Was Julie Bishop “too diplomatic” as the only woman in the room?

Julie Bishop doesn’t believe in regrets. She’d rather draw a line and move on.

She has relied on this approach throughout her revered political career, particularly in her history-making role as Australia’s Foreign Affairs Minister.

It’s been five years since the West Australian stepped away from parliament. For someone who spent 20 years in the public eye, she’s revelled in the change. 

“I feel liberated from the constraints of 20 years in politics,” Bishop told Helen McCabe in a wide-ranging interview for FW’s Too Much podcast.

“It wasn’t just the political processes and the whole notion of cabinet solidarity and party solidarity.”

Yet, Bishop also witnessed first hand the moments of sheer discord, particularly for a woman in politics. 

“There was so much pressure to conform to other people’s ideas of what you should be, how you should look, what you should wear, other people setting for you standards that they couldn’t or wouldn’t meet themselves,” she said. 

“It took me a while to understand what was going on. But once I did, that was it, I was going to be me – authentic, love it or leave it.” 

And Bishop was authentically herself.

The Hon. Julie Bishop speaking at FW’s Off The Record event after leaving politics in 2018

“I recall somebody asking me a question about having to play by the rules in a man’s world and that’s when I said, ‘Well, if you’re trying to be a man, it’s a waste of a woman’,” she said.

Though, that doesn’t mean she hasn’t also “played the game” during her career. She reflected on her decision not to speak up when she was named the only woman in Tony Abbott’s 2013 Cabinet. She feared it would undermine the government from day one and instead chose to raise her concerns privately.

“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,” she said.

“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. We’ll never know.”

During her professional career, many labels have been levelled at Bishop – the one that stuck around the longest was that she was “too diplomatic”. 

It’s something Bishop was keen to unpack.

“I was diplomatic enough to be considered appropriate to be Australia’s foreign minister and that requires tons of diplomacy, you know the statecraft around diplomacy,” she said. 

“There were many occasions when I could have lost my cool, or I could have said something that could have been taken the wrong way by my counterpart foreign ministers, foreign secretaries or leaders and so I was always very careful to tread my way through the diplomatic minefield, in my professional role as foreign minister, so was that too diplomatic in that role? 

“I don’t think you can ever be too diplomatic as long as you can achieve your outcomes.”

“I wanted to leave the message that it’s okay. Now, I didn’t win the leadership battle. But there are plenty of other things for me to do, you just draw a line and you move on.”

In February 2018, Bishop shocked many when she resigned from her ministerial position in then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s cabinet. 

It was a moment of upheaval for the then Liberal Coalition Government, but also for Bishop.

“That was quite a hard decision because I loved my role as foreign minister,” she said.

“When the next leadership challenge took place, it was just so debilitating. And as I recall, Malcolm won a vote earlier in the week, which I thought put the matter to bed.”

Bishop recalled she was focused on travelling to the United Nations General Assembly Leaders Week when another leadership challenge was made against Turnbull. During this challenge, she also raised her hand, running up against the future prime minister Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton.

“We know the outcome of that,” she said. 

“I then had to decide, do I stay in a cabinet where I’ve challenged for the leadership and not won, where the party obviously wanted either Peter Dutton, or Scott Morrison, and we’re going to tear each other apart. 

“But of course, they ended up with both. And I couldn’t see a place from me in that scenario – and I’d been deputy to so many leaders. So I knew that I wanted to get out of the party politics.” 

Though her decision was tinged with disappointment about a role unfinished, she chose to stand by her principles. 

Months later she was afforded a chance to reclaim the narrative, something she captured perfectly during her keynote speech at an FW dinner in October 2018.

“I wanted to portray it to the women present,” she recalled.

“I didn’t want women to think that this is the story of what always happens to women in politics. If you can fight your way in you fight your way up the ladder, and then you never get the top prize and that’s the kind of story that was circulating out there. 

“I wanted to leave the message that it’s okay. Now, I didn’t win the leadership battle. But there are plenty of other things for me to do, you just draw a line and you move on.”

Bishop silenced both sides of the aisle in parliament following Question Time in February 2019 to announce her decision to quit politics entirely.

Years later she would be shown a voter poll that revealed she was the preferred Prime Minister over Morrison.

“I take some pride in the fact that, in so much as we take notice of polls, there was one that showed that I would have been a popular Prime Minister,” she told McCabe. 

“But politics isn’t about popularity, as we know.”

Rather, as a self-proclaimed realist, she describes politics as fleeting and transient.

“I know that even though there might have been a particular sentiment at some time, the more you are in a role, the more decisions you have to make the more people you alienate,” she said. 

“There are winners and losers. So I’m pragmatic enough to know what would have happened. But interestingly, shortly after I retired from Parliament, we were hit with COVID. 

“So I cannot even fathom what it would have been like leading this country or any other country during a two year global pandemic. So I don’t really stop and think about it too much.”

Asked by McCabe whether any former colleagues would have touched on pragmatism in answering a question about a potential chance at the top job, Bishop suggested otherwise.

“There’s a lot of rampant egos in politics, not confined to the male of the species, but because there are so many more of them,” she said.

“You do tend to see rampant egos quite upfront, and it is quite confronting. So yes, I guess men, generically speaking, would answer that question differently.”

IMAGE CREDIT: Getty Images