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The 7 parts of the Julia Gillard interview everyone's talking about.

 

 

Julia has spoken.

And the former Prime Minister’s interview tonight with Ray Martin is what everyone will be talking about in the morning.

The Channel Nine interview took over three hours to film, and the former Prime Minister opened up about everything from what she misses most (and least) about the leadership role, to her views on marriage equality, to her walks with Reuben the dog.

But there were seven moments — including Julia’s confession that she cried when trust broke down between herself and Kevin Rudd and her revelations she practiced boxing in The Lodge — that really stayed with us.

Here are the key quotes you need to know about:

1. She says she cried when she realised Kevin Rudd didn’t trust her any more.

“I’d felt like I’d done everything I possibly could to help and support and prop Kevin up and there had already, in the days before, been some signs that now I was being viewed with suspicion. And I just cried because I felt it was just so unfair.”

Julia Gillard interview
Julia Gillard and Ray Martin. (Photo: Channel Nine)
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2. She admits she made lots of mistakes, but ultimately had no choice but to get rid of Rudd.

“I asked Kevin for a ballot. By the time I got back to my office it was filling with supporters and that I’d have to say just had the sense of kind of, you know, almost uprising about it. People wanted change…

“For me, it was all explicable how I’d ended up there.

“(W)e’d done a pretty good job, I think, shielding from public view some of the issues about the functioning of the government in its last few months, some of the issues about the way in which Kevin was approaching the Prime Ministership at that time. And so when I became Prime Minister people would’ve been going, ‘why?'”

3. She took boxing classes at home in The Lodge.

“When we were at The Lodge I had a personal trainer come a number of mornings. I’d be doing yoga or you know, sometimes boxing, things like that. Good practice for a politician, a bit of boxing in the morning!”

Click through a few Julia Gillard moments:

4. She still stands by her arguments against marriage equality.

Ms Gillard’s book, due out this week.

“I’ve got… what may be in the modern age a kind of old-fashioned, feminist view about ‘can we, take the traditional institution of marriage and stretch it? Or do you create some other… way of solemnising relationships and recognising them as of worth and status?’

“And when I was a young feminist I would’ve said overwhelming the gay community was on that track too, but things have changed!

“Look, I accept the course of human history now is that we are going to see same-sex marriage here and in most parts of the developed world.”

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5. She still hasn’t forgiven Sydney radio broadcaster Alan Jones.

“There’s nothing I can say that would be kind about Mr Jones. I mean he intruded on my family’s grief when we lost my father….

“(His apology) was mealy-mouthed in the extreme, only after he’d been put under commercial pressure because so many people were disgusted.

“And you know, I mean what on earth explains anyone getting up in front of an audience and for comedy reflecting on the loss of someone’s parent?

“Everybody can make slips and you know bad remarks. You know, everybody’s made an error in their lives. But there was something so cruel about that, and you know he wasn’t just my father. I’m not the only family member involved. It was a disgraceful thing, unforgiveable.”

6. She thinks all the fuss about Tim being a hairdresser is sexist.

Julia and her partner Tim Matheison.

“To some extent you look at all of that and you say, how much of that is gender working, because would we think it was quite so odd if a male Prime Minister or a male chief executive officer of a big bank or whatever had a wife who worked as a hairdresser?

“Would we think that was… really odd, you know? ‘Why on earth did he marry her? She’s a hairdresser!’

“I just don’t think it would occur to us. I think it was the gender thing a bit.”

7. She thought it was sad that Germaine Greer criticised her “for cheap laughs”.

“I just thought for her, who came into public consciousness for writing The Female Eunuch, for being the feminist of our times, to end up talking like that for cheap laughs about another woman was really a very sad thing.”

Did you watch the interview? What parts of the interview are you talking about?