Our next PM?????

www.adelaidenow.com.au/lifestyle/sa-lifestyle/julie-bishop-shes-got-the-look/story-fnizi7vf-1227201991320

GROWING up among the cherry orchards at Basket Range, Julie Bishop used to strive, for parental attention. As the third of four children, she developed a certain amount of steel – there was an incident with an axe – and perfected the art of the withering stare.

“I don’t know where the stare came from,” muses Bishop.
“If my sister is suggesting I have always had the ability to give a disdainful stare then she’s probably right.”

Back to the axe: Relations between the three sisters didn’t typically degenerate into violence but there was a particular day when the middle sister, Patricia, was hogging the swing. Every time Julie asked for a turn, Patricia kicked higher. Infuriated, the five-year-old Julie stormed off to the woodshed.
“I got the axe so I could cut the swing down,” laughs Bishop. “Fortunately my father retrieved (it) before I got too far.”

Although Bishop, 58, has lived in WA for 30 years, they are all still close. Over Christmas the clan gathered at the family enclave in Walkerville where MaryLou and Patricia live opposite each other and their widowed father, Douglas, who is in his nineties, next door. A nephew lives further along the same pretty, quiet street.
“MaryLou is very protective; she’s the older sister, a very nurturing type. We gather at her place at Christmas because she happens to be a very good cook as well,” says Bishop. “We all had a very good childhood and they are my two best female friends, we’re very close.”

We catch up in the Commonwealth offices in Adelaide and Bishop is typically on a very tight turnaround. Christmas is three days away but she is not slowing down. She has come from a breakfast supporting the cranio-facial unit started by surgeon David David, and is smartly turned out in a neutral skirt and floral cardigan. And, of course, her pearls. She is relaxing but not relaxed, although she is happy to talk about her family connections to Adelaide where the cherries at Bishop’s Orchards are in season. It is still a family business and Bishop co-owns with her brother Douglas The Waterfalls, a charming stone cottage on the property with stunning views that is let out as a B & B. She posed for pictures later with the cherries but, again, was on a schedule.

Her appetite for work is not in question, nor is her ability to control a conversation. Skirt too close to topics she doesn’t like and she shuts you down with a few well-chosen words, and a look.

There are few politicians more powerful than Julie Bishop and none is better groomed. After 14- hour days and 16 months of almost non-stop travelling, she has never been photographed looking tired, dishevelled, or with a hair out of place. This is an important part of her political armoury, but more of that later.
Since the election of the Abbott Government in September 2013, Australia has witnessed the rise and rise of an ambitious and politically astute female politician. Whispers of admiration started with her deft handling of the Indonesian spy scandal and by midyear, during the MH17 disaster, they became a matter of public comment. By the end of the year, as Abbott’s stocks flagged, the question was being asked whether she might be the next Prime Minister.

This polished performer has been a long time in the making. Bishop has had two careers and the first laid the foundations for the second. She sailed through St Peter’s Girls’ School behind her two sisters MaryLou, who was recently elected to the Walkerville Council, and Patricia, a doctor. She was a few years behind Amanda Vanstone, who was in MaryLou’s year, and ahead of Kevin Rudd’s wife Therese Rein. In her final year she was head prefect.

Patricia, who delivered an adapted version of a speech Bishop intended to give at St Peter’s Girls’ but couldn’t when she was delayed in Canberra, spoke of their very distinct personalities.
“I talked about MaryLou being the tall, beautiful one that all the boys adored,” says Patricia, who is married to Ed Michell from the wool-broking family. “I was the little one with glasses and Julie was the one with the sparkly blue eyes and personality. She hasn’t really changed.”

Bishop left Adelaide for Perth to marry. After graduating from the University of Adelaide in 1978 she became a lawyer and at 26 was a partner doing commercial litigation with the firm Mangan, Ey and Bishop. In the early 1980s a property developer, Neil Gillon, swept her off her feet; he convinced her to move to Perth by sending flowers once a week until she accepted. She was married at St John’s Church at Norton Summit just behind the hotel which has been the scene of many family occasions.

Five years later the marriage was over. Gillon had moved to Rome where he managed Alan Bond’s properties and his wife wasn’t prepared to commute. Meanwhile she had made a life for herself in Perth. MaryLou, who trained as a nurse and sells high-end medical equipment to hospitals and medical practices, was already there and after Bishop joined the firm that became Clayton Utz, they persuaded their younger brother Douglas, a lawyer, to join them.
“I carved out a career in Perth. I joined the firm and was made a partner within 18 months of joining and had a very successful and fulfilling career,” Bishop says. “After 15 years with the firm I then became the local member for Curtin so my career and my political life has been centred in Perth.”

As a legal partner she developed a taste for strategic thinking, and for travel. She liked acting for international clients and enjoyed setting up relationships with other law firms in the Asia Pacific. Her best subject at law school was international law and a four-month sabbatical studying advanced management at Harvard convinced her to transition into politics with an eye to a future post in Foreign Affairs.

She had already, famously, tried out for diplomatic post when she was a lawyer in Adelaide in the late 1970s. “I had an interview with Alexander Downer who was then a young DFAT officer in the South Australian office,” she laughs. “I went to see him about going into Foreign Affairs so it’s been a long-held passion. I secretly wanted Downer’s job one day.”
Bishop entered the political main stage as Minister for Ageing in the Howard Government where she did well by virtue of keeping the portfolio out of the news in the wake of the kerosene baths scandal. But in opposition Bishop faced a new experience for the golden girl who thrived on a mixture of hard work, a good memory and personal charm; it was failure, and it still clearly riles her.

She was already deputy leader of the party (and still is) but one morning in 2008 she unexpectedly became the Liberal shadow treasurer after a leadership spill. Her faltering recollection of the cash rate only hours after getting the job got her off to a bad start from which she never recovered.
“I wasn’t comfortable with any of it; the leadership spill, the change of portfolio. It was a very difficult time,” she says. “It was stressful for the whole Liberal Party.”
She is exasperated, still, because she says she hesitated but didn’t confuse the cash rate at all. “I was suddenly, on a Monday morning, shadow treasurer; no notice, no preparation, no time to do anything and I was doing interview after interview and somebody said ‘what’s the cash rate?’ I said ‘seven something?’ I was meant to be more precise. I did give the answer, but I hesitated. Apparently that was a crime,” she says.

Four months later, after a series of scrapes including an accusation that she borrowed too heavily in a speech to parliament from a piece in the Wall Street Journal, she quit.
Why did she, if she had done nothing wrong? “Because it was a distraction for the Party,” she says.
Was it a setback? “It wasn’t the right fit and I moved to something that was the right fit,” she says and shuts down further discussion with a weapons-grade stare.

The Bishop look has become part of her political persona and it has an interesting history. It began when she was doing one of her first television interviews in a studio link from Perth and she was told to stare at a small dot on the camera and talk to it. She did so with no thought to the people at home whose television screens were blistering under the intensity of her gaze.
Patricia says cartoonist Bill Leak was the first to pick up on it and he claims to have checked the spoons in the kitchen because he thought it was “a Uri Geller thing”.
“They ridiculed those startling blue eyes,” says Patricia. “Those eyes have always been sparkly and intense. Yes, she wears contact lenses, you have to have a bit of colour in them, they’re slightly tinted blue but they’re not tinted aqua. That’s her colour.”

After she employed the stare with good effect against a heckler on ABC TV’s Q&A, the Chaser’s Yes We Canberra invited her on. In good spirit she felled host Chas Licciardello in a stare-off, then outstared a garden gnome whose smashed body the Chaser team returned to her later, filled with flowers.
It’s all good fun but the stare is outward evidence of what is going on within. Bishop’s toughness explains much of her success in managing Australia’s sometimes prickly relationships with the rest of the world. But she also understands the importance of personal charm. There is a family story about young Bishop at primary school who got a teacher off-side. A report came home saying Bishop was basically a smart alec and the rudest child in class.

“Mother said to Julie, ‘by the end of the year, I want you to get Miss Brown to like you. And she bribed her with two shillings or whatever to get a good report,” says Patricia. “Well, by the end of the year, Julie had Miss Brown eating out of her hand.”
We use that analogy all the time, says MaryLou, laughing. “We say to Julie, ‘turn on the charm!’

Her first foreign affairs challenge was to smooth the waters with Indonesia after it was revealed Australia had eaves-dropped on President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and his wife.

The outcome was a memorandum of understanding with Indonesia that doesn’t prohibit spying but which enhances security and intelligence co-operation.
A bigger test came midyear when news that Flight MH17 had been shot down over the Ukraine came through at 3am on the morning of July 18. She was in Adelaide staying with MaryLou after a party the night before to celebrate her birthday.
She called the relevant foreign ministers and, after a national security meeting, left for New York to seek UN Security Council backing in case Australia had to force its way into the Ukraine to retrieve bodies.

“It became apparent to us that nothing would happen because of the Russian Ukraine conflict and it became apparent to us Australian bodies would be left in the fields,” Bishop says.
The Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, was aggressive; he was the first to say that Russia was involved and promised to shirt-front President Vladimir Putin. Bishop had words with Putin too, but she prefers honey to vinegar.

Putin is hard to get to but she chased him down at the Asia-Europe (ASEM) meeting in Milan in October. Putin typically arrives just on time and leaves early to avoid impromptu confrontations. When there was a break during the day, she made a beeline for him, only to realise at the last minute he was already locked in a conversation. Not wishing to be rude, she saw the British PM, David Cameron, out of the corner of her eye and diverted to him. Her sisters say Cameron dined out on it.

“He tells the story very amusingly about how he saw Julie marching up to him and he was thinking ‘what have I done!’ only she was marching to Putin next door,” says Patricia. “She chatted very nicely with Cameron for a while until she noticed Putin was free so then she grabbed Putin.”
Bishop insists relations with Putin are polite; they have to be. “It’s cordial. He is the president of a significant country so of course it’s cordial,” she says. “But we make our point, and the purpose of my discussion with Putin was about getting access to the crash site of MH17.”

Australia along with teams from the Netherlands and Malaysia had gained access to the site initially but were prevented from sending expert teams back. A week after Bishop spoke with Putin, they were allowed to return and the 38 Australian citizens and residents were identified. All without a shirt-front.
“I am the Minister for Foreign Affairs and I have more of a diplomatic buttonhole than a shirt-front,” she says. “It’s just a different style.”

Style is Julie Bishop’s secret weapon. Her political career, and her international success as a foreign minister, is underpinned by her attractive appearance and investment dressing. While female politicians before her have disdained interest in fashion lest it make them seem frivolous, Bishop has embraced it. Clothes – seamless, classic, stylish and expensive – are part of the personal artistry she brought first to her career in the law, and now to politics.

It is not something Bishop would dwell on but not far below the accomplished foreign minister who is across her brief and mixes easily with world leaders is a woman who loves fashion, and uses it as part of her job. Her sister Patricia quotes Coco Chanel who once said “dress shabbily and they remember the dress; dress impeccably, and they remember you”.
“It’s a deliberate thing,” says MaryLou.
“If she looked like a mouse, no one would remember her,” says Patricia.

Bishop is a great champion of Australian jewellery. When she worked at Clayton Utz, she was on a number of industry boards including an Australian Pearling Industry board that brought her up close to the lustrous, large, white South Sea pearls she still favours. It also introduced her to Australia’s pearling dynasties, the Paspaley and Kailis families.

“When she left and went into politics Nick Paspaley said to the Kailises, ‘she must always be seen wearing pearls’,” says MaryLou who had at her neck a pearl the size of a pigeon’s egg. “We buy all our pearls from Kailis or Paspaley.”

Her clothing isn’t Australian; she buys Armani whose Italian tailoring and fitted suits complement her petite size. A glamorous photo in Who magazine late last year was thought by some to be hypocritical given she criticised the former Prime Minister Julia Gillard for dressing up “in borrowed clothing and make-up to grace the cover of magazines”. Bishop refutes the charge absolutely. It was these shoes, she says, raising a pair of nude stiletto pumps for inspection, and it was her dress, a gorgeous, slim-fitted Armani piece with three-quarter sleeves and a pleated skirt. The Who photo was taken en route to the PM’s Christmas drinks at Kirribilli and this was what she wore.

“I have said I’m not going to spend hours dressing up in other people’s clothes,” she says. “I wear what I wear and if people want to take a photograph of me in it, and put it in Harper’s Bazaar or Who or wherever, that’s fine but it’s me being me. This is how I dress. This is what I look like.”

In public, her wardrobe is effortless, as it should be, but it isn’t easy co-ordinating clothing that might have to traverse the tropics, European winter, cocktail parties and business meetings. Sometimes she needs a little help. Last April, Bishop was in Adelaide and had to fly to Canberra to welcome Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge at the start of their Australian tour. She would not have time to get to her apartment to change so she borrowed a fitted orange Armani coat from Patricia.

“I said you can have this, so I lent it to her and the next minute I see her on TV talking to someone in Europe wearing my orange coat,” Patricia says. “I thought ‘damn, that looks good on her!’.”

Bishop is good friends with the Sydney manager of Armani, who is also from Perth, and she helps her buy outfits that co-ordinate. Overseas, Bishop asks for help if she is stuck. When the first bodies from the Ukraine were repatriated to the Netherlands, Bishop was invited to the tarmac to stand behind the Dutch royal family. “She risked being inappropriately dressed,” says MaryLou. “She had packed for three days but not for receiving the first bodies who came back.”

Bishop enlisted local help and was taken to a shop where she bought a sombre but stylish outfit, then popped next door for a vintage Italian straw hat.

Bishop’s leadership during the MH17 disaster and the subsequent stand-off with Russia over access to the Ukraine was acknowledged by the Netherlands whose foreign minister, Frans Timmermans, presented her with a rare award, a Dutch foreign ministry order of merit during a NATO summit in Wales. It has been awarded only 10 times before.
“Julie Bishop did a marvellous job this summer,” Timmermans said as he pinned on the award. “She helped the Netherlands, she helped Europe, she helped me personally to tackle one of the most difficult situations the Netherlands has ever had to face.”

Her other secret is personal fitness; it tides her over long days and lets her get by with a minimum of sleep, sometimes four or five hours a night. While the former foreign minister, Bob Carr, complained in his autobiography about the poor food, the manic jet lag and the general drudgery of travel, Bishop hits the ground running.
“You don’t have the luxury of jet lag in this position. I don’t have rest days. As soon as we arrive somewhere, we’re into it,” she says.
Once on the ground, she adopts her new time zone. She might have gone to bed at 2am after a red-eye flight but will be up at 6am to start the day with a run. There are pictures of her rugged up running through the morning chill in Times Square, in Beijing, even Myanmar.

“Sometimes it’s not logistically possible but I try to get a morning run in,” she says. “It also gives me the opportunity to go running with some of the staff at the embassy, some of the federal police. You always pick up the vibe of a place if you’re out there in the morning.”

Bishop’s two biggest challenges this year will be restoring Australia’s international reputation as a nation committed to preventing climate change; and working with Tony Abbott’s office. Last year, she took US President Barack Obama to task over his remark that he wanted to bring his daughters, and their sons and daughters, to visit the Great Barrier Reef in 50 years. Bishop said publicly she had “an issue” with his comments and that Australia was employing world’s best practice to preserve the reef, despite World Heritage Committee concern that it was in danger.

She says her relationship with Obama is good. “I get on very well (with Obama),” she says. “I met with him at a meeting at the G20 summit and had a very congenial discussion with him.”

She is on such friendly terms with the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, that she last year hitched a ride on Air Force 2 to Australia when she was having trouble getting a flight.

This year, Australia has to negotiate its way through to the December UN Climate Change Conference in Paris where a new global deal on climate change will be made. Bishop will be a key player, as will Trade Minister, Andrew Robb, reportedly a climate change denier.

Robb’s presence at climate change talks in Peru – sent, it was said, by the PM’s office – is the source of Bishop’s other challenge in 2015; proving everyone wrong about her relations with Peta Credlin, the PM’s chief of staff. Bishop is adamant there isn’t a problem and said she had to Google “Siamese fighting fish” after an anonymous frontbencher said the two women were like “two Siamese fighting fish stuck in the same tank”.

“It couldn’t be further from the truth,” she says. “I get along very well with Peta Credlin. We’ve worked together on a number of projects and we have a very good personal and professional relationship.”

Entrenched in the job she loves and with so much public support, it makes little sense to think she might trade it for a Canberra-centric life as Prime Minister. She works hard, but not so hard that she hasn’t had time to start seeing a dashing property investor, David Panton. Bishop won’t comment on her private life but has been photographed with him at the races, and was recently seen at lunch in Sydney.

Her sisters are adamant she is enjoying being on the world stage way too much to want to trade it in for the home-based rigours of the PM’s job.
“We don’t want it, she doesn’t want it,” says Patricia. “She is on top of the world and she loves it where she is. If she takes that one step further she would be crucified, everyone would turn against her.”