wonderful panel that we have. i'm just going to be making a personal introduction and very shortly turning it over to my colleague. tom mann who is a senior fellow in governance studies and then of course needs no introduction to all of you but of course julia gillard australia's first prime minister and e.j. dionne. first female prime minister. [laughter] >> thank you. >> she really looks great, doesn't she? the first female prime minister. [laughter] and then the e.j. dionne. the laughter covered up your intra-e. j.. senior fellow for government studies. we are going to and note lots of people in the audience but just two people. welcome to ambassador kim beazley who is also the former leader of the labour party and tonya who is currently the deputy of the leader party -- labour party and shadow foreign minister so welcome to all of you. it's my pleasure to introduce the session the likes of an australian prime minister, first female prime minister. i am now going to be haunted by that julia. julia gillard on 'my story" and if you haven't seen her book it's wonderful and i highly recommend it. you will get those recommendations also from my colleagues who will vote it up, yes indeed. copies are available afterward and julia you will be sticking around afterward for anybody who wants to talk or get their books signed etc.. i'm not going to dive into the subject of the book. i'm going to leave that to the panelists but i do want to make a personal introduction to julia gillard who i first met a year ago. can you believe it was only a year ago? she joined us as a distinguished fellow here at brookings working primarily on global education issues and we were very honored to have her. i thought well, you know she probably will be very high-level very conceptual, former heads of state are big big picture. and indeed that's true but how wrong i was in terms of how strong her intellect is. so three points. you know any economist who would like to go toe-to-toe with julia gillard on different ways of standard deviation is welcome to do so. you may lose. as a former minister of education myself and our entire team were quickly impressed at how well juliette new education and how thoughtful she was, how technical she was and she certainly has been an amazing asset to us in our work. the second , excellent strategist. we spend lots of time here at brookings and in our work in particular breathing global leaders, sharing information on global education, showing data about trends, making policy recommendations and julia was one of the quickest studies we ever had. i remember we threw probably three days of probably two college courses condensed into three days in terms of getting up to speed on global education. here's all the data in a trance. she took a few notes and i thought i wonder she's not interested maybe she is bored and then on the third day she had an interview with i believe christine amanpour and she was honest. every single fast, every data point big picture strategy so ever since then we have had incredible high regard and julia has been strategic and helpful in thinking through our work in terms of conducting research and analysis and impacting global policy helping shape some of our key initiatives. and lastly, on a very personal note she is incredibly warm and incredibly generous colleague to work with. of course at the very beginning we said well you know how should we refer to you? is a prime minister sub. she said please call me julia. in short order we have are talking about the pool in australia and when we could all come and visit which i am still, it's on the list. i'm not sure i can relate that is a work expense but i'm working on it. but she has been very warm and very generous with her time with me personally but also with every member of my team, talking to her interns, to our research assistants, to our senior executive fellows around the world and so it's a wonderful pleasure and honor to have her in a brookings family and with that, i know i also wanted to say not only with us at brookings it's a pleasure but it's also a great pleasure for our global education community because not too long ago she joined as the chair of the board of the global partnership for education. i didn't get some notes from you beforehand but i'm sure she would echo all of these things and i know the entire global education community is very happy to have you in a leadership role at the center. so with that, over to you julia. >> thank you very much. thank you. [applause] it's great to have this opportunity to launch 'my story" here at brookings and i do very much value every day that i get to be here so thank you very much. i too wanted to acknowledge kim beazley and to acknowledge two special friends. rowland who is here to who is my policy directors partner and the achievements in a policy sense in this book are shared by him and i would also like to acknowledge john here in the front. if you like any of the photos in the book you probably like them because he took them so i thank you for being here and it's great to have the jpa colleagues here as well, alice and the team. thank you for being here. i want to start by reading a few words from ibooks 'my story" and then take the conversation from there. the paragraphs i wanted to reach you are as. i first met barack obama at the g20 summit in korea and japan respectfully in november 2010. at the g20 meeting he advised me not to sit my expectations too high. big summits like this could lack excitement. what happened to the audacity of hope? [laughter] by the time of the nato summit later that year we had established such a report that the banter continued. the key photograph of us shows me like i'm telling him off as he laughs labs. an otherwise very serious occasion he catches a quick humorous discussion about our question time. when i explain that i had flung out after one question time and would fly back into another president obama said he envied the opportunity question time gave to explain your agenda to the nation. are you mad i said with accompanying dramatic overacting. once he understood it happened every day and consisted of 20 questions, 10 from the opposition mostly directed to me as prime minister he was inclined to agree his statement was a bit mad. so that's diplomacy in this book 'my story." on reflection as i was writing that i could understand what president obama was reaching for anything but he was reaching for was the opportunity that unfortunately leaders and politicians don't get very much which is the opportunity to talk directly to the community, not mediated through third parties whether that mediator is the tv news director or someone who edits a newspaper or a journalist or someone who puts a web site together. we don't actually have as many opportunities as we would like or need to have a direct conversation. and having the opportunity to write a book is you can just have that direct conversation and put it out there for people to look at into judge. so i hope many of you do read the book and what you will encounter in this book is in some ways not at all an american story, a very australian story and that very australian story starts with me coming from a migrant family. i ended up being prime minister of our nation, very different system than you have here and we find that it saves a hell of a lot of time because you don't have to have any of those debates about whether or not president obama was born in the united states. [laughter] you can just get to the political arguments about policy and the like. so it's a very australian story. i think it's a very australian story and another sons which is it would have been impossible for me, an unmarried woman, and atheists to have succeeded in american politics in a way that i succeeded in australian politics and i think it says something about the contrast and compare between our two nations but that has been possible for me. but you will encounter in this book debates and issues that are very familiar to people in the u.s. and ones that we face together. the book certainly campuses at have some link darren gage meant in the war in afghanistan, our engagement in counterterrorism which of course we deal with along side with you in so many of the nations of the world. i is prime minister went to more than 20 funerals for soldiers law -- lost in the conflict in afghanistan and as we now see conflict spreading throughout the middle east in the so-called islamic state. i think there are things to reflect on in the book that i learned during the course of leading our nation that conflict. ideal extensively in the book with a shared challenge of climate change with their brand adventure in putting across on carbon a very fast and furious political argument. a political argument which is seen bipartisanship in our nation lost. when labour was first elected to government in 2007 both sides of politics stood for that election on the basis that they would enact an emissions trading scheme. if you had stood in the center of that election campaign and said i predict that putting a price on carbon and climate change would be a flashpoint partisan issue with this they would have looked a very oddly in the campaign people were fighting about so much. and yet it has become a flashpoint partisan issue of our decade and in many ways of your decade. as a result particularly the campaigning of the radicalized right against the science and acceptance of the science and i campus that within the book. i also talk about the way in which we have worked together with you and other nations around the world to try and kickstart the global economy after the global financial crisis and some of the challenges that are still there. in our nation and in yours though our economies never had some of the dreadful downs and declines that you have had since the gf see that in our nation and yours people can realize the true promise of opportunity and social mobility for the future. the book canvases some of the big strategic shifts that are making our age, in particular what is happening in our region of the world. we have the explosive growth economically in asia and the rise of china. its economic rise and consequently a strategic rise, its desire for a larger and more modern military force. my conclusions overwhelmingly are optimistic ones and i come to those optimistic conclusions informed by my experiences as prime minister. it was said as prime minister that it was impossible for our nation for australia to improve its relationship with the u.s. and china at the same time, that this was a zero-sum game, that you could only improve the relationship with one of the cost of the relationship of the other. i set out to prove that wasn't right and during my time as prime minister we took a step forward in our alliance with the u.s.. we are now trained u.s. marines in our northern territory. president obama said he wanted an environment for them to train it and i said boy have i got a harsh environment for you. i do sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and think to myself there are probably several hundred marines who at that moment are thinking very unkindly of me as they train in 110-degree heat and 100% humidity, probably not on the list to be the most like. we did take that big step forward in the alliance. at the same time we struck a new deal with china to improve our nation's access to the top decision-making in china. one of the few nations on earth to be able to describe such a compact. so it was that experience about engaging in foreign policy with a sense of optimism and having that sense of optimism realize that i come to think strategic shifts in our world since the optimism talk. in this book i talk about my first passion education which is still driving me as i work here at brookings and for the global partnership for education. i came to believe is a very young person that access to education is the key to transforming lives. how it transformed my own life, how my own life has been made very different by the lives of my parents laid simply to the access to good quality schooling. in some ways that was a matter of choice. my parents mutually migrated halfway around the world to get my sister and i have better quality education but there was an element of luck in it now. i grew up in the days when you went to the local government school and it was owned. he didn't have a choice. you didn't campus all over my hometown for the best school to go to and we could not afford a private education. he just went to the local one and happily for me the local schools were great schools. but if my parents had migrated to another part likely the schools would not abandon schools. so that element of luck has always worried my mom. you have that sliding door moment where would my life have been if my parents had moved to a different part of adelaide and we would have been imports cools them i shall be put in a child through that kind of perverse lottery bet ways the financial circumstances of a parent should dictate the opportunity they get in life. it's changing that perverse lottery that drove me as prime minister and is continuing to drive me now in this international work and they certainly talk about that extensively because my whole life story doesn't make any sense without describing that peace to you. vineland i hope this book does get received on this particular point and start a million conversations. i talk about gender and leadership. i found this the hardest chapter to write. i entitled it the curious question of gender. i was conscious when i was writing it that in some ways others in the best position to write it because i was prime minister the first woman and it happened to me. i was also conscious when i was writing it that because it happened to me in some ways i was in the worst position to write it because it's hard to be dispassionate about things that have happened in her own life. i've tried to unpack as analytically as i can why it is that we received women's models of leadership differently and are very advanced societies, here in the u.s. and in australia. why sexism in a brand of image i would have thought no longer existed in my country until i saw it played out in newspapers in our politics and demonstrations where people were holding up signs saying ditch the which meaning me as the leader of the opposition stood in front of them, a kind of corrosive drip from the shock jocks including one of our shock jocks allen jones who called for me to be put in a chaff bag and dropped out to sea. now some of this is very serio serious. i managed to use it for some comedic effect at our annual national press gallery ball where i said ditch the which, how can this possibly add up? doesn't everybody know that you can't drown a witch? [laughter] there were laughs to be had along the way but i think there are some serious reflections on women and a leadership, how we obsess about appearance and how we judge on appearance, how we obsess about women's family. the issues we have made, don't have children or how can i be in touch with family life that i don't have children of my own? the issue has been she does have children. well who's looking after them while she is leader of the labour party? these issues when we don't let women when. i think there is an issue too. there something in the back of our brains that still whispers to us that we expect to see men commanding and we expect to see women empathizing. when you see a woman who has acting and commanding it's pretty easy to say she has to be pretty hard-boiled, doesn't she? she's got to be pretty worthless doesn't she? i will let you supply the next word. how many times have we claimed our moral virtue in this? how many many times have we had this conversation ourselves about other women in our world? as long as we allow that song to dictate to us in images of women in leadership we will be holding women back. even as i raise these questions i'm conscious that i live in a greatly privileged place as the women in the united states and we are not fighting like nigerian schoolgirls for the basic right to go to school. we are at it different stage. even at their different stage there are things we need to do about images and acceptance of women as leaders to take the next step in our society. even as our societies do everything we can to reach out to those like mullala and those nigerian schoolgirls who are still struggling for the most basic of rights. so that is the book. i hope you enjoy it and i'm now going to subject myself to what it probably will be the hardest question on the book to date. thank you very much. [applause] >> thank you julia. it's great to have you here. first i just want to say thank you to rebecca who really is one of the most wonderful people here at brookings and her center does more good and she and her center do more good than any six of us combined. and it was natural that she brought julia here to brookings as part of a long-term effort that tom bornstein and i have to try to merge australian to the united states. we like elections in new south wales or victoria or western australia as much as elections in kansas or wisconsin or new york. i will also want to acknowledge my friend kim beazley. we met 41 years ago this fall. we were in pre-k. he is one of the finest friends and one of the most principled politicians i've ever met. it's great to have you here. [applause] julia said hers is a relentlessly australian story. i'm going to try relentlessly to turn it into an american story so that she can sell books in this country. [laughter] i think what is most obviously relevant at this moment given the possible candidacies in the 2016 election is what you write about gender. this is a really extraordinary chapter and some of the same passages and who really thought these passages jumped out at him. there is another one i want to read but let me just read you these. i would like you to elaborate a little more on the general question, do stereotypes whisper to us that a woman leader cannot be likeable because she must have given up the nurturing and feeling? you write if you are a woman politician it is impossible to win on the question of family. if you do not have children you are characterized as out of touch with mainstream lives. if you do have children then happens to his looking after them? you write, and this is where the word julia avoided comes and common sense would tell you that if schoolchildren filed in the classroom every day and instead of saying good morning miss smith to the teacher said good morning fat. that would impact on their levels of respect for the woman and front of the class. somehow that common sense fled the scene while i was prime minister. lastly you were with anna bly in queensland during the floods and just to read this passage. this day was portrayed in the media and terms like these. yesterday as the floodwaters threatened our state capitol glide front of the media in a utilitarian white short hair looking like she had been working all night. beside her ms. julia gillard sat perfectly coiffed and a white suit nodding. what the heck was all that? [laughter] >> thank you for that very expensive question. on this gender bit i have tried to unpack it and i've tried to give whirl world examples because i did actually have some of the silly things about women and appearance. anna bly the premiere of queensland did a remarkable job during the floods. any political leader standing next to her would have come off -- because she was putting in eight miraculous performance leading her state. the fact that all of that ended up devolving down to what we were wearing says something about how women are judged. so i put that incident in there because a bit like the incident i put in there of my first overseas trip. i visited our troops in afghanistan and i then went and met with the secretary-general of nato literally our troops were fighting and dying in afghanistan. the report of that meeting in australia read julia gillard wearing a white jacket and black pants is greeted by the secretary-general of nato. no need to mention that mr. rasmussen was wearing a suit and tie. of course not. so in these key moments our nation threatened by natural disasters around the country queensland in particular our troops engaged in a work which is causing combat fatalities that the emphasis can be on appearance i think is limiting for women and we have just got to get through it and get over it. if i had one piece of advice, should there be a woman who runs for president in 2016, if i had one piece of advice it would be that dealing with any gendered criticism or focus on appearance or focus on family and parenting, that burden actually isn't hers. i try. i tried to take that burden up when i was prime minister and you can judge how successfully or unsuccessfully but that burden is not hers. that burden is actually all of ours to engage in the debate in a way which calls for the end of general -- gendered criticism. i look back on my time when it got particularly nutty with ditch the witch and all the rest of it and think how powerful would it have been if in that moment a mild australian business person had entered the public space and even if he had said i didn't vote for julia gillard in 2010 and i'm not going to vote for her in 2013, i don't support carbon processing that we don't have a national conversation like this. if there had been someone prepared to do that it would have been tremendously powerful. so if i could give one piece of advice for anyone who ever runs for the u.s. presidency it would be to think about who are those voices actually beyond the terrain of combat of politics who can help steer the national conversations that to what they should be on, which is capacities for leadership, not gender of leaders and policy suites, good bad or indifferent and keep the policy and leadership conversations there. >> tom could i follow-up with one question? i went back and looked at the interview i had with you in october of 2009 when the tea party was rising. in a way it's the flip side of the gender question because we were talking about the anger both in the u.s. and anger that existed for example for hansen to right-wing figure. and there was a lot of anger and it was working-class anger and it was often working-class man who had suffered a lot in globalization. what you said is that we were confronted and i quote you with the politics of the ordinary guy versus these elites, the opera watching lattes sipping elites and you said the anger was driven by real problems and not simply raw feelings. i'm curious if you could talk about how does one talk across that line and it's a particular problem i think for centerleft parties who are coalition often unstable between upscale or liberals in the broad sense in our sense and working-class voters. and certainly that coalition is frayed some in the united states and also in australia. >> though -- that coalition has spread an australian i think that's an issue for centerleft and social democratic parties around the world. in my time as prime minister we hosted the tfc. that didn't mean that there wasn't a ripple of fear out there on what could have been and what might still be because it's very hard when you are trying to explain to people in australia it had something to do with the sub-prime mortgage in the united states. it's like, what? and then to try to explain the ongoing ramifications. in our nation, actually in the teeth of the tfc, people weren't doing it too tough. the unemployment rate did not go up very high. government was engaged in economic stimulus some of it in cash transfers to families. .. >> there is still the need to fusey important change agendas with a great deal of reassurance about people's jobs and lives. and certainly part of that formula for the labour party has been workplace regulation and very good social safety nets. and when we get all of that working well together, then you can offer sufficient reassurance to get people to go with you on a change agenda. on this question of women and leadership, one of the things that i really noticed in the more benign days since i've left politics once you take yourself out of the sort of, you know, combat public views towards you change very quickly. and i get a lot of very, you know, obviously working blue collar main come up to me now who in an endearingly blunt australia way do so -- oh, thanks, mate, thanks for that. [laughter] would you mind signing this for my daughter? no problem. [laughter] and when you actually think about those two things, there was, i suspect, something about the days of my immediate leadership that made him feel a bit uncomfortable, not only the issues weapon dealing -- we were dealing with, but, you know, the nehase of the gender relationship, now a woman's leading the country. now it's happened, and it's sort of there. i think there is this thing as working men look at their daughters, it would be great, you know? maybe my girl could be the next one. so i think if we in the progressive side of politics can harness some of that since really all of this discussion about gender is a discussion about opportunity for daughters, then we can take a lot of people with usen out. with us on it. >> well, what a delight to be here with julia and kim and our many friends and colleagues. as e.j. said, there are these three strange students of american politics; himself, norm ornstein and myself. and we have become utterly obsessed with australia, its people, its institutions including compulsory atten dance at the polls -- attendance at the polls which we approve of. [laughter] its policies and its politics. and norm is here as well as e.j. , we've had opportunities to travel down to australia to visit with you there and to meet with you when you're in town. when we recently read of and learned of the passing of goff whitland, we too -- like many australians -- immediately returned to refresh ourselves and our memories about his years, decade as labour leader and his three-year term ended under the most extraordinary circumstances. but the beginning of the new labour party and hawk and keating and other leaders including kim who led the party for a number of years, it's really, it's about time, don't you think, that we finally got our, get our appointment as honorary citizens of australia? [laughter] we're waiting for it. i just want you all to know. i had read this book with immense pleasure. it's a fascinating read. it's about politics and policy. it's direct, lean in its writing and clear, frank, and is julia's quite prepared to be self-critical, to say when she thinks she made the wrong call and why. but it's in so many ways connected to american politics. and so e.j.'s idea of having a discussion/conversation with you about some of the links really fits with me. i remember well, julia, when your first visit here in opposition you came to a friday lunch that senator ted kennedy was speaking at, and you all had a very interesting exchange. the next time you came as minister of education and led a seminar at brookings with a whole group of education reformers -- which leads to my question. we now, our paths, respective paths of education reform overlapped a good deal. ours began in some ways with governors sort of leading up, republican and democratic governors clinton and bush 43, to some extent even 41 were deeply involved in this national standards testing measures, transparency, accountability. it was really fascinating to see. but now if you look in america, it's become caught up in the same ideological debate. the common core standards which were developed voluntarily by the states are now being disowned by some of its former champions. like the current republican governor of the state of louisiana. so my question to you is, did you face similar opposition when you were enacting your education reforms? and will your reforms survive a change of government? >> it's a different, in some ways a different set of issues for us and in some ways the same set of issues. actually, the tools for reform in individual schools, i think, what we talk about, what you talk about, what reformers do here, what we strive to do in australia is very much the same. but in terms of the government levers, actually the national government in australia has more levers in its hand to force change in schools than the national government here. and i've had the opportunity to have that conversation with secretary duncan, for example, and i think he would pine for the kind of levers we have as a national government. [laughter] there's a great labour saying, a paul keating saying, never get between a premier -- the governor equivalent -- and a bucket of money. very dangerous place to be. [laughter] and one of the ways in which we implemented our education reforms is we made money which would flow from the national government to schools contingent on adopting the agenda. now, around my state colleagues there were some who were enthusiastic about that and some who were more sour-faced about it. but at the end of the day, everybody was going to take the money. so the money talked. and because in our system we flow money not only to government schools, but to nongovernment schools, we can impose a grade -- whatever word you want to use -- change agendas on nongovernment schools. so that means, for example, when we agreed there would be a national curriculum, that the national curriculum whether you're educated in a government school or a nongovernment school. of the various reforms i enacted as education minister and then kept enacting as prime minister, i think the transparency is here to stay. that's a web site where you can see transparently the results in national testing of every school in australia in the context of the levels of advantage or disadvantage of the school -- of the kids in the school in the context of the money supply to the school for the teaching task. and you cannot only compare schools with the national average in testing, you can compare with similar schools. so you can do the powerful thing of saying here are two schools that are teaching quite underprivileged teachers. how come one is doing a lot better than the other? and then seek to identify and capture that best practice and flow it to the other school. i think that will stay. the national curriculum has been on a bit of an adventure where the incoming minister for education appointed some people who were immediately and, in my view, rightly viewed as quite partisan on the topic of education reform. to report on the national curriculum. the fear that that generated actually didn't get realized in their final report which is for a relatively modest set of changes and certainly not for, you know, dragging the curriculum into being an ideological kind of a stick to beat children over the head with. the main piece which is in contest is the funding reforms where we, reform school funding, so funding now flows to matched need. we know that children from the most disadvantaged homes can get a great education, but it costs more to achieve that for them. so we have a system so they get more for educating those children. that's locked in sort of overwhelmingly by intergovernmental agreements. the current prime minister said he would keep the whole lot. he is resolved from that in government and now particularly the final two years of this six-year change are at risk. and while tenure is in a far better position than me to talk about labour's policy sweep for the 2016 election, i would anticipate that school funding reform will be one of the big issues completing and keeping that funding reform will be one of the big issues in 2016. and i certainly think it's a great debate to be in, because it's quintessentially about whether or not the nation is prepared to make available for the education of every child the amount of resources necessary to get that child a good education. >> e.j. had a follow up, and so i was going to do it too. >> with go -- go ahead. >> which really goes to minority government. i remember being at kim's residence the morning, late morning/afternoon of election day 2010, and it took us what it took you, 17 days as i recall, to put together a minority government. i'm still fascinated about how you did that, and the book helped because you really wrote about some details but i hope you'd share that with us. and it was especially difficult because of developments and politics within your own party. but tell us how minority government differs from u.s. divided party government and how you can get things done in a minority government that we can't possibly do these days in divided party government? >> >> did any of the people who supported you get money in swiss bank accounts? [laughter] in about 20 years. [laughter] >> absolutely no -- [inaudible] i can guarantee you that. and interestingly, no one asked for a swiss bank account. so -- [laughter] our system is, you know, the westminster system, so whether or not you govern depends entirely on whether you have a majority in the house of representatives. and our system is one of very rigorous bloc voting by political parties. so while here you will have lots of debates about whether on, for example, waxman-markey climate change, whether a democrat would vote for it, whether a republican would vote for it, whilst you will have those kinds of debates in australia, everybody in the labour party will vote for it. and whilst our conservative parties maintain a fiction of freedom to cross the aisle when you want to, in reality they bloc vote all the time -- block vote all the time too. the only limited examples of people just individually voting are on some conscience questions that are defined as conscience questions, things like abortion and same-sex marriage where you'll get people making individual decisions, and you'll get mosaics of, you know, political party members sitting for one proposition or another. so, i mean, my task in the 17 days given we didn't have enough labour members to form a government was to add enough independents to our pile to get the votes. i needed to get four. in the first instance, we negotiated with the green political party which sits to our left and is, you know, highly focused on protest politics and environmental politics. that required me to be satisfied that they could be welded in a way that would, you know, keep them on the straight and narrow for the period of our government. wanted to, you know, enjoy executive power, and i was never going to do that. but we were able to negotiate some policy issues and carbon pricing was one. you know, we could work through it and step through. and then i needed to secure up the votes, and the most likely were two country independents, tony windsor and rob -- [inaudible] and a man from tasmania. now, history is written now as if it's inevitable i was going to win through and form this government. but actually going into those 17 days the independent from tasmania, andrew willkie, i had never met in my whole life. anything i knew about him is he had become politically active as a person in our intelligence community who had objected to the way in which the howard government had used intelligence to justify us engaging in the iraq war. so a kind of familiar story, a story here and a story in the u.k. and then the two country independents. whilst they became very good friends over the three years -- they actually came to the launch of my book in australia which was very generous of them -- even the start of those 17 days i didn't know them well. i'd dealt with them once over a student income support issue when i had a change agenda as deputy prime minister, and that was really it. and so, i mean, you know, with all of the weight of can you form a government, in the moment it was really extensive studying of these people in person, what can i get to know about them, all of the things they'd ever said publicly, they'd ever said in the parliament, their voting records, what could i get to know about how they saw the world and could i find some connection points between us and them which would make it viable? and over 17 long days -- and they certainly were long days -- i managed to do that. and it was, and i describe this in the book, for me in some ways it was kind of a lonely time. whilst wayne was sort of there supporting me and i had great staff supporting me including ian davidoff, either i could do it or i couldn't. there wasn't actually a whole lot that even the best of my ministerial colleagues could do, because it needed to be this leadership negotiation. so i recount in the book ringing one of my good colleagues who went on to be minister for finance about something i wanted to check with her, and it was like 10:30 in the morning, and i said what are you doing, she said i'm roasting spices. i said, you're roasting spices? [laughter] and so for a minister with a lot of energy in this 17 days of kind of stasis, she was taking her energy out by making the world's most complex meals from scratch -- [laughter] right to the extent of roasting the spices. [laughter] i don't even know how you do that. [laughter] apparently, it can be done. [laughter] and, i mean, tandy would remember what it was like, but it was this sense of waiting, waiting, waiting and then working, working, working, and then finally we got enough people to say yes. but once everybody said yes, there was actually this great growing sense of common endeavor which meant that people hung together even in very difficult days and through some very controversial propositions. and we then had the reverse problem for most australian governments. most australian governments -- including the current government -- have, the numbers in the house of representatives so they can bang something through. they get to the senate, and they don't have the numbers, and they've got to flounder around and negotiate. our government's budget is very hostage to that process at the moment. we had the reverse. once we could get the numbers in the house of representatives, basically we could get it through the senate because it meant the greens were onboard. we'd get it through. and so it turned out with all of this odd start and curious dynamic as a minority government to be a very productive parliament in terms of the pieces of legislation that went through. and there are days when i get a bit of awry smile and -- a wry smile and think to myself we got budget deals through in record time. if i'd ever taken the amount of time the current government is taking to get its budget through, our newspapers would have been screaming crisis in huge, you know, fonts on the front. our prime minister has been fond of talking about budget emergencies. actually, you know, an inability to get your budget legislation through is a bit of a problem. and it would be, it'll be interesting to see when the focus goes back on that problem and what can be achieved through negotiations by this government. >> i just want to say that, you know, the labour party is full of liberal people. not only did julia write a book, but wayne swan, the minister of treasury, wrote a book, and now i'm thigpenny has to write a book, a -- thinking penny should write a book. i want to open it up to the audience, because we have so many people here who know a lot about australia, so i'm going to combine two questions. the book is brilliantly organized for political junkies. i told julia, this is a good way to sell the book. all the great politics is in the first 130 pages, so political junkie journalists can read the first 130 pages and leave substance like education, climate change, economic collapse -- [laughter] but there is in that at the beginning a chapter called the enemy within. and while my first quotation is going to be your view of the press, that is not the enemy within. but it's about what was happening inside the labour party. so i'll ask two questions. one is just the media in general, and the set up in australia is somewhat different than ours, although there are some things in common, i think. but you have a wonderful line where you said good government does not work at the same speed as the media. no journalist is ever going to be happy with a day in which the prime minister quietly and methodically reads at meetings -- [laughter] thinks deeply and makes decisions. i'd just love you to talk about that. but for those of us here watching your labour party and especially for those of us who have a general sympathy for the center-left, it was really a what are you people doing over there sense? [laughter] i mean, first, you throw kim out as leader, and you express some regrets about that in the book. you and kevin throw him out as leader. then you throw kevin out as leader -- [laughter] and then kevin throws you out as leader, and then there's an election finally where the voters, even though labour had the best economic record arguably of any government on the face -- of any democratic country in the world, you lose the election. so if you could talk about, a, the media and, b, what is it with your party? [laughter] those are the easy ones. >> actually very simple questions. thanks for that. [laughter] >> and then we'll have a softball from the audience. [laughter] >> on the media i actually think there's a set of common problems here, but if anything, there's -- we've got an extra problem, and the extra problem is because we are a limited population, only 23 million people. while this age enables the development of alternate media, our market is very thin, so it's only going to sponsor so much. whereas here because the market is thicker, deeper, more people interested, more money, therefore, in potential circulation to media outlets that you'll end up and you are ending up with more diversity than us. but the thing that's common is in this media age i've been comparing it in speeches to the advent of all you can eat restaurants. do you remember when we first got all you can eat restaurants and you'd go into a buffet table groaning with food, and you go a bit mad, wouldn't you? i don't know what it was, but you would go a bit mad, and you'd just be stuffing down as much food as you humanly could for the time you w the all you can eat restaurant. and i think we are at that stage with our media, that it's so much coming at us so quickly that the journalists who are generating it, many of the best journalists who are generating it are regretful that they can't spend more time on generating deeper pieces, but they've got, you know, editors barking at them to fill the space, you know? blog, tweet, get on 24-hour tv, get your column in, blog, tweet again. it's thinning out our national conversations. and everything emerges devoid of context. it's like it puffs out, no looking back what does this relate to, no looking forward, what could this possibly lead to, and no depth. and so -- >> otherwise it's perfect. >> otherwise it's perfect. [laughter] so i talk in the book about, you know, the experience of, you know, launching major policies mid-morning which required thought and analysis and having journalists by midday ringing my press office saying have you got a story for us. because, you know, they tweeted, they blogged, they appeared on 24/7 tv where journalists now take to interviewing journalists. they don't actually need talent anymore. [laughter] they've got each other. and then the cycle moves. so i hope that this is a transition time. and because the technology enables us to get all of this information, we'll get used to it and we'll move to a newer where we go from the all you can eat back to the more selective i'd rather eat less, have it of better quality and have it more customized to my tastes. and in the media parallel, i don't mean by that biased, i mean by that a deeper dive into the issues i care about. but we are there in australia, and you aren't here in the u.s. and it's been interesting for us having watched president obama's mastery of social media and new media when campaigning that when governing he's had the same problems with the speed and thinness of the media that we've had. on what's wrong with our political party -- [laughter] i feel like i should be deferring to -- [inaudible] i think if you were trying to draw across all of the events and there were different elements in each of them and different personalities in each of them, i'd think about my sense of regret about events involving him in the book. but if you wanted to draw across all of it, i think our political party is in the modern age still trying to get the balance between how much it is a leader's party, how much of its identity is defined by the leader and how much of its quest for popularity is correlated with the leader's acceptability to the electorate as measured by polls. this is how much it is a party with the leader and a sense of purpose. that brings together the many elements that go to make up the labour party. and i think over a long period of time and to the cost of some very good leaders we've erred on the side of being a leader's party looking for that quest for popularity rather than looking for purpose and genuine leadership ability. and that has been what has chartered so much of our political fortunes over the last few years. >> the book has in loving and i suppose unloving detail the fight, and it's a fascinating account of this period. tom, would you hold -- i want you to come back, but -- >> no, absolutely. >> do we have mics going around? stanley over on the right, not necessarily -- that's not a political description. it's my right, your left, and so that leaves you in the center. >> stanley roth-boeing, it's good to see you again. welcome to washington. want to bring the conversation back to foreign policy. and one of the things that happened on your watch was the u.s. pivot or rebalance towards the asia-pacific region. not trying to draw you into the semantics of what word would have been best, but just a very straightforward question, how do you think we're doing with the policy looking at it now and all the things that have happened? >> okay. yes, the pivot, rebalance did happen on my watch, and it -- i do need to pay a tribute to former prime minister rudd here. he certainly put to the u.s. clearly the need for the u.s. to join the east asia summit, and it was advice that was agreed to, and it was very good advice. and, you know, the joining of the east asia summit was an element of what became the pivot. i mean, the pivot was given a lot of, you know, image and flesh when president obama came to australia, spoke to our parliament, talked about the u.s.' deep engagement in the region and at the same time secretary clinton was standing on an aircraft carrier just out of the philippines, and so the whole imagery was an american president is here in the region speaking about the u.s. and its future in the region. and, yes, the u.s. is a formidable nation, and he is the image of being formidable, you know? aircraft carriers -- can kim would know more about them than i ever will, but they're bloody big things. [laughter] been through a whole lot of stuff. [laughter] so that, i think, if you -- i mean, not obviously us, australia, with our long standing alliance with the u.s., but if you were a nation in the region that was calibrating its future -- u.s., china, where do i stand, how do i navigate this -- that was an important moment. .. i think there is a need to do no -- it's not like you got the feasibility. it's not like you gone. it's the visibility of engagement that needs to be lifted in the years to come. >> note we are making progress. a former prime minister did not tell us what hillary clinton was wearing on the aircraft. [laughter] let's take a few, let's take if i could three women here in the back with a black air over here and then right here. right behind you. and then just passed her colleague pastor colleague. why do we take three at once and get voices in. >> my name is bianca and i'm from australia and i'd like to say hello to kim beazley firstly and thank you for speaking prime minister. i just have two questions. the first is on gender and i would just like to know basically how you mentally dealt with the misogyny and the chauvinism that you dealt with on a daily basis both from those on the opposite side of the bench and from those in the media and secondly i have a question on education which is based on the current problems with the current governments looking to not cap the university charges so that universities can set their own prices on degrees. what is your opinion on that because as someone who has just finished university two years ago that scares "the hill" out of me thinking that the social gap and australia could widen because the students who don't have access to that. i was lucky and fortunate that i could but is just going to get worse in my opinion. what's your view on that? >> thank you and for that matter the misogyny inside of your own party if i can ask that. >> my name is a dell and i'm a a fellow adelaide ian. i am currently at csis and an australian government employee. i just wanted you to know as well that in my household at least it's happened more than once that i have come home after experiencing everyday sexism and looked on youtube and watch your misogyny speech for inspiration and a reminder that my daily troubles are probably not as bad as yours were. my question is also on the sexism issue. you obviously experienced the most appalling and vulgar sexism while you were in the nation's highest office. obviously before you were in politics you have a different career and i just wondered if you had any comments on how sexism manifested in the law firm that you worked in in a sort of more regular workplace and were you surprised by the changes that you observed when he became prime minister? thanks. >> thank you so much and there was a hand here. please. then we will go one more round and to the last question. >> good morning ms. gillard. thanks so much for being here. my question actually builds off of the two that were just asked. but first of all i would like to take this opportunity to personally thank you so much for the grace and humility that you display this prime minister. as a young professional looking to enter the field of foreign policy and international affairs i look to you as a role model being a young female professional looking to enter what is has typically been a male-dominated field. as a young professional i am just curious to know the challenges you experienced early on in your career and how you overcame those challenges. >> they are all very good questions. i will try and do my best to answer them. on the sword of sexism in different contexts, and politics and my early days in the labour party, i think the difference really is the degree of division you encounter as prime minister in politics and how white-hot the spotlight is. the law firm where he worked it could be a pretty rowdy place. in fact that was part of symmetry. it was unashamedly a labor law firm and have sort of a boise out there image but because the division or debates within a partnership in the firm generally weren't very hot, they might have slightly different views about things but at the time i was in the partnership most partnership meetings there was a degree of consensus across the firm. there was a great degree of consensus about what we are trying to do. he didn't quite see it the way that i saw this prime minister and he didn't have the public spotlight on it either. think the difference really is when i became prime minister i deliberately thought i'm going to try to shine a spotlight and i don't need to wander around going did you know i was the first female prime minister? [laughter] i thought any positive reaction to that or any negative reaction to that would be at its greatest immediately after becoming prime minister and it would abate and then i would be judged on how good or bad i was doing the job. what i actually experienced in what is different from the law firm or different from my early days in the labour party is that when it got hard and divided sexism became the convenient instrument of criticism. so instead of saying she did that badly or she is wrong about this it was framed as a sort of sexist attack. that element of politics i think is the one that people sort of latched on to for good or ill and it's that element of politics i try to deal with in the book. in terms of dealing with it which was your question i talk about this in the book and i actually hope, i'm no lifestyle guru. i don't have the eat prail love self-concept. i wouldn't be any good at that but i have tried to talk about resilience and what you can do to work resilience up. i generally think resilience is a muscle that gets stronger if you use it. i have enough tried to talk about strategies that worked for me because actually in the modern age you don't need to be in politics to feel that you are besieged by lot of chris' -- criticism. what a sight to grow up as a teenage girl today with all the normal teenage anxieties about being too or you are not pretty enough or not popular enough in all the things that kids go through and have an instant chorus of criticism on the social media rate i can imagine what that's like but that's today's reality and whether you are prime minister in that course of criticism is the newspapers and tv or whether you are that teenage girl of course the criticism appears to be the whole world but it's actually the 30 or 40 people that you know. i think a strategy for dealing with it that i talk about in the book is drawn a note to yourself that isn't pushed around by the critiques of others and having watched other women in politics i think one of the things that you can easily succumb to is for a period of time the set of golden girl phenomena come isn't she doing well and isn't she doing good, and you get put on a pedestal. it's a long way to bloody fall. pedestal for high and when you fall you go to the other end of the cycle of really making decisions that i was not going to let my sense of self be hostage to either the golden girl phenomenon where the crash off the pedestal, that i was the same person on the days the newspapers were running well for me in the days the newspapers were running badly. i think that's an important kind of coping strategy. on getting ready for politics what forms you, and a wonderful labour party style i got some early lessons in resilience because it took me until my mid-20s to decide that i would like to be in politics and then it took me 10 years and three failed attempts to get there. i wasn't thinking the labour party for this treatment at the time but looking back on it across the full sway of politics i think it probably did help toughen me up a bit and enabled me to get some sense about how you deal with rejection and how you deal with it when it's hard. so i'm not suggesting you go throw yourself into as many negative experiences as possible but in the way things live hands out to most people and it's important to learn from them and strengthen the resilience. >> thank you so much. the next book is eat, pray, vote. that was lovely. maybe one more quick round. there's a hand way in the back there and then the lady over there and then the lady in front of her. i'm sorry, think we are supposed to close down soon. is that correct? >> three minutes ago. >> tom will ask one and i will ask one and you can skip any of them that you want. go ahead sir. >> hyenas gillard its jump from the estonian financial review. thank you for your presentation this morning. you mentioned in some of your earlier comments about the bipartisanship being lost in the australian parliament on issues such as carbon pricing. australia's new prime minister tony abbott has just called for a mature debate on things like tax reform and signal that maybe there should be a debate about an increase in the gst. you think that's something that both sides could engage in maturely including the labour party? >> hang on. mature debate is something we could all use. thank you. back here and in the lady in front of you and i'm sorry about everyone else. julia will be signing books that he books that you can ask or your question. >> hi i am a scientist and i have a question, first thank you for all you set an all you did but i have a question on the press. it has always fascinated me how the press loves or hates people and reports well or bad regardless of their work. my question is, looking back would you change anything in your relationship with the press and is there anything you feel you could have done to come out better there were was just hopeless and in that case why? thank you. >> diplomatically you did not mention the name murdoch so i'm mentioning it. >> my name is lee and thank you for your presentation. you have been through all kinds of issues and i just wonder as the prime minister that competition is very strong that you should have in order to deal with the public interest for the general public. they don't agree with the capitalism and the united states doesn't agree with communism so i just wondered if you can come up with something that can really improve the general public interest and give -- rid of the 1% versus the 99% problems? >> thank you. >> go ahead and then tom. why do we pile our son. >> just a brief question. you came out of the left faction of your state but it was one of the two left factions. yet i look at your politics as they developed and have seen people out of the right of the labour party moving to the left. do those factions within labour party still have any ideological meaning and are their days numbered or will they be with us but primarily for other purposes? >> i love that question. that's a total australian political junkies question. my quick question and it is something i mentioned last time we were talking. we think a lot about mrs. thatcher as obviously a major figure of a woman who -- for a long time. you think there's a big difference between being a woman on the centerleft and a woman on the center-right and is it harder if you are on the centerleft? >> okay, i will do my best. >> no notes. >> how could you possibly prepare for this? i mean just picking up on your questions and actually going to the question that was about the media one of the features of the australian media landscape as we have one of the most concentrated media markets in the world. i come from the city in australia adelaide that gave rupert murdoch to the world. he is from there and when i was growing up it was impossible to buy a newspaper that wasn't unbiased to murdoch. the morning paper, a the afternoon in the local papers were all for mr. murdoch. all of these years later in many parts of australia, they're readily available with all due apologies to our friend from the review they're readily available newspaper for people is only the murdoch papers. so the daily paper is only a murdoch paper. so that does mean that there are questions of quality and questions of bias that intercept with our politics and i deal with some of that in the book and not hankering for a media market that had more diversity and more quality in its presentation to the public. and certainly on carbon price which is just one big debate, some of the things that got published as facts were just so ridiculously rubbish that it distorted the public discussion in a way that is not helpful. it does always amuse me that you get editorials in newspapers of generations of politicians and why aren't they more visionary and where they were prepared to tackle difficult debates while the newspapers are making sure that any big debate gets distorted -- distorted and pulled apart often by spurious reporting. i think it leads back to this question of gender and the centerleft woman versus the center-right woman. the issues agenda for me were playing out in a media market which was overwhelmingly hostile to the government's agenda. cleary, if you were from the center-right and you are pursuing an agenda that got a lot of support in the media market, how would questions of gender play out? you wouldn't have the media that was against your agenda using and reflecting some of this criticism because they wouldn't be in the criticism business. so i think there is a connection here. on that day today political question from australia i'm going to disappoint you and say you need to talk to a day-to-day australian politician about that because they are debates for her are in the current generation and try to be as rigorous as possible is not picking over looming over the shoulder of the current generation. they have my complete support and i hope they do well in the debate you are talking about as well as all others and i'm confident that they will. on you know the issues about the factions neighbor. for long period of time well before it was prime minister and well before he was deputy prime minister and well before i was deputy opposition leader, not as far back as that but a long time back in my political career i decided in the modern age most of this was nonsense. and i get where it came from. a difference of opinion around attitudes towards communism and the soviet union and defense and the whole nine yards but in the modern age without those faultlines it really had sort of cease to have meaning. and i think the real faultlines in labor today you know there is a broad consensus on the economic sphere. the pair of markets, the engagement with markets, the need for markets to be properly regulated, the need for good social services and the need to have a strong productive economy and the free trade economy there's broad consensus on that which takes in what we would call lots of people cover left and lots of people called the right. you have a few on either side in a consensus but is quite broad and quite deep. then there's the social policy continue on that runs from you know, more progressive and true through to the more conservative and on questions like abortion, same-sex marriage, maybe with some reflection on roles and most of those things that pressure gets taken off. so i got elected the same time is a very good friend of mine. it was a wonderful health minister took over her health portfolio. amongst other things she pioneered blind packaging of cigarettes to dissuade young people from smoking than that appears to have some effect. we were always great mates. she was on the right and i was on the left and there were precious few issues that we disagreed on. so just kind of goes to show a lot of this doesn't really make sense. will it endure? it probably will for a period of time to come. it's like a habit you can't quite give up and at its best the fact that they're organizing units within the party does help manage potential conflicts and debates so at its best it plays a role. but i think we are on a journey for democratizing the labour party the first of which was taken directly for the leader after the 23rd election and the election had been shortened as labour leader. i think the more steps we take towards democratization the less the influence of the traditional affections will be because they won't be able to guide the bigger pool of people and i think that's a very healthy development. so i hope that answered your questions. >> i'm sure now mr. murdoch says i come from the city that gave julia gillard to the world. [laughter] i want to say in closing first we are honored and happy to have julia is a colic at brookings and second she will be signing books and i just want to read a passage that actually goes back. there's a wonderful passage right at the beginning of the book where julia introduces it and she says the taste of politics is always bittersweet because the best and worst of things are often inextricably woven together. i've endeavored to convey the complexity of the flavor but for me even in the most difficult of times the ability to do things i so passionately believed would make our nation stronger and fair was always the most intense. thank you so much. [applause]