of your evidence suggesting at the moment, in terms of those things that people might think are helpful, but are actually, you know, having the opposite effect, and some of the things that you are finding work?

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Well, there’s certainly very good evidence that unconscious bias training, without anything else, is not counter – is not productive. It can actually remind people of stereotypes and bring them to the fore, rather than debunking stereotypes, and if it is made mandatory, it’s often very much resented. And so, we talk to people about the amount of money that’s being spent on unconscious bias training and try to get that money directed to more productive things. I also think, from my own observation and some research work is happening on this, I’ve got a colleague, Anna in the room who is specifically researching on this and she’s based at the University of Adelaide, that many of the women’s leadership training programmes that people are sent on, which proceed from the assumption that women lack confidence, lack the ability to negotiate for themselves, lack the ability to find sponsors or mentors and are all about women leaning in, that much of that work is really misconceived because it’s not so much about fixing the women as fixing the structures. We – you know, there is good evidence around now that gender blind recruitment makes a difference, defining merit around measurable outcomes, rather than networks and cultures of presenteeism make a difference. Family friendly policies that are taken up by men and women, make a difference, so if men, women both use the flexibilities, no-one pays the penalty for it, if only women use them, then it becomes the money track, and that’s a track to, you know, precisely nowhere, in most organisations. There are still some things that we need to know a lot more about and that is where we’re pitching our evidence around.

Dr Champa Patel

Yeah, and I think sometimes, you know, the presentation of women is like there’s some homogenous group, so I think often, we don’t recognise differences of race or ethnicity or class, even. I think class is sometimes the one that’s often overlooked, in terms of barrier for women to be able to progress in their careers. And is your research doing that sort of differentiated analysis?

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Yes. Yes, it is and we do unders – you know, I mean, gender is one way to look at the world, but of course, there are a myriad of other ways to look at the world. A colleague, we’ve met on this journey, tells a story about – she’s a black woman and she tells the story about going to a company initiative where they said, “Look, we’ve made such a difference on gender, the board used to look like this, the board of the business,” you know, a photo of all white men, then they go, “Now it looks like this,” photo of white men and white women. And she says, “Ah, you know, what about me, I don’t see my face reflected there?” To which she is told, “Oh, we’re doing gender first, and then we’re going to do race second.” Now, clearly, we’re not taking that perspective, we’re taking a perspective that, you know, the academics would use the terminology, interspectionality. For people like me, who only have two undergraduate degrees from 300 years ago, I’d like to just think about it as the factors that compound and can make it far more difficult for an individual to come through.

Dr Champa Patel

And I think sometimes what we find with these initiatives or programmes is that they focus on the internal, so it’s like trying to fix the culture of the organisation. But of course, if you’re a woman, and you would know this from your own experiences, if you’re a high profile public woman working in public offices, you’re exposed to an extraordinary public array of opinions about yourself, whether it’s your looks, your politics, your views, how you present yourself. So there’s something about the external environment at the moment in which female Politicians or other figures have to operate. And what are your thoughts on, do you think that has changed from the days when you were a high profile Politician?

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Yes, I do. I mean I, you know, was Prime Minister for 2010-2013 so, you know, over the course of human history, it’s not that long ago. But in the course of social media development, actually, it is a long time ago. So, you know, of course we had social media then and we had Twitter and Facebook and all the rest of it, but the huge uptake of it was still happening. And now, these years later with it being such a feature of political life, there’s no doubt in my mind, and the research clearly shows this, that the toxicity that gets unleashed when people can put comments and opinions out publicly, but anonymously as they can through social media, that that is disproportionately directed at women and it is truly vile.

One of the things I do for the institute is, I have a podcast where I interview women about their life stories. We call it a podcast of one’s own because the institute’s based in the Virginia Woolf building, so what else would you possibly call it? I interviewed Caroline Criado-Perez, who’s written a book about gender data, but before she did that she campaigned to have a woman on a British banknote, got Jane Austen on the £10 note, and to have a statue of a woman in the parliamentary area and now there’s a statue of Millicent Fawcett there. You know, so these are good things to do but, you know, you wouldn’t have said were particularly challenging of power structures or dragging power away from someone who currently holds it. But even being online campaigning for those things, a woman on a banknote, a statue of a woman, there was a period where she was getting 50 death or rape threats an hour. Now, that level of hatred of misogyny, I think, you know, is deeply concerning and it does mean that it so much harder now for women to be in the public square. And I think, during the course of contemporary political debates in the UK, you’ve seen many women talk about that and talk about that quite emotionally and unfortunately, it doesn’t just start and end with vile words on social media, it spills over to real world threats that women have to deal with.

Dr Champa Patel

And I think that coarsening of political discourse, in a way, it’s not just directed at women, it’s particularly felt in that direction. But I think what we’ve seen is this general coarsening of political debate across the world, whether it’s the rise of populism, some of the kind of, you know, undermining of global governance that we’re seeing now. That system that was set at post-World War Two, democratic countries that are undermining the rule of law and protection of human rights. In your view, when you look out at the world now, what do you see are some of the key challenges facing global governance?

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Yeah, I certainly think that the differential speed between the time it takes to govern well and the contemporary media agenda is, you know, sharper than it’s ever been, and good government was always slower than the media agenda. So, in the days that we’d get the morning newspaper, the afternoon newspaper and watch the 6 o’clock news, I mean, good government wasn’t generating a news story for the morning, a news story for the afternoon, a news story for the 6 o’clock news, governing takes more time than that. But they were the lazy old days, compared with this world where the agenda just moves and moves and moves, and I experienced a bit of that as Prime Minister. You know, you’d put out a major announcement, you know, at a 10 o’clock press conference and by midday, Journalists would be on to my Press Secretary saying, “Have you got a story for us?” And you’re like, “What about that thing we put out at 10 o’clock?” “Oh no, you know, we – we’ve tweeted on it, we put a piece online about it, I’ve already been on 24-hour TV about it, like that story’s gone, so we need something else.” So, that, I think, gives us a whole set of uncomfortable choices about the ways democracies function. Either you have sort of Politicians as show people who are constantly generating new Flim-Flam stories, the culture of the announceable to keep feeding the media beast.

Or you have governments that are trying to do the thoughtful thing, but are getting pilloried in the media cycle for not doing anything, for not being visible, for apparently not governing. I don’t think anybody has found the formula yet, which gears good democratic debates to this new media age. Now, ultimately, on all of this I’m a long-term optimist, but a short-term pessimist. I think there are some green shoots that we can see, you know, we’ve all spent more than a decade now staring at our phones. And I think people are starting to lift their heads and say, “Do I want to spend the next decade staring at my phone or do I want to embrace deeper news sources, the advent of slow news?” The fact that some people are moving towards, you know, a screen free device, education for their children, the fact that there is now a movement about getting off social media or engaging in a different way. The fact that we are now openly critical of Facebook and Twitter, it’s like we’ve seen the story behind, you know, we’ve seen the Magician’s trick now, we didn’t realise there was all this data harvesting, when all this first took off, but now we all realise it. I think these are some green shoots that we’re going to find our way to a different age about how we consume media, but the – and consequently, respond to democratic debates. But before we get there, I think there’s some years of chop and churn to go through.

Dr Champa Patel

And when you look out on the world, where do you see some of the key challenges at the current, when you – well, probably, it’s a very long list. Do you have to identify areas where you think, are these the areas that we really need to focus on?

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Yes, you know, when I look out on the world, obviously the challenge of gender equality is the big one personally for me, in terms of where I spend my time now. One of the reasons I’m so focused on education, in developing countries through the Global Partnership for Education, is it’s girls who disproportionately miss out. So, gender equality for me means, you know, making sure every girl on the planet and every boy gets a great quality education and a stake in the future and it ends with us thinking about how we get more women leaders. So I feel like I’m working both ends of the spectrum, gender equality.

The challenge of climate change and, you know, clearly, in politics around the world, this is still contested, the science is still contested, the urgency of action is contested, the nature of action is contested, and it’s the threat that we’ve got to respond to. For #MeToo, I think there is a continuing agenda about the unequal provision of opportunity in our world. I think brilliance is equally distributed around the world, but opportunity is not. The traditional model of resolving that has been for people to migrate and move from places of low opportunity to places of more opportunity. I think the stresses and strains around the world mean that that is a less easy pathway now. So we’ve got to ask ourselves the more profound question about how we make more environments high opportunity environments. The new technology that we’ve been criticising does have its downside, but it’s got enormous upsides when it comes to more equally sharing opportunity around the world, so they’d be a few biggies, but we could go on.

Dr Champa Patel

Yeah. Just one final question, before we open it out to our audience. In terms of Australia, how do you think it’s positioned itself on some of these challenges? I mean, I think it’s fair to say it was a bit of a shock election, the outcome was to say the least, unexpected for many, many people who thought the result would go a different way. But, you know, under the new administration, they have been heavily criticised for their climate change policies, and particularly, recently, from the Pacific Islands Forum. So how do you think Australia is dealing with some of the challenges that you’ve outlined?

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Our elections are on a Saturday and it was not the Saturday night I hoped to have. There is, no doubt about that, there’s a moment where you’ve got to put the champagne aside and reach for the bottle of scotch, so, I had one of those Saturday nights. I mean, really, the issue with climate change in Australian politics doesn’t start from the May election, the story starts much further back, and it is, more than anything else, I think a story about the emerging divisions in Conservative politics. In Australia, in the Republican Party, here in the Tory Party and many of the Conservative Parties of Europe, around the world, you’ve seen what historically have been centre right political parties start to shake out into, you know, it’s almost hard to lay the old political spectrum over it. But if we can try and jam it down a little bit on current discourse, you’ve seen it shake out between people who are in the climate change, if not denial, at least heavy scepticism can. And people who are more globalist, more conscious of responsibilities and more wanting to address this, is ultimately a challenge about retooling your economy, and that push and pull has been on very vibrant public display in Australian Conservative politics.

Dr Champa Patel

Thank you. There’s so much more, I wish I had the time to ask you, but I think it’s only fair that we open it out now and see if there are any questions from our audience. So if you could say your name, and if it could be a question rather than, you know, a short monologue or comment, ideally, we’d like to get in as many questions as possible. So, let’s go left to right, so if we take your question and then yours, and then I will come here, so don’t worry, I will come to you.

Hanif Adeel

Thank you. Hello, Hanif Adeel, Member of Chatham House. You’ve touched on this issue, populism, right wing populism seems to be in the ascendant Socialist Party, Social Democratic Parties don’t seem to be going anywhere politically. Why do you think that is, what is the future for Socialist Parties? What do you think of the British Labour Party, its leader and its chances? Thank you.

Dr Champa Patel

Oh dear.

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Oh dear.

Member

During your last speech, you said that it would be easier for the next female Australian Prime Minister, and I want to ask, if you still think that statement is still true, given the context where in Australia with Alan Jones making comments about Jacinda Arden and with the comments you just made about social media and that placement in Australia, so do you still stand by that comment?

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Sure.

Dr Champa Patel

Let’s take those two.

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Okay, well if I’ll – I’ll start with the Australian question first, if you will forgive me for discriminating in favour of an Australian. I do believe, despite Alan Jones, we are in a better place, in terms of women in politics in Australia. For those of you who aren’t Australian, Alan Jones is a Conservative radio shock jock, who, relatively recently, said that our Prime Ministers should shove a sock down Jacinda Arden’s throat. And then, you know, when challenged about it said he didn’t mean that and he meant a more benign sort of statement about put a sock in it. Only, of course, to be reminded that when I was Prime Minister, he suggested I should be put in a bag and taken out to sea and dropped in the ocean, to which one wit on Twitter said, “Oh, he was just misunderstood, what he meant was, the Prime Ministers should be sent on a cruise with a new handbag.” So, I particularly like that, but for all of that I do actually think things are getting better. And what has particularly got better is, when I was Prime Minister, most of the people who report on politics, who reside in the Canberra Press Gallery, most of them took an analytical prism that nothing that was happening to me could be explained by gender. And that’s one of the reasons, when I gave my last speech as Prime Minister, I did want to say my Prime Ministership wasn’t all about gender, but some things were about gender.

Here we are, these years later and now, there is a lively debate about sexism in politics and it is no longer fashionable to pursue that theme about, you know, gender doesn’t matter in politics. Now, a lot of that has been sparked by a series of incidents in the Conservative side of Australian politics, with women complaining about bullying and the like and low numbers of women. But it means we are at least onto the right discussion, and I’m a big believer, and obviously, this is the backbone of Chatham House, that you never resolve problems, unless you can talk about them, and we are talking about them now.

On British politics, I’m quite careful about, you know, flying in from overseas and issuing edicts about someone else’s democratic politics, so I’d renounced my British citizenship, in order to be eligible to stand for Australian politics, so I’m not a voter here. But I would point out that there have been times, you know, I’ve been obviously actively involved in politics for many a long year now. There have been times, in the political cycles, when you would have said, British Labour and Australian Labor were very much on the same page around the time of Tony Blair and New Labour. In fact, some of our principle Labor identities would say they gave the idea about New Labour to Tony Blair. I suspect he’d contest that history. But, you know, we were very much allied about the need for modernisation of the historic project about social mobility and modernisation of state provided services.

In the contemporary iteration of politics, Australian Labor and British Labour are not on the same page, very different pages, and so our politics is running to a different sort of mood music than politics here. We don’t have an issue like Brexit creating sort of fault lines that you have here. So, you know, if – having not predicted the US election, I thought Hillary Clinton was going to win, having not predicted the Australian election because I thought Labor was going to win, I’m not going to start making predictions about the British election. It’s going to be very interesting, and particularly with your first past the post system, I think incredibly interesting.

Dr Champa Patel

I think just to come back on that point though, people – I think people were surprised that Julie Bishop wasn’t given an opportunity. So I think it shows that even with the greater numbers of women in parliament, there is still that – it still became a boy’s club in the sense that she wasn’t able to push through that, do you have any thoughts on that?

Julia Gillard

Look, I said this quite a while back in a speech I gave in South Australia. You know, one of the most fascinating things about looking at gender in politics, there’s so much is going on all at the same time that it’s very difficult to sort of distil out the gendered bit. What you can say about the election that brought Scott Morrison through to the leadership of the Liberal Party, was there was a clear sizeable constituency in the Liberal Party for moving away from what was viewed as the sort of more moderate, smaller Liberal tendencies of Malcolm Turnbull. So that was not going to be an environment conducive of Julie Bishop’s aspirations, because she was more associated with the tendency that people were seeking to move away from. Then I think, you know, there’s a set of issues about who people thought would be a credentialed, you know, campaigner in domestic politics. I mean, Julie Bishop was very noted as a good campaigner, but she’d held the foreign policy portfolio, which is, in Australia, largely, but not 100% bipartisan, whereas the others were seen to have more shown their ability to project political force in the domestic contest, so there was that. And then I think there was a bit that was straight out gender and then you’ve got to try and put values on those and work out what was what. And, you know, I did sort of enumerate those factors in a speech a while back and I think, you know, ultimately, the Liberal Party has to analyse all of that, think about it, think about what was the gendered bit, think about the complaints that have come forward from many women about the culture within the Liberal Party. Think about their comparative lack of numbers of women in the House of Representatives and the Senate, and address that. But at least it’s a lively debate on their side of politics now.

Dr Champa Patel

Thank you. So we have two questions here.

Charles Spencer

Hello. Charles Spencer, no affiliation other than a Member of Chatham House. When I think of the state of political discourse today, one of the things that constantly occurs to me is the joy of fake news, or what my mother used to call, when I was little, lying. Now, much of it comes from government, much of it comes from lobbies, much of it also comes from elected representatives across the political spectrum. May I ask your views and ideally, even, your silver bullet, please?

Dr Champa Patel

Thank you. There’s a question behind you.

Asha Herten-Crabb

Hi, I am Asha, also Australian and currently working on women’s economic rights, gender and macroeconomic things. My question is regarding hierarchies, but in the policymaking process and looking at women’s leadership from the community level and the difficulties that those women face actually having voices in the policymaking process at the national or global level. And I wondered if that’s something that your institute would look at and how you think those people in power, whether men or women can better open the doors to the people that are actually impacted by the policies that have been created. Thanks.

Dr Champa Patel

Thank you. Let’s just take this one here ‘cause you’ve been waiting a while and then we’ll give you a chance to respond.

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Okay.

Dr Champa Patel

There was one right here on the front row.

John Wilson

John Wilson, a Member of this institute and a Journalist. Prime Minister, you have suffered from misogyny, do you think that the United Nations programme, HeForShe will achieve its objective, which I believe is equality for men and women by 2030?

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Okay.

Dr Champa Patel

Thank you.

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Okay. Well, once again, I’ll take them in reverse order. Gender equality is one of the Sustainable Development Goals, so part of the 17 global goals that the world is moving towards for 2030. I’d like to believe that we’ll wake up in a gender equal world in 2030 but, you know. I’m also cognizant of the fact that, you know, the World Economic Forum is telling us that at current rates of change, it’ll take 107 years to close the gap in political empowerment, 202 years to close the gap in economic empowerment. Now, that doesn’t mean that the global goals don’t play some role, like the Millennium Development Goals, I think the Sustainable Development Goals, galvanise thinking. And galvanising thinking and action is key to bending that curve to moving away from current rates of progress, so I’m – want us to be aspirational about that.

On women and local leadership, we, at the institute, are interested in women’s leadership at all levels. We don’t take, you know, just a glass ceiling analysis, so our analysis is not limited to, you know, what’s the difference between being Secretary of State in the US and President of the US, though that obviously is the very high hard glass ceiling. We more take a, you know, what we refer to as a kind of a glass labyrinth approach. Every stage in a woman’s journey where she can see that others are being treated differently to her, but she can’t get that different and better treatment. And we want it to be in all walks of life, not just politics, but across the board, and not just in national politics.

And there are great examples of female local leadership, you know, I’m thinking in the UK of people like Yvette Williams in the Justice4Grenfell campaign, but there’s also some constraints in local leadership. Actually, if you look at the statistics in Australia, we aren’t doing that well at the local Council level in getting women engaged, you know, we’re doing better at state and national levels, so, yes, we are involved in that kind of thinking. On the fake news, lying, all of that kind of agenda, I think whether it’s citizens who just randomly tweet or go on social media from time-to-time, Activists, Journalists, Politicians, you know, influencers, to use the terminology, this is an age in which spectacular untruths travel quickly, complex evidence travels slowly, if at all. And in that, the sort of traditional thinking is, let’s make the complex evidence more simple, so we can get it to travel, and I think that that’s a good aspiration. But at some point, you can only compress debates so much. You know, we talked about the SDGs before, 17 global goals, I mean, couldn’t you have had five, couldn’t you have had ten? And a friend of mine, who was involved in the work to draw up the 17 goals, tells a story about, you know, after they were adopted, ringing his mum, quite aged woman, ringing his mum and saying, “You know, we’ve just adopted these goals.” And she’s like, “Oh, what are they?” And, “Oh, there are 17 of them.” And then she says to him, “But yeah, of course, it’s complicated. Yeah, it would be, you know, solving global poverty and stuff, yeah, it’s complicated, why wouldn’t there be 17 goals?” So, I do think we’ve got to try and build some tolerance again for some complexities and texture in arguments, but relates to the words I spoke before about there are some green shoots around, but I think we’re in for a turbulent period before we get there.

Dr Champa Patel

There were some hands up at the back, so if we take the one there right in the corner.

Mark Clodi

My name’s Mark Clodi, Member of Chatham House and Lawyer with the Saul Service. Miss Gillard, you’re obviously one of the very privileged few who speak with the voice of authority of being a former Prime Minister. And that made me wonder what factors do you take into account when you consider weighing in or commenting on the current issue of the political debate, whether that is on the day? And in particular, how does that change, if it goes against what the government of the day’s platform is, or more particularly, the platform of the Australian Labor Party?

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Yeah.

Dr Champa Patel

Thank you. Let’s take this one here, so I’m going to take the two hands in the middle and then I’ll come to this side.

Euan Grant

Yeah, thank you very much. Euan Grant, I’m a former Law Enforcement Intelligence Analyst in the British Customs Service. When we were in a hell of a state at the turn of the century and just before the rescue team was parachuted in from outside, somebody asked me, “What do you think should be done about it?” And I said, “Bring in some external Managers from Australia, they’ll sort it out.” My question is, apart from Britain and France, and this has got nothing whatsoever to do with Brexit, how are the other member states of the European Union and the European Commission, old and incoming, how are they engaging and understanding Australia’s position on Huawei and China? Thank you.

Dr Champa Patel

Thank you, and there was one more question at the back.

Member

Oh, hi, I’m an undergraduate studying philosophy, politics and economics at UCL. My question is also about China, how should Australia and western societies, in general, how should they counter increasing Chinese influence in their societies? Thank you.

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Okay.

Dr Champa Patel

A nice easy set of them.

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Yeah. I’ll start with the sort of questions on China and then come back to the question on how I used my voice. On, you know, on China, and we’ve just had a discussion about things can be complicated, this is multi-layered and, you know, not caught in a slogan or a snapshot. I’ll leave the slogans and snapshots on China to – there are, you know, I can think of a political leader in the world who uses them quite a lot and tends to tweet them, I won’t be mimicking his example. I mean, from Australia’s perspective, I mean, we’ve, you know, over a long period of time now, since Gough Whitlam went to China, you know, very early on, he went there before Richard Nixon went, so one our great Labor Prime Ministers, Gough Whitlam, went to China. We have, on both sides of politics, welcomed China’s rise into the rules-based system, and we continue to do that. And we know we’re in an age where who, who gets to define the future and shape of that rules-based system, is not the world that defined the post-World War Two compact, but it’s a new world in which China is a superpower, and we’re in a bipolar world. So, in those circumstances, we still believe that patient dialogue, constructive engagement, working through issues is the way forward. And we think that global economic integration, rather than reversing trends on free trade and the movement of goods and services, that that’s a better way forward than people retreating into trading blocks, but clearly, we see, in today’s world, that these things are up for contest.

In Australia, you know, at the last election, we had two Chinese Australians, both women, contend for a marginal seat, the seat of Chisholm in the State of Victoria. When you look at our immigration contemporary to Australia, our permanent migration streams, you know, China and India are the top couple of countries, you know, one year one’ll be on top, one year the other will be on top, but they’re the big stream of migrants to Australia. You walk the streets of Melbourne, I’m probably most familiar with, but you walk the streets of Melbourne on the weekend and, you know, this is a city, which is home to a very sizeable Asian community and that’s very visible on the streets. So, I instinctively react negatively to the sense that there’s sort of us and China, I think it’s all more integrated than that. But, you know, there have been difficult issues to work through about Chinese influence in Australian politics, as expressed by the donation of money, difficult issues to work through, with Huawei and the Chinese aspiration to have Huawei involved in our national broadband network. There are issues that continue to need to be raised in the human rights dialogue. I’m thinking, for example, of Chinese treatment of the Uighers, and all of this needs to be on the table, as our nations engage. And that’s the perspective that we bring into the dialogue with the rest of the world, whether it’s the European Union or elsewhere.

I’m conscious, when I travel, that there’s an emerging almost, you know, and I travel extensively in the States, I speak there very regularly and I speak in some of the smaller cities, so I’m not talking about New York or Washington, I’m speaking about the some of the smaller cities. The discussions I have with people, they phrase questions to me as if this is the new Cold War, and they phrase questions to me, as if engage with China, yes/no? And when you’re from Australia, you know, this cannot be a yes/no perspective. That is not how the geopolitics of our region works, and I don’t think it’s actually a yes/no for the rest of the world either. I think that’s wrong, but it’s particularly patently wrong for Australia’s foreign policy outlook. So we will continue to put, you know, all of the thoughtfulness into how we engage with China that you’ve seen in a bipartisan sense broadly, you know, obviously I’d have some criticisms from time-to-time, but broadly across Australian governments, in recent years, and we’ll continue to put that perspective to others around the world.

In terms of my voice in Australian politics, I made a deliberate decision, when I exited the Parliament, that I would not be a day-to-day commentator on political issues in Australia any longer. I’ve, you know, handed that over to the current generation of Politicians, most particularly the current generation of Labor Politicians, who are too skilled and able to need me looming over their shoulder saying, “You should be doing this or you should be doing that.” So I don’t do that, but I do think, you know, former Prime Ministers have a voice and so, I’ve used that voice particularly around causes that I’m passionate about: gender equality, education in Australia, mental health, and the future of how we support people with mental illness, so I’ll continue to do that. But I’m not going to be, you know, he said, she said on the contemporary political issues of the day.

Dr Champa Patel

I just wanted to come back to the question that was raised there, because I guess the other challenge for Australia now is how it navigates its relationship with the US as well, and not just for China. And I guess again, it’s not a yes/no question of how it does that, but I think, you know, you’ve certainly seen a few kind of bumps along the way, in terms of the relationship with the US at the moment.

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Yeah, I mean, you know, fun – at the fundamental level, you know, you get some waves on the top, but at the fundamental level, obviously, Australia’s relationship in the US – with the US is an incredibly strong one, we’re long-term allies, we’ve got a deep trade relationship, deep people-to-people links. And, you know, making sure that that relationship continues to go from strength-to-strength has been the work of Australian Prime Ministers since, you know, John Curtin turned to America, during the darkest days of World War Two, and I expect that to continue. And, you know, I am a believer this is not a zero sum game with China, when I was Prime Minister we took a step forward in our alliance with the US and improved our relationship with China, both at the same time. And it’s not like we’ve snuck up on China, in terms of being an ally of the United States, like they know that, they’ve already priced that in, when they deal with Australia, so, you know, yes, we can manage these things.

What enables us to best manage them is when there’s a clear strategy and policy from the US about its engagement with China, and to the extent that that seems to turn on a dime or a tweet, that is not an easy world for us. We were very welcoming of President Obama’s pivot towards Asia. We were very welcoming of Secretary Clinton’s, you know, major engagement and travel in our region, where she is very popular, and very popular in Australia. I think, you know, reading Australia – reading America’s directions is more difficult now, and that’s something that our Government, our opposition, our foreign policy establishment has to keep working its way through.

Dr Champa Patel

So we had two people who were waiting here, so I’m going to come to those two hands first and the gentleman here. So there’s the lady there and the gentleman here.

Sarah

Hi Julia, my name’s Sarah. Thank you for your great insights. I wanted to ask you about something you said a little bit earlier about balancing good – sorry, the considered government with the constant media appetite for a steady stream or a constant rush of announceables. I’m wondering, how much do you think the answer will be found through just better political management from say the PMO, and how much of that, the answer do you think will require changes to institutions, systems and processes of government? So I’m thinking something that kind of involves the public service and what do you think some of those answers might be?

Dr Champa Patel

Thanks. There’s a question here.

Adva Gamaraji

Hi there, and my name’s Adva Gamaraji, I’m a junior Doctor. I just wanted to ask your analogy of the glass labyrinth, how do you think it differs in low and middle income countries, as opposed to rich countries? And what do you think the solutions are to try and get women into more positions of leadership in developing countries?

Dr Champa Patel

Thank you. Let’s just take your question as well. Yeah.

Sheba Chan

And hi, my name is Sheba Chan and I’m a Member of the Chatham House and undergrad at the [inaudible – 49:04] School of Planning. I’m just wondering though, while many western countries pledge to fight against climate change, what’s your comment on the uncontrolled suburban or even encourage suburbanisation, which has been proven to be highly environmentally disadvantages?

Dr Champa Patel

Thank you.

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Urbanisation?

Dr Champa Patel

Hmmm hmm.

Sheba Chan

Suburbanisation.

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Suburbanisation, okay. Right, thank you, and so let me try and take those in order, they’re very different questions, but I’ll do my best. My comment about the different speeds of government and the media is not a comment about Australia, it’s a comment about the world. And, you know, even master communicators like President Obama, you know, saw the stresses and strains in these things, when he tried to deliver profound reforms, including his healthcare reform. So it is, I think, a deeper debate than migrating any of the immediate structures of government, but having said that, I do think that there are issues for, we would say, public servants, civil servants around the world about how to best support government in these, you know, these times. What’s the long-term scan, you know, the thing that’s coming next over the horizon that you need to get to government to feed into decision-making now? I think that’s a very complex piece of work and because things are fast moving, what was on the long-term horizon, becomes the near-term horizon more quickly than in the past. What enables public services to be provided in a way that meets consumer expectations, when they are so used to using their phone to, you know, almost procure anything instantaneously. How do you migrate expectations of government services, so that they aren’t seen to be lapsing so far behind, what consumers can get elsewhere?

All of these questions I think are very deep questions for the civil service, public service and I think some of the siloisation that the public service traditionally has, some of the rigidity, so that it’s hard to move in and out of the public service and off to other occupations. These have been longstanding problems, but I think the costs from not resolving them are actually more acute now than they used to be. On comparing the work for gender equality, in richer parts of the world and poorer parts of the world, one, we need to be careful, I think, about the assumption that rich always equals more equal, and poorer always equals less equal. We’ve got a series of global indexes that tend to come out like that, but if they tend to come out like that because they put in education and health status, which of course, in richer parts of the world, are challenges which are far closer to being resolved than in poorer parts of the world. But if you try and take that out and just look more directly at leadership, you find a more mixed picture than you might immediately assume from the surface, so we are conscious of that.

But we’re also conscious that, you know, in the UK, in Australia today, if you look at education mostly, graduate numbers favour women. If you look around the world in some of the poorest parts of the world, you know, girls in particular are struggling to still get access to primary school completion. So where you’ve got to, you know, focus the energies is very sensitive to culture and context. On urbanisation – suburbanisation, I think – this is not really a direct answer to your question, but it’s something that I think comes out of the contemporary debate. I think one of the things we’ve got to be careful of with how we put the climate change agenda is giving the impression to people, and if we give this impression then it is turbocharged by the media and political tendencies, who don’t want to see action on climate change. That somehow acting on climate change is going to put us back to, you know, less energy, intensive more rural lifestyles that, you know, we’ve got to stop the clock of progress and go back. I think really, tackling climate change is about absolutely changing how we live and changing how we procure energy in particular. But the lifestyles that people aspire to have in cities, in great cities in the world like London with, you know, meaningful work with the ability to travel round those cities, with the ability to live in some degree of, you know, comfort, the ability to have aspirations about their life and their family’s life, that those things can be achieved, whilst we are combatting climate change. If we make this an either or choice, I think we make the politics of it much, much more difficult and that is not, in my view, an objectively true choice either.

Dr Champa Patel

We’re coming close to the end of our time, so I’m going to take these four and then we’ll do rapid fire responses.

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

This will strain my memory.

Dr Champa Patel

Hopefully, they’ll be on similar things.

Carly Kind

Thank you. Carly Kind, I’m the Director of the Ada Lovelace Institute, which is a new think tank dedicated to data ethics. I wanted to pick up on your point around the lack of anonymity online and how that fuels toxic discourse and also, look at the flipside of that which is in fact, greater tracking, personalisation online and micro targeting. And get your reflections on what that means for political discourse and for campaigning, the ability to target political messages to voters at a micro level has of course come to the fore in the aftermath of the US election, the Brexit Referendum? And as we stand on the brink of potentially another election here in the coming months, I’d be interested, in your reflections, on how you think technology has changed the nature of political campaigning, political discourse and whether there’s a role for electoral reform or other regulation in that space?

Dr Champa Patel

Thank you.

Anis Cardrey

My name is Anis Cardrey. I’m a member of Chatham House, and Miss, I’m going to ask you a very difficult question. It’s not to talk about gender equality and education, you know, and they are very nice subjects. I would like to hear a comment on the rise of the Religious Fundamentalist Party and the largest democracy in the world, The Land of Gandhi and Nehru and their actions potentially leading to a nuclear war on the subcontinent, a difficult question.

Dr Champa Patel

Thank you, nice and easy for the last ten minutes on. Shall we quickly take these two and then offer some thoughts?

Anna Lawton

Hi, Anna Lawton. You’ve spoken a lot about climate change and Extinction Rebellion has shut down parts of London for the past week and a half for the second time. How do you think Politicians, in the UK and globally, should be engaging in discourse with Extinction Rebellion and climate change protestors?

Dr Champa Patel

Okay, we have somebody there. Do you want to go ahead?

Member

Yes. Hi, I’d like to respond or return quickly to the conversation about politics and gender. So I think it’s safe to say that campaigning for political office has historically developed with a disproportionate bias towards masculine values and characteristics. What kind of reforms in this space do you think will make it easier for women to successfully campaign for political office?

Maria Bond

Hi, I’m Maria Bond. I’m a Management Consultant and I work in the finance sector. On the DNI space and gender equality, it seems to me a lot of the conversation is seen as a female conversation. What advice or call to action would you have both for young men and those in more established power positions?

Dr Champa Patel

Thank you. So, we have a few questions, I guess, around micro – the flipside of anonymity, micro targeting, greater tracking, more tailored campaigns, the impact that might have, the values question, but also, a call to action for men. So maybe if we take that and then we can come to the trickier question of relationships with India and how people should engage with those movements that are seen, I guess, as perhaps more radical in their tactics like Extinction Rebellion.

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Yeah, I’ll do my best. So, on – and none of these are really capable of rapid fire answers, but I’ll do my best. On broadly the various lenses on gender and politics, gender and political campaigning, politics is and has been inherently adversarial. And I always thought that, you know, the great Madelaine Albright statement, “Anybody who thinks bringing women to the fore in politics will resolve all arguments, can’t remember high school.” So, you know, Madelaine’s very good at those lines. I think I’ve always thought it’s simplistic to say female leadership in politics will change the currency of politics, so that big issues and big value clashes are somehow wished away. You know, big policy contention is always going to require some stridency and advocacy, I think. I’m conscious, even as I say that, that maybe the march of human history is ultimately, a way from contemporary political models to more consensual political models and I’ll be remembered as the superseded stock, but that is my perspective.

So, I do think, at its most adversarial when big issues are up for contention, leave or remain, that you should expect Politicians in Parliament to have feisty goes around those issues and put their perspectives very strongly. What I don’t believe is that women should pay a disproportionate price for doing that and I think currently, they do pay a disproportionate price. I don’t think the rise of micro targeting, in and of itself, is a bad thing. I mean, Politicians have targeted messages always and now we can obviously target them more forensically. I don’t think politics doing that is necessarily a bad thing. I think what it’s – what is a bad thing is if the data harvesting is being done in an unethical way, to enable that micro targeting and that’s true of politics and it’s true of people pushing consumer products, it’s true generally. And it’s a problem if that micro targeting is used to push, you know, fake news and messages that are nowhere near political truth. And so, on the data harvesting and truth in politics, I think we’ve always got to be open to better and better ways and better and better regulation.

On diversity and inclusion, I do think we need male allies to be involved in the change agenda about gender, one, because gender equality is better for everyone, better for men and better for women. So, men should be on that journey too, if we are in societies and structures where men have disproportionate power, if we don’t take men on that journey, then how do we win? You know, ultimately, you need men to come on the journey too, so I think that that’s really important, if I’ve got them all.

Dr Champa Patel

Extinction Rebellion.

The Hon Julia Gillard AC

Extinction Rebellion. Extinction Rebellion, look, I think it is always difficult for politics to respond to disruptive street protests, but human history also tells us that there are many times when the street protestors were right and the decisions of politics were wrong. I’m thinking, for example, in Australia, going back, the mass movement against conscription and the Vietnam War, where undoubtedly, the protestors were on the right side of history and current government policy at that time was not. Having said that, we can’t forget that ultimately, nation state democratic politics gets changed by winnings hearts and minds and tactics that prejudice the ability to win hearts and minds ultimately, don’t get you to where you want to go. But one thing that gives me a lot of hope for the future is the mobilised nature of the current youth generation, I think that is different from youth generations going back for some time now. And I think, you know, whilst, you know, a woman who turned 58 a weeks ago might occasionally raise a little spectacle eyebrow at some of the, you know, tactics and campaigning, ultimately, it’s all to the good that a more mobilised generation of political activists is going to come onto the scene and bring with them a new energy for change, so I think that’s, you know, a good thing.

Dr Champa Patel

We have come to the end of our time and I know there was an outstanding question of the relationship between Australia and India.

Anis Cardrey

No, no, no, India and Australia, in particular concern about the rise of the Fundamentalist Party in India, potentially, there’s a nuclear war on the subcontinent.

Dr Champa Patel

Yes, it’s a nice light note to end the conversation on. If I may invite you to, perhaps we can follow that up after the event ‘cause unfortunately, we have come to the end of our time. I wish we could have billed this as an Evening with Julia, because I feel like there would have been lots more hands up, come up and plenty more questions. But I want to say thank you so much for taking time to share your insights with us and your experiences, it’s been fantastic, and if you could join me in thanking Julia [applause].