In October last year, Bronwyn Bishop became Australia’s longest-serving female politician of all time. But the path has not always been easy for the woman once touted as a future prime minister. Despite her ambition and fortitude, Bishop’s three-decade long political career has been dogged by political miscalculations and scandals.
Born in Sydney in 1942, Bishop joined the Liberal party at the age of 17, before rising through the ranks to become the first female leader of the New South Wales branch in 1985.
Several tilts at entering politics finally paid off in 1987, when Bishop won a NSW Senate seat, making her the first elected woman senator in that state.
She quickly gained a reputation for her forthright and sometimes confrontational style of cross-examination in Senate estimate committees and fiery chamber performances.
“I’m reminded in fact of the exchange I heard recently in parliament house when someone said, ‘Why do so many people take an instant dislike to Senator Bishop?’ to which the answer was, ‘It saves time,’ ” the then foreign minister, Gareth Evans, quipped during a debate in 1992.
Bishop was elevated to the shadow ministry in 1989, taking on the portfolios of public administration, federal affairs and local government. She was dumped the following year by the then opposition leader, John Howard.
In 1990, the NSW Liberal party accused Bishop of contravening party fundraising guidelines by accepting pledges for the party to bolster her chances of re-election.
“No one in modern political history could have been more aware of the fundraising guidelines than Bronwyn because it was unfortunately during her reign as president that the issue came to such a head,” a former Liberal party director, Peter Kidman, told Bishop’s biographer David Leser in 1994.
Leser wrote in Guardian Australia last month that Bishop “didn’t appreciate the kind of scrutiny she liked to apply to others”.
Her dogged pursuit of the then tax commissioner, Trevor Boucher, during a Senate committee, including vague aspersions on his new role as ambassador to the OECD, led to his resignation in 1993. Boucher had been leading an audit into the tax habits of Australia’s largest corporations, a campaign that raised the ire of the Business Council of Australia and the Liberal party alike.
Bishop contested, and won, a byelection in the northern Sydney seat of Mackellar in 1994.
Moving to the lower house marked her out as a potential leader of the Liberal party, and her ambition was clear. But her campaign against John Hewson stalled, and she bowed out of the leadership contest due to lack of support.
After Alexander Downer took the reins, Bishop was made opposition health spokeswoman. On her first day in the role, she managed to put the Australian Medical Association (AMA) offside by announcing her support for tobacco advertising. Brendan Nelson, who was at the time the head of the AMA, but would eventually become Bishop’s boss as opposition leader in 2007, said Bishop “had a lot to learn about health”. She held the portfolio for only eight months.
Just months after entering the House of Representatives, it emerged that Bishop had been employing a researcher whose wages were paid for by FAI Insurance, owned by Rodney Adler. She had listed the gift as an “additional staff facility” in her register of interests, before public outcry led to her sacking the staff member.
Despite the scandal that ensued, Bishop was named a minister in the outer ministry after Howard won the 1996 election, taking on the defence industry, science and personnel portfolio.
In 1999 Bishop joined the future prime minister Tony Abbott – who famously described himself as the ideological love child of Bishop and Howard – in leading the charge against Australia becoming a republic. The avowed monarchists were successful during that year’s referendum.
Bishop’s name was again in the headlines in 2000, when, as aged care minister, it emerged that a Melbourne nursing home was using a weak kerosene solution to treat patients with scabies.
Some patients had suffered second-degree burns from Riverside nursing home’s kerosene baths. One 84-year-old patient died shortly after receiving the treatment.
The government had refused to withdraw the home’s licence, despite it breaching several standards of care in the past.
Amid mounting criticism, Howard backed Bishop.
“I am totally supportive of the way Mrs Bishop has handled it,” Howard told ABC’s Lateline in March. “When she heard of the problem with the Riverside home, she acted quickly and I think has applied herself with a great deal of compassion and diligence since, and she has my total support.”
That support eventually waned, and Bishop was dropped from the ministry after the 2001 federal election.
Bishop had a failed tilt at being Speaker of the House in 2004, but lost to David Hawker.
In 2005, Bishop joined Sophie Mirabella, then known by her maiden name of Panopoulous, in calling for the Islamic headscarf to be banned from public schools. Howard shot down the suggestion. She made a similarly contentious decision in 2014 as Speaker, ordering women with facial coverings to be seated behind glass in the public gallery of parliament house for security reasons. That decision was overturned, too.
Abbott named his mentor as Speaker shortly winning office in 2013, taking the unusual step of nominating her for the position himself.
“I accept that in the end it is the Liberal party room that determines our candidate for the speakership, but my strong support and nomination will be for Bronwyn,” he said.
In putting herself forward for the role, Bishop said she thought parliament needed “dignity returned to it” after the scandals surrounding Peter Slipper.
“That doesn’t mean it won’t be a robust place but it does mean that it will have a dignity that has been lacking in the last little while,” she said.
Bishop has been embroiled in ongoing expenses scandals since taking on the role.
Those came to a head in July 2015 when she was forced to pay back more than $5,000 for chartering a helicopter to take her from Melbourne to Geelong for a Liberal party fundraiser.
Abbott put Bishop on “probation” as a result of the incident.
But the news of questionable uses of public money kept on coming. Bishop defended herself after it emerged she used taxpayer dollars to attend the weddings of two colleagues, Mirabella in June 2006, and Teresa Gambaro in 2007.
She said the use of the money was “within the guidelines”, insisting she had meetings with unnamed sources connected with her role as chair of the standing committee on families and human services.
Guardian Australia revealed 15 more instances in which Bishop claimed flights for committee business during periods in which the committee had no listed public inquiries.
Bishop apologised in late July for chartering the helicopter and admitted that using public money to attend weddings was “not a good look”. She refused to resign.
More expenses claims emerged at the weekend, and on Sunday Abbott announced that Bishop had tendered her resignation to the governor general, Peter Cosgrove.
Abbott said “today is not the day” to look back at Bishop’s long history of public service, saying she had “certainly done the right thing” by resigning.
