by Julia Baird
Some sympathetic commentators insisted she was being treated unfairly because of her gender, and that her ambition was regarded as grotesque simply because she was a woman. Alan Ramsey warned against misreading her: ‘While she can look like an insufferable, mannered, middle-class matron who is thicker than two planks, she behaves like a political gorilla. Her appetite for politics is enormous. So are her ambition and her capacity for work. The worst mistake to make with Bronwyn Bishop is to underestimate her.’27 Frank Devine, columnist with the Australian, wrote that her colleagues called her an ‘airhead. Pushy. Uncontrollable. Not a team player. Unarmed in policy matters.’ Pushy was the most substantial accusation, he wrote, but was it also ‘the sort of word applied almost reflexively by male reactionaries — of which the Liberal Party is not devoid — to women who don’t know their place’?28 Many journalists argued that it was not ambition in itself but the expression of it that bothered people, and insisted men exhibiting the same ruthlessness would also be disliked.
Bishop now believes the hostility towards ambitious women springs from a more selfish source:
Let’s face it, if women are able to compete equally, what you do for men is, you double your competition. So the more people you can keep out of the game, the lesser your competition and the better your odds are . . . I think it’s a bit of a worry. In the general population now, women have a huge participation rate: 66 per cent; it’s huge. Kids growing up . . . are looking at two-income relationships; you are looking at sharing workloads; I mean, that’s the way life is. But for — how do I say this? — if you look at our front bench, most of the blokes have stay-at-home wives. Now I am not criticising that situation but it doesn’t reflect what the rest of the country’s like. And it does have an impact on policy.
Bishop often provoked people to joke about her being a man in drag, or having ‘balls under her skirts’. After the Australian Magazine featured her kicking a football in 1989, the photograph was displayed in a ‘very senior’ Liberal’s office, after someone had drawn male genitalia hanging out of her football shorts.29 In October 1993, Australian reporter Kate Legge asked: ‘How much of the attraction [to Bishop] is voyeuristic of the sideshow freak variety? “Roll up. Step inside. See a real tough woman with balls.”’ Bishop clones marched along Oxford Street in the 1994 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, and Bishop drag acts sprouted in Sydney and Melbourne. Long-standing enemy and preselection rival Chris Puplick called her ‘[Liberal Party head-kicker] Wilson Tuckey in drag’. She was also called Menzies in a frock.30
More important than Bishop’s ambition, in media reports, was the way she looked. Her appearance was widely commented on, frequently parodied and occasionally praised, in particular her ‘beehive’ hairstyle — comedian broadcaster Andrew Denton once joked it was ‘not hair but twelve pounds of plastic explosive’ — her tailored clothes, and tooth-flashing smile. She was famous among photographers for sweeping into a room for photo shoots and barking, ‘Teeth, or no teeth?’ Some photographers claim she was overtly sexual. For years they joked about huddling together in corners for safety at parties she held. The rumours about her alleged sexual aggression were legion but unproven — as prevalent as the gossip about any woman taking a seat in parliament. For decades, single women working in Parliament House have found themselves fending off fake rumours about seeking, giving or demanding sexual favours, even if completely chaste.
Another trope often used for female politicians in this era was suggesting they have a ‘makeover’ to make them more palatable: in Bishop’s case, in order to win leadership. On 3 July 1993, the front page of the Telegraph Mirror provided a spectacular example of this. In a paean to her strength in challenging Prime Minister Paul Keating to debate her on television rather than criticise her publicly, the headline screamed: ‘BE A MAN’. Next to it was a large photograph with a doctored image of Bishop. Her face had been pasted onto the head of a woman with thick, wavy hair and long, dangly earrings, whom readers were told was American actor Candice Bergen. It was an injection of Hollywood into Canberra in an image that represented Bishop as a sexual creature who challenged blokes to be real men — just at the moment she was revealed to be a real woman. The caption read: ‘She already outranks Dr. John Hewson as the most popular choice for leader of the Liberal Party — but Bronwyn Bishop is being urged to undergo a complete image overhaul to snatch his crown away . . . We use a computer-enhanced graphic to show just what a winner she could look. Her party will never see her in the same light again.’ Inside, journalist Sue Williams urged: ‘Let down your hair, Bronny B . . . Clip on some sparklers and soften those suits. How much more popular could you be if you loosened up a little and mellowed that stiff, starchy image that sends shivers of fear and loathing up the spines of the incumbent Liberal leadership?’ Williams praised the computer image: ‘A North Shore matron becomes a potential parliamentary pin-up.’
What is odd is that, in 1991, the same reporter had chastised NSW National Party MP Wendy Machin for posing in a leopard-print gym outfit: ‘The day an ambitious, high-profile woman politician tries to win a few more votes by flashing a little flesh and flaunting her fashion sense is a sad one indeed.’31 Two years later, Williams was quoting hairdressers, make-up artists and designers with tips for Bishop.
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The key question about the wax and wane of the Bronwyn Bishop phenomenon, posed by many journalists at the time, is whether her influence was exaggerated by the press. Many journalists and commentators blamed other members of the media for being indulgent and fuelling a silly story. But the polls revealed growing public support for Bishop, particularly among women and young people. According to Newspoll figures, in March 1993 she was considered the best candidate to lead the Liberal Party by 17 per cent of voters, while 36 per cent supported Hewson. Four months later, the Morgan poll figures showed 18 per cent supported Bishop as leader, while only 15 per cent supported John Hewson. The media interest grew even more intense. Her colleagues told journalists this ‘publicity orgy’ exaggerated her influence, and repeated that she had no party room support. However, public support for her continued to grow. By 2 November 1993, she was the preferred party leader by a two–one majority in a Herald Saulwick poll. The next day the Herald’s editorial argued this could be partly due to former ALP pollster Rod Cameron’s theory of the feminisation of Australian politics: ‘Voters and particularly women voters . . . are being turned off by politicians who are confrontational and who engage in vicious name-calling. Despite the tough rhetoric . . . and the barbs about sharks and piranhas, Senator Bishop, on television and in person, presents herself in a reasonable and soft-spoken manner.’
The crucial year for Bishop came in 1994, and she flamed then fell in a matter of months when she moved from the Senate to the lower house. She went from being the preferred leader to the fourth choice. What went wrong? First, the hype was just that: exaggerated excitement based on unrealistic expectations. Second, she failed to translate her alleged electoral appeal into votes during a by-election. And third, the press had had enough of her anyway. While the cameras had continued to click throughout 1993, and her face still rolled off the presses, Bishop failed to impress the Canberra gallery or significant portions of the business community on policy matters. The most common complaint was that she lacked intellectual rigour, or policy depth. She did, however, have the support of some powerful men. She lunched with Kerry Packer and Liberal Party powerbroker Michael Kroger — and, she said, talked ideas.32
As the momentum grew, and senior Liberals puzzled over how to contain her, in January 1994 Bishop was moved from the back bench to the shadow cabinet as spokeswoman for urban and regional strategy. The following Newspoll figures showed 39 per cent of voters preferred Bishop as leader, 21 per cent wanted Hewson, and 13 per cent John Howard.33 The head of the Saulwick polling group, Irving Saulwick, said her profile was ‘extraordinary . . . You could describe it as a “Superwoman” image and I am not sure where it comes from.’34
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nbsp; A move to the House of Representatives — from where leaders are chosen — seemed inevitable for Bishop as each poll was interpreted as nudging her closer to the Lodge. Her chance came when Jim Carlton indicated he was going to resign from his seat, in the electorate of Mackellar in Sydney’s northern beaches. The by-election was to prove her undoing. Although the ALP did not field a candidate, she had one unexpected opponent. Author Bob Ellis stood against her as an independent with the intention of destroying her chances of leadership. He told broadcaster John Laws he had decided to stand ‘in response to arguably the worst woman in the world coming into my turf, threatening with her hair-spray to pollute the water and kill fish for miles around’. He dogged her steps on the campaign trail and insulted her at every opportunity. But Sydney Morning Herald journalist Sally Loane wrote that when Bishop was asked to comment on Ellis’s description of her as ‘fanatical, overdressed, perfume-drenched and ideologically insufferable’, she replied, ‘Is that a policy?’
Ellis believed Bishop was a threat to Australian politics: ‘She was a fascist.’ He claimed his campaign cost $125,000, including his own loss of earnings. Ellis also believed Bishop was talented enough to exploit the Liberal leadership vacuum: ‘She was a good interviewee, she had a good radio voice, she was an inspiring right-wing speaker to vacuous old people in old people’s homes.’ Bishop believes she was considered such a threat by the men on both sides of politics that they conspired to delay her entry to the lower house. She told me:
The date for my by-election was arranged between Keating and Hewson. I was preselected in November; I did not have an election until March. Which meant because of Easter and Anzac Day we didn’t sit in April. I didn’t actually go into the parliament until May, and Jim Carlton flagged his resignation in November. There has never been such a long time for a by-election.35
Hewson bluntly denies any involvement, telling me: ‘This is incorrect. I had nothing to do with her by-election. I always considered Bronwyn a bit of a joke — I never thought of her as a “threat” and indeed publicly welcomed her “competition”.’
But Ellis claims Labor helped him: ‘one of the wiliest things’ he’d done was to call Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson and ask him to delay the election by six months: ‘And he said “done”. I said “no Labor candidate”, and he said “done”. And I wanted six months so I could run a presidential-type campaign and he said “done”. And in those days when Graham Richardson said “done”, it would be.’ Richardson did not believe he could win, but Ellis said he wanted to deliver him a prize: ‘a wounded tigress on the floor of the House of Representatives’.
Bishop won the seat, but lost kudos when there was a swing against her — especially since there had been a swing towards Labor’s Carmen Lawrence in a by-election in Western Australia. Newspapers reported the swing was 4.36 per cent, which cast doubt on the wisdom that Bishop had tremendous, untapped, and enduring vote-pulling power. Analysis of by-elections held since 1949 showed it was the only time an opposition had received a swing against a candidate in an opposition-held federal city seat. The front page of the Sunday Telegraph screamed: ‘SHOCK RESULT FOR BRONWYN’.
Bishop insisted that the media simply swallowed the spin coming from her political opponents. The primary vote had dropped by about 5 per cent, but there were seven candidates running against her. According to the Australian Electoral Commission, the two-party preferred vote went from 61.16 per cent in the 1993 election for Jim Carlton to 60.27 per cent in the 1994 by-election. But on the same day in Warringah, Liberal Tony Abbott had won his by-election with a swing of 5.1 per cent on the two-party preferred vote, and a 1.2 per cent swing against him in the primary. The nameless ‘senior Liberals’ who continued to speak off the record to reporters did not hide their glee: the damage to Bishop’s status was ‘the biggest burst since the South Sea bubble’.36
The front page of the Sydney Morning Herald on the Monday after the election was the subject of debate for several days afterwards. While the headline — ‘BISHOP IN, BUT LIB VOTE FALLS’ — and article were sober, the photograph, by Peter Rae, depicted Bishop standing at the bottom of a penis-shaped arch. Rae said he was not conscious of the way it could be interpreted at the time of shooting it at Sydney’s InterContinental Hotel, and that he was just aiming to have a nicely framed photograph. He was, however, ‘astounded’ by the number of calls he received congratulating him for depicting her as a ‘dickhead’. A letter was published the next day thanking the Herald for the ‘wonderful’ and ‘very apt’ image, with the question: ‘Did yesterday’s front-page photo have anything to do with the Bishopric or Bobbitt affair?’
This result marked the beginning of a downward spiral for Bishop. When Hewson, forced by the polls, finally called a leadership spill in May 1994, Bishop told journalists she would support Downer, who successfully challenged Hewson and became the next leader. In 2004, she clearly had some regrets. When I asked why she did not run, the exchange went like this:
BB: The timing at that point in time was — I decided it would be better to back Downer.
JB: You didn’t have the numbers?
BB: No, I didn’t. But it would have been interesting if I had [run] in hindsight.
JB: Do you wish you had run now?
BB: I would just say it would have been interesting . . . I had a conversation with [then Liberal Party president] Tony Staley down at a dinner in Melbourne not long after that and he said to me, if you’d had a 5 per cent swing to you instead of against you, you would be leader today. The truth of the matter was I didn’t have a 5 per cent swing against me, but that’s what certain people put forward.37
Once Bishop was in the lower house, and appointed to ministry positions, she made a series of gaffes that compounded the view that she had been hyped, and promoted, beyond her ability. In May 1994, for example, after she became opposition spokeswoman for health, in a very short time she was rebuked by then leader Downer when she questioned the amount spent on AIDS research and argued tobacco advertising should not be banned. She then attacked Carmen Lawrence, the health minister at the time, asking her if she supported the decriminalisation of marijuana seeing as she had admitted to smoking it. Lawrence shot back that Downer had made a similar admission.
At the end of June 1994, Bishop was forced to sack a staff member after it was revealed that Rodney Adler’s FAI Insurance had paid his wages before and after Bishop’s appointment to the shadow health portfolio. She later rehired him. In mid-July, further trouble followed a story about bad behaviour on an Ansett flight, where it was alleged Bishop had demanded to use her mobile phone, and entered the cockpit so she could tell the pilot to land instead of circling while waiting for bad weather to clear. She dismissed the allegations as ‘rubbish’ and ‘complete nonsense’, saying, ‘I’ve never tried to get into a cockpit in my life.’
By November, in a Liberal leadership poll, Bishop had only 13 per cent support, compared with 20 for Howard, 18 for Downer and 14 for former NSW premier Nick Greiner. Hewson was at 9 per cent.
Bishop went on to be minister for defence industry, science and personnel from March 1996 to October 1998, then minister for aged care until October 2001. The aged care portfolio effectively destroyed her chances of promotion, as a series of scandals about nursing homes unravelled daily. The most damaging and memorable story was the discovery that 57 residents in a Melbourne nursing home had been given baths with kerosene to prevent a scabies outbreak. Images of systemic abuse and neglect flashed in the media for months: maggots in wounds, infected bedsores, residents locked in cupboards, dismal standards of care. Referred to as the ‘minister for caged hair’, Bishop spent almost $350,000 monitoring the media coverage of the debacle. The Courier-Mail slammed her performance as ‘abysmal’, the Age argued ‘serious questions’ remained about her refusal to take responsibility, and the Australian insisted we deserved better.
After the 2001 election, Bishop was dumped from the ministry. There was a notable silence from women
’s groups. Michelle Grattan wrote in 2001 that, despite the media hype, her chances of leading the Liberal Party had been, ‘realistically, zilch. When the “Bishop bubble” burst,’ she wrote, ‘it was hard to understand how anyone had taken it seriously.’
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Bronwyn Bishop resigned in 2015 following revelations she had chartered helicopter flights from Melbourne to Geelong in order to attend a Liberal Party fundraiser and claimed them as travel expenses. Her parliamentary career had lasted three decades, encompassed a range of ministry positions — with varying degrees of success — as well as a stint as Speaker. But at the time I was writing this book, in 2004, she had won some respect for her sheer tenacity. The Daily Telegraph’s political editor, Malcolm Farr, told me:
I always thought it was a scream that people used to think Bronwyn could be the first [woman] prime minister, because she’s quite thick. But I have got to tell you, her determination and her hard work and her ability to get up there and make things happen are absolutely impressive; she’s quite a remarkable woman. A lot of people hate her — not just dislike her, hate her — and this doesn’t bother her a bit, and when she lost her portfolio, she didn’t sit home and whimper and weep, she got up and did things and I admire her; I think she’s terrific in that area. I’d never vote for her but I think she sets an example for MPs, male and female . . . There’s nothing like her. She’s this tiny creature who enjoys life to the full. You go to a party and there she is drinking, joking, dancing, carrying on. She’s a very extroverted woman. She was a combination of all these things — she was a woman who thought she could have a good time and do the hard work and she did.