Do we like Julia Gillard?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Mostly on the right side on women, climate and LGBTQ+ rights, with a slow turn on marriage equality, a royal commission that rejected her denial, and a retracted memoir claim.
Her defining moment is the 2012 parliamentary speech that travelled the world. Looking back in 2022, she described a cool head: “I felt analytical. I knew precisely what I wanted to say.” She also says sexist behaviour is less tolerated now than it was during her time as PM.
The big stain is the AWU affair. In 1992 she gave legal advice to help incorporate a fund set up by a union official, and she told the 2014 royal commission she had no further involvement. She denied her builder's evidence that she'd said that official was paying for her renovations. Commissioner Dyson Heydon found no wrongdoing in her legal work, only a “lapse of professional judgement”, but rejected her denial about the renovations.
Then there's the memoir slip. Her 2014 book contained a false allegation about Senator Nick Xenophon. He threatened legal action, the publisher retracted it, and she ran newspaper apologies: “I retract the allegation, accept that the allegation was false”. Reports put the ad bill at more than $30,000, so owning up cost her something.
On LGBTQ+ rights she's a mixed history with a good ending. She generally voted against same-sex marriage (38% agreement), though almost always voted to extend benefits to same-sex couples (92%). In 2015 she said she'd vote yes if given the chance again and warned a plebiscite had “long-lived dangers”. In 2023, asked the 'what is a woman' question, she called for “love, inclusion and respect”.
On people and planet the record leans her way. She consistently voted for a carbon price (99%) and against unconventional gas mining, and at COP28 as Wellcome chair she said “phasing out fossil fuels is a public health intervention.” Asylum is rougher: she voted against temporary protection visas and boat turn-backs, but a mixture on regional processing (41%). AAP FactCheck rated a viral anti-immigrant speech pinned on her as false.
The recent stoush is about the 2013 changes to the Sex Discrimination Act. At Hay in May 2026 a protester held a banner calling her a destroyer of women's rights, and Gillard reportedly did not respond directly. A Family First Party press release, so a partisan source, says she told a Manchester audience in July it was a different time and the issues weren't in public debate then. Where you land depends on whether you see the law as protecting trans people or as eroding women's spaces.