So that was the great female hope of the Liberal Party that was. Julie Bishop, the only conservative who ever got to a bull’s roar of the Lodge, ( the ambitions of her namesake Bronwyn were nevermore than megalomaniac fantasy) has decided to retire her shoes – which most of the media thought was by far her most important attribute — home to Perth.
Her early career was unimpressive. Under John Howard she served as Minister for the Ageing, for Education and Science, and, inevitably for Women, without notable distinction. When the coalition went into opposition, as shadow Treasurer she was clearly out of her depth.
But she hit her straps as Foreign Minister, which will be her lasting legacy.. Bishop was always a safe pair of hands, and occasionally a formidable one; her measured and powerful response to the downing of MH17 was far more effective than Tony Abbott’s vain bluster about shirt-fronting the Russian president Vladimir Putin. For that alone she should be remembered.
She also inaugurated the new Colombo Plan to bring Asian student to Australia, an initiative which was widely applauded. She avoided the gaffes and blunders which beset so many of her colleagues and although she had her setbacks – particularly the failure to reprieve drug dealers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran from execution in Indonesia – they were never held against her.
But in spite of her long tenure as deputy under three Liberal leaders (four if you count Malcolm Turnbull twice) she must be accounted a failure in that vital role. The tradition in all parties is that the deputy must be the leader’s loyal backstop, the eyes and ears to ward off potential threats from within the party room.
The gold standard was Gough Whitlam’s deputy Lance Barnard, who once had the numbers to topple his leader but declined the opportunity, knowing that Whitlam was the better choice for his party. The nadir was the long-standing rivalry of Andrew Peacock and John Howard, when the Liberal Party successively installed each as leader under the other, a disastrous combination. As a result, Bob Hawke had a dream run as Australia’s longest serving Labor prime minister.
Bishop was never into such deliberate sabotage, but she insisted on being her own woman, keeping her options open. And in that position she was never really suited. She more or less stuck with Turnbull, in his both his incarnations, but she dropped both Brendan Nelson and Tony Abbott when she decided their time was up.
This may have been realpolitik, but from a deputy it was unseemly; she should at least have warned them when trouble was brewing. And in the end, it put a stop to her own long-cherished advancement Her defection from Abbott to Turnbull was never forgiven by the right wing rump, which is the main reason that although she had been deputy leader for eleven years and was by far the most popular candidate for the public, the party unceremoniously spat her out when last year’s leadership ballot was held.
Would she have been a good leader, a good prime minister? We shall never know. But at least she deserved the chance.
Mungo MacCallum is a veteran political journalist and commentator. His books include Run Johnny Run, Poll Dancing, and Punch and Judy.
mungomccallum@staging-johnmenadue.kinsta.cloud
Comments
7 responses to “MUNGO MacCALLUM. Julie Bishop”
I respectfully agree with Alison Broinowski. Her reaction to the MH17 downing and the Skripal poisoning was a disgrace, jumping on the anti-Russian bandwagon before there was the least bit of evidence, and maintaining a disgraceful silence as evidence did come in that Russia was responsible for neither of those events.
Oh Mungo , you are to kind to a front runner and a glamour puss the best description for her is to quote Paul Keating ” all tip and no iceberg ” lots of pretty pictures and images of her jogging around various world capitals but what did she do !!!!
As far as l can see the Libs did not think much of her either just look at the last leadership vote result !!!
I lke the cowboy in age — I have always regarded the Abott swagger as a cross between a drunken gun-slinger and an irritable silver back gorilla, both best avoided. Mungo
Sack rash was always a possibility too Mungo.
A bit too kind, I think. Apart from her earlier role in the asbestos business, I mainly remember her spiteful attacks on Julia Gillard, in and out of parliament.
Mungo’s assertion that Julie Bishop ‘hit her straps’ as foreign minister made me wonder who was manipulating them. Despite endlessly invoking the ‘rules-based international order’, she was unable to produce legal justification for our military presence in Iraq or Syria. She and her colleagues to a man neglected the South Pacific, until Concetta Ferravanti-Wells picked it up as our new cold war frontier. Far from ‘measured and powerful’, her response to the downing of MH17 was a rush to the same judgment our Russo-phobic allies made, without waiting as a lawyer should for the evidence, which is not complete even now. She did the same with the Skripal affair, going along with the allies in expelling Russian diplomats even before evidence was in from the OPCW about what poison was used, let alone by whom. She did indeed revel in consular cases, as Bob Carr did, and like him she picked the ones that would deliver good publicity, even those of convicted drug traffickers: yet both of them ignored Julian Assange, who has been charged with no crime. She promoted women and spoke up for them, it’s true, while reducing the aid budget which could support women and girls in developing countries to its record low level. She did not invent the ‘new Colombo Plan to bring Asian student [sic] to Australia’: the reverse Colombo Plan was devised by her predecessor Alexander Downer, to send Australian students on short visits to Asia.
Jewels Bishop’s great claim to fame is that she was a least-worst Liberal MP (although I’d personally give that back-handed compliment to her replacement Marise Payne).
But I will concede that she did show some mettle in fronting Vlad over MH17 – a bemusing call-out of Abbott’s braggadocio, underling the humbug of our hirsute, he-man shirt-fronter with his ludicrous bow-legged affectation – akin to a cowboy leaving a rodeo port-a-loo*. Who can forget his G20 performance with Vlad, as hard as we may try. His manic grin, quacking cackle and his far-too-close, two-handed grip engaging the non-plussed recipient with his faux chumminess. You could almost read Vlad’s mind – “Ye-bat‘, I want to look away but he may kiss the back of my head. But if I don’t he may go for the mouth”. Jewels, to her credit, showed far more grit with Putin than phoney Abbott could ever muster.
*The cowboy analogy is not mine. I can’t remember where i read it so I can’t attribute it.