When Julia Banks transitioned from a successful corporate career into federal politics, she was shocked to find sexism and backroom skulduggery still running rife. The best antidote? Channelling Helen Mirren.
“Who’s going to look after your kids?” The question was put to me abruptly and unashamedly, the interviewer’s tone aggressive. “You’ll be constantly travelling and away for work.” I was taken aback, but remained Zen-like as I replied: “My kids have grown up with both their parents working. They’re self- sufficient, older and …”
and Julie Bishop – whose socially progressive and economically conservative views aligned with mine, and I thought this might give me a broader platform from which to continue my advocacy on important community and societal issues, including gender and cultural equality. So, in my early 50s and for the first time, I joined a political party.
I was given advice on campaigning: “You should be campaigning for better toilet blocks in the local shopping centre – stop rabbiting on about the economy. Leave that to the big boys.” Astoundingly, after I was elected, this same young Liberal applied for a job in my office. I pretended to give consideration to his application, returned his call and let him down gently. Now I wish I’d just sent him a text à la Dame Helen Mirren. When the 70-something Oscar-winning actor was asked in 2017 what she would say to her younger self, she replied, “Say ‘f… off’ more and stop being so bloody polite.
The meeting was just prior to the scheduled public hearing, in which the appointed MPs would question and cross-examine the CEOs of the big four banks. It was agreed that, given my extensive corporate experience – which none of the others had – I would cover governance and workplace culture issues. Preselection relies on local party member votes, and suddenly I was seeing increasing numbers of new members signing up in my electorate. When I called them, many hung up or didn’t even know who I was; a few confessed they “weren’t really sure” why they joined except that they “did it for Gladys” [Liu], the woman who was to be my successor and who was openly supported by another federal Victorian MP.
Far worse has happened to millions of women, including myself, in terms of unwelcome attention or inappropriate touching. In some ways, I saw it as a transient and trivial incident, and put it down to a ridiculous drunken moment by an entitled narcissist, a kind of power move. But this was a senior MP, a cabinet minister, in the prime minister’s wing. I kept thinking to myself over and over:
I remember sitting next to the then foreign minister Julie Bishop in the party room in Parliament House, minutes after she’d lost her tilt for leadership during the coup. Morrison rose to his feet, his buoyancy at his new-found status making him oblivious to the bloodshed that had just been caused. He addressed the party room with a weird combination of evangelical fervour and footy coach rhetoric.
But I was still fully intending to “fake it” and stay under Morrison’s leadership until the next election. You don’t have a successful corporate career without having to “toe the company line” from time to time, and this has to be reflected by you as a senior executive leader or director. I instructed my staff to delete the post. I tried to reach Morrison through other ministers after unsuccessful attempts to speak to him directly.
Meanwhile, there was wider, gendered abuse from “no-caller ID” calls, on social media and in co-ordinated letter-writing campaigns to my office and to the press. Most of it was so vile that my staff and I spent an inordinate amount of time filtering phone messages and deleting posts. When I became an independent, I received high-level abuse and death threats classified as “low level” by police.
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