In an interview in the dying days of her prime ministership, Gillard spoke candidly about Rudd, Abbott and sexism

As prime minister, Julia Gillard remained instinctively private, consistently contained and, for a figure so much in the public eye, oddly enigmatic.

But in an interview with the Melbourne-based magazine the Monthly, conducted during her final period as Labor leader, the former Australian prime minister has reflected candidly on gender politics, and on “that” misogyny speech which generated headlines around the world and became a viral sensation on the internet.

She compares her treatment to the reception faced by the US president, Barack Obama, but says sexism is more easily glossed over than racism. She also reflects on her relationship with Kevin Rudd. She suggests “his people” leaked against her in Labor’s leadership battle, but she insists she did not reciprocate.

Gillard recounts the events of 9 October 2012. The Labor minority government faced a fresh political crisis over Peter Slipper, the former Liberal MP it had installed controversially as speaker of the House of Representatives in order to boost its parliamentary numbers. Slipper had sent lewd text messages, and they’d been made public. The opposition leader, Tony Abbott, faced off across the dispatch box, berating her about Slipper’s sexist messages, and querying her integrity.

“I’ll think of a more polite way of putting it,” Gillard tells author Chloe Hooper, her interviewer for the Monthly piece, “but the only way I can think is, ‘For fuck’s sake, after everything I’ve listened to, I have to listen to this? That [Abbott was] somehow on a bandwagon to crusade about sexism? Oh, God, give me strength!'”

The speech was, of course, delivered. (“I will not be lectured on sexism and misogyny by this man, I will not. Because if he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn't need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror.”)

Gillard resumed her seat, apparently completely unaware of its impact. “I actually swung my chair around to Swanny [the then treasurer, Wayne Swan] and said, ‘Oh, I’ll have to bloody listen to them reply now. I’ll be bored, I’ll get some correspondence brought in.’”

Swan, evidently horrified by the dissonance, counselled otherwise. “And Swanny, who is not the most demonstrative person on the planet, had this really weird look on his face and said, ‘You can’t give the j’accuse speech and then sit down and do your correspondence.’ I was thinking, ‘Well, that must have hit a bit harder than it felt.’”

Across the chamber, her political foes looked suddenly downcast. “They went from a braying sort of swagger: ‘We’ve got this day won and the government’s in diabolical trouble’ to, like, ‘Oh shit, is that the time? What’s on my BlackBerry?'”

Gillard is also invited by Hooper to reflect directly on her gender – whether she was treated differently as prime minister because she was a woman.

Australia’s former prime minister was subjected to some extraordinarily offensive treatment during her time in the top job, and there were standout examples during her final weeks in the Lodge. A Perth talkback radio host asked her whether her partner, Tim Mathieson, a hairdresser, was gay. A menu for a Liberal party fundraiser contained a reference to her “small breasts, big thighs and big red box”.

Gillard reflects that her treatment is comparable in some respects to the treatment of other progressive leaders around the world, but she says gender was a factor in her prime ministership. And sexism is more easily glossed over than racism.

“Is the stuff about Barack Obama because he’s African American? [Stuff like] ‘He’s a Muslim, he wasn’t born in the United States.’” Gillard spells it out. “Or would they have played as hard as that against any successful Democrat? Well, I suspect it’s a bit of both. It’s probably got harder for any successful Democrat, and there’s an extra edge because he’s black. And I think that’s true for me. I think some of the stuff about me, because it is about gender, gets glossed over more easily.

“If I was the first Indigenous prime minister, and Abbott had gone out and stood next to a sign that said, ‘Ditch the black bastard,’ I reckon that would be the end of a political career. And I even think, with all the nutty stuff you see in American politics, if a Republican went and stood next to a sign that said ‘Ditch the black bastard’ about President Obama, that would end a political career. And it’s not less because it’s gender. But it’s been treated as less.”

Gillard tells Hooper there is no control group to tell her reliably whether a male leader in the same circumstances would have had an easier run.

In her final press conference as Labor leader on 26 June, Gillard made the following public reflection about gender: “There's been a lot of analysis about the so-called gender wars. The reaction to being the first female prime minister does not explain everything about my prime ministership, nor does it explain nothing about my prime ministership.

"What I am absolutely confident of is it will be easier for the next woman and the woman after that and the woman after that and I'm proud of that.”

Of the corrosive leadership rivalry with Rudd, Gillard says she remained loyal to him right up until the end in 2010, when she told him he needed to step aside as prime minister.

She suggests something of a double standard in the judgments made of her actions and of Rudd’s. Gillard never seemed to recover politically from the decision to oust Rudd as Labor leader in 2010. Her point is Rudd’s campaign to destabilise her leadership between 2010 and 2013 did not seem to attract the same level of public criticism.

“His people leak and they background and all the rest of it. I never did any of that,” Gillard tells Hooper. She says Canberra journalists have backed her self-assessment. “But you know, all of that has kind of been parked to one side in the public’s mind because of the circumstances of 2010. So that is ironic.”