Julie Bishop – the only woman in Tony Abbott’s 2013 federal cabinet – believes that the then prime minister really wanted an all-male senior ministry and only included her because her elected position as deputy leader meant he could not avoid it.
The former foreign affairs minister remains convinced that Abbott’s preference was to have no women at all.
“I wasn’t appointed by Tony, I was there in my own right as the elected deputy leader, so they had no choice but to have me in cabinet,” Bishop says in a lengthy podcast interview with Helen McCabe, founder of professional development and advocacy organisation Future Women.
“I suspect that had I not been deputy leader, I would not have been in cabinet, so there would have been no women in the cabinet.”
So why didn’t she speak up about this state of affairs?
In the podcast, part of a series of eight with high-profile women, Bishop says she challenged his decision, not just because of “the optics” but also on behalf of “the other women who were perfectly capable of holding a cabinet position, if not more capable than many of those men chosen”. But she says she chose not to express her concern publicly out of a mix of cabinet solidarity and self-preservation.
“I knew that if I went out at that point as the only woman in cabinet said, ‘This is unacceptable, it’s 2013, get your act together,’ then that would have caused a rift that would have been irreconcilable between me and the rest of the cabinet,” Bishop says.
She wishes others, including the media, had expressed more outrage at the time.
Ah. She was a fucking COWARD, that’s why. Wanted the media to be brave for her. As if they would’ve been anything of the sort, fucking Liberal shills. Of course, there’s nothing surprising about this revelation to anyone paying attention at the time; the idea of TONE ABET as Minister for Women (a position he refused to give the only woman in his cabinet)was so transparently absurd on the face of it, that the idea he would’ve preferred an all-male cabinet is “well OBVIOUSLY” stuff. And that Julie Bishop would be a coward in this situation who sacrificed other women for her own career… well, why am I not surprised by that. If there’d been no women at all in Abbott’s cabinet, how outraged would she have been then, or would she have relied on the media to do that for her too?
