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AUSTRALIA-POLITICS-BISHOP
Australia foreign minister quits in PM ousting fallout
SYDNEY, Aug 26, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, a rare
female voice in the Australian government, said Sunday she was quitting the
frontbench after a failed tilt at the nation’s top job during a messy party-
room coup.
The deputy chief of the Liberal Party, Bishop had put her hand up to be
one of three candidates to replace former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull in
Friday’s leadership challenge, but received minimal support from colleagues
even as opinion polls pointed to her popularity among voters.
Her departure has raised questions about whether she fell victim to party
politics and a perceived glass ceiling for women in Canberra.
“I will be resigning from my cabinet position as Minister for Foreign
Affairs”, Bishop said in a statement, signalling her intention to remain on
the backbench.
A moderate, she reportedly garnered only 11 votes out of 85 in the
leadership ballot — significantly lower than the two other rightwing
challengers, coup instigator Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and Treasurer
Scott Morrison.
A leaked WhatsApp chat between some Liberal members, revealed by the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation Sunday, showed them pushing against
voting for Bishop as a tactic to back Morrison, who finally emerged as the
winner.
Australia has endured a turbulent period in politics that has seen six
changes in the top job in 11 years.
The chaos has highlighted not just the infighting within the two major
parties — Liberals and Labor — but also how politicians and the electorate
view women in power.
One of the casualties was Labor’s Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female
leader, who constantly battled misogyny and made international headlines for
her fiery rebuttal of then Liberal opposition leader Tony Abbott in
parliament in 2012.
Bishop has been candid about her experiences as the only woman among 18
men in cabinet after Abbott won national elections in 2013.
“It was pretty lonely,” the former lawyer said last year, adding that she
would suggest ideas which were ignored until copied by her male colleagues.
The male colleagues would suggest “exactly my idea, exactly my
initiative… and the others would say, ‘brilliant, what a genius idea!'”,
she said, putting down the behaviour to an “unconscious bias”.
“It’s almost a deafness that we still see in Australian society,” she
said.
A trailblazer who was Australia’s first female foreign minister and the
Liberals’ first female deputy leader, the 62-year-old was hailed by her peers
Sunday.
Turnbull tweeted that she was “an inspiring role model for women here and
around the world”.
Her Labor counterpart Penny Wong praised her “tireless work ethic”, adding
that her “commitment to standing up for Australia both here and abroad has
never been in question”.
Renowned for her steely gaze dubbed the “death stare”, Bishop’s highlights
as foreign minister include her strong condemnation of Russia’s role in the
shooting down of Malaysia Airlines MH17 in 2014.
BSS/AFP/MSY/1344 hrs