Former Liberal MP Julie Bishop has come out with bombshell allegations toward former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, claiming that she felt Abbott did not want any women in his senior ministry at the time when she was the only woman in the cabinet.
In an interview with CEO of the Future Women organisation, Helen McCabe, on the Too Much podcast, Bishop shared how during Abbott’s time as PM from 2013 to 2015, she felt as though she was not wanted in the party’s senior ministry.
But not just her. She says no women were wanted.
Tony Abbott not working well with women? Surely not now, not ever. If only someone like Julia Gillard had said something. Oh wait…
Bishop stated that she is convinced were it not for the fact she was voted in by the rest of the Coalition to serve as Deputy PM, she wouldn’t have been in the cabinet because she’s a woman.
“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,” Bishop told the Too Much podcast.
“We’ll never know.”
Bishop’s claims are hardly the first time Abbott has been called out for misogynistic behaviour. During his stint as leader of the Federal Liberal Party, Abbott views about women were accused of being “incredibly old-fashioned“.
Like that time he said: “What the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing.”
Or that time he got told he was talking to a sex-worker on the phone, so he winked. Ugh.
Perhaps most ironically was when in 2013 Abbott discontinued the “Minister for Women” portfolio in his Parliament, deciding instead to make himself the “Prime Minister for Women”.
Needless to say, the women of Australia were less than thrilled.
Bishop told McCabe that while in meetings with the Liberal cabinet, she had raised the “optics” around the party’s lack of women.
However, due to cabinet solidarity she was not able to share details about a “ferocious discussion” she held with all the other men in the party.
“I certainly had a very intense discussion with the leadership team about, not just the optics of ‘2013 and there’s only one woman out of 20 in cabinet’, but the other women who were perfectly capable of holding a cabinet position, as — if not more — capable than many of those men chosen,” said Bishop.
This feeling of gender inequality that Bishop and other women in the Liberal party felt, was described by the former MP as “challenging”.
“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,” she told the podcast.
After realising she did not want to cause any internal issues in the party (that would soon suffer two leadership spills), Bishop shared that she began limiting her calls for gender representation, to merely defending when female colleagues were criticised unfairly.
At the time of Bishop’s involvement in politics, the Liberals did not have a quota for how many women must be in the party at once. On the other hand, Labor had been instating gender quotas ever since 1994.
In 2015 both the major parties set goals to have a their parties comprise of at least 40% men and 40% women as part of the Australian Government Boards (Gender Balanced Representation) Bill 2015.
Currently only 29% of Federal Liberal Party comprises of women. Labor’s share of female members is 53%.
Julie Bishop served as Australia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs of Australia from 2013 to 2018, and represented the Western Australian seat of Curtin from 1998 to 2019.
