Former deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop has announced her resignation from Australia’s federal parliament. After 21 years as an elected representative, the once-foreign minister will not recontest her safe West Australian seat of Curtin at the next election.
Words used by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull to describe Bishop in the wake of the announcement include “elegant”. Current prime minister Scott Morrison described her “grace”. The Sydney Morning Herald ran a headline on the resignation that began “Perfectly poised, Julie Bishop quits politics”.
Sigh.
Bishop’s Liberal pedigree was a law degree from the University of Adelaide that she deployed at one time defending corporations against compensation claims from dying asbestos victims. Assuming office in 1998 to represent the western suburbs of Perth, she first became a cabinet member in the Howard government, a status restored when the Liberals were reelected in 2013. She was deputy Liberal leader for 11 years, serving no fewer than four Liberal leaders, two of them prime ministers. Over that time, she built on her first primary vote of 44% in Curtin to a walloping 65.6% and became one of the Liberals’ best fundraisers.
But when the Liberals spilled Turnbull from the top job last year, Bishop contested and crashed out in the first round, attracting only 11 votes out of 85.
And in the wake of this resignation, I just can’t help thinking the reason her pitch to her party was thrown to Earth like a burning rock was because her male colleagues never understood her leadership potential beyond something that could ornament their own.
Tony Abbott once referred to his then-53-year-old deputy as his “loyal girl”. A WhatsApp conversation among her closest allies in advance of her bid didn’t include the woman herself. After the decision to desert her, the suggestion “someone should tell Julie” should surely go down in bubble idiom as the surest death knell in Canberra.
“Elegant”, “grace” and “perfectly poised” certainly aren’t words you use to describe a politician empowered with the responsibility of national budgets, the onset of wars, life and death – they’re the ones you use to flog a Lladro figurine. Type the words into Google and you’ll get sold a chandelier.
For months we’ve been discussing the Liberals’ “woman problem”, the dwindling numbers of women in their parliamentary ranks, their collapsed appeal among female voters – only 38% of whom now express a preference for this party.
When Bishop’s leadership bid failed, she returned to the backbench. Her sudden low profile revealed how much her party had made of her previous visibility to camouflage the extent of their institutional sexism. She claimed feminism was “not particularly useful” to her, decried the existence of a glass ceiling and railed against the quotas that’ve brought her Labor rivals to within a whisker of gender parity. Who gained but her party’s male-dominated establishment when Julie Bishop advised girls to “stop whinging, get on with it”?
It was to the great convenience of the men who ended her ambitions that rather than build internal party numbers, Bishop instead invested in a belief that the decorative red shoe emoji “was a statement of women’s empowerment”. Note that Morrison – who defeated her in the leadership contest – said yesterday: “Her successor will have big shoes to fill and we all know Julie has the best shoes in the parliament.”
The hagiography around the resignation insisting that Julie Bishop was a trailblazer inspires despair for affirming that the success of a trail is relative to the wilderness you find yourself in; yes, no woman in the Liberal party has had the career Bishop has had. The “woman problem” of the Liberals – and their Coalition colleagues, the Nationals – remains intrinsic to the parties’ culture and identity.
Because what kind of trail is Bishop’s for any Liberal or conservative woman to follow; just have a look where it leads.
There are but 21 women federal parliamentarians remaining on the Coalition’s website – of these, several have announced resignations, two have been diminished by scandal, others preselected to unwinnable positions, others facing impossible battles in marginal seats. Some senators may survive – but senators cannot be prime ministers, or treasurers.
I’ve written before about how for rightwing women “complying with that structure of power … is the activity of structurally reinforcing powerlessness.” The Bishop saga demonstrates this sadly, and too well. But what the events in federal parliament this week have shown is just how lonely the political journey is for these women, too.
The Coalition government’s minister for women, Liberal Kelly O’Dwyer, has also resigned from parliament and gave her official valediction a couple of days ago. Her own party’s benches were conspicuously sparse an audience to her speech.
