With all the antics in London, the right to privacy of public figures has been much in the news recently. The press have long argued that the public has a right to know about the private lives of elected politicians (the spurious “in the public interest” argument). In her speech today to the National Press Club, the Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, seemed to be struggling with a different element of the private/public debate.
On the face of it, this was a tough speech about the need for carbon pricing to save Australia and the planet. But on another level, there was search going on; the really interesting stuff was not about carbon pricing but self-awareness. Julia Gillard was looking for who she really was, or maybe who she was becoming.
The self awareness in the speech was right there at the front:
“In our lifetimes, think of how information technology has transformed itself and transformed our lives. I wrote my first university essays on a manual typewriter.
I remember the first mobile phone I saw, as big as a brick, and I wondered why anyone would want such a thing. Now I visit classrooms where children use a phone to take a photo of me and share it with the world via the internet before I’m in the car and on the way back to the office.”
Here, she was observing herself from outside the car, looking in at herself being Prime Minister.
And this sense of observation grew later in the speech.
“I’ve been Prime Minister for a year now and as well as governing and reforming, it has been a period of learning. I’m learning more about Australians, meeting people and getting to know them.”
Caught in the echo of these words, the sense that she was also learning about herself. She was wondering about the self that is Prime Minister: the person who has to make the tough decisions, who has to walk the “hard road of reform”.
Because she can remember a different Julia Gillard.
“It doesn’t come easy to me to expose my feelings as I make these decisions. I was the shy girl who studied and worked hard, and it took time and effort but I got from Unley High to the law and as far as here, where I am today.”
In the speech there was an undertow that she wanted to be still the girl from Unley High inside even though:
“people’s image of me is one of steely determination.”
She said:
“I don’t forget Unley High, where I saw kids who sat at the back of the room and did “make work” and were left behind.”
One suspects she could probably name those kids who sat at the back of the room, even though they probably didn’t get on with her too well.
The thing here is that Julia Gillard is under pressure with this legislation. It’s a big, tough ask for the country and some people are saying “this country is not up to it.”
The pressure came through in her descriptions of the road to reform – as having “many obstacles, pot holes to get around and hard hills to climb”
But the toughest dimension of it all is that it is asking her to assess herself. Is she the shy girl from Unley High or the PM with steely determination? Maybe she is walking ever further away from that little girl in Unley High with every step she takes as PM. And that is the private life she really cares about, her own sense of herself. Which is changing and which no journalist can hack.
