Julia Gillard

Our future growth relies on competitiveness and innovation, skills and productivity... and these in turn rely on the education of our people.

— Julia Gillard

Education's net economic benefits are greater than many other investments.

— Julia Gillard

Now I understand for Mr Downer and other members of the chattering classes in the Liberal Party: they might think what qualifies you to know about national security, is you sit in a minister's office typing press releases all of your lives, with the greatest risk to your personal safety being a papercut – Mr Downer might think that's appropriate; well I do not.

— Julia Gillard

What I believe, what the Labor Party believes, is that marriage is between a man and a woman.

— Julia Gillard

Whether or not you welcome it, moving house requires you to make choices about the past as you move into the future. What of all of your bits of stuff is truly valued? What should be left behind?

— Julia Gillard

There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.

— Julia Gillard

I suggest Australians rush to their kitchens and check that their spoons aren't bent after that performance.

— Julia Gillard

I know the Leader of the Opposition has an unhealthy kind of obsession with the so-called "faceless men in the Labor Party"; what he really should be obsessed about is the useless men sitting behind him.

— Julia Gillard

Will the misogynists and the nut jobs on the internet continue to circulate them? Yes, they will. And it wouldn't matter what I said and it wouldn't matter what documents were produced and it wouldn't matter what anybody else said, they will pursue this claim for motivations of their own which are malicious and not in any way associated with the facts.

— Julia Gillard

Here he [Abbott] is, trying to fudge one way and fudge the other; This morning he went out and accused me of a crime. Back it up or shut up.

— Julia Gillard

It's a cute project to work on.

— Julia Gillard

We cannot have the government or the Labor party go to the next election with a person leading the party and a person floating around as the potential alternative leader. Anybody who enters the ballot tonight should do it on the following conditions: that if you win you're Labor leader, that if you lose you retire from politics.

— Julia Gillard

Hindsight can give you insights about what went wrong. But only faith, reason and bravery can propel you forward.

— Julia Gillard

I indicate to the Leader of the Opposition that the government is not dying of shame—my father did not die of shame. What the Leader of the Opposition should be ashamed of is his performance in this parliament and the sexism he brings with it.

— Julia Gillard

Good sense, common sense and proper process are what should rule this parliament. That is what I believe is the path forward for this parliament, not the kinds of double standards and political game playing imposed by the Leader of the Opposition, who is now looking at his watch because, apparently, a woman has spoken for too long [loud protests from the Opposition benches]—I have had him yell at me to shut up in the past!

— Julia Gillard

It's a big emotional thing to do, to challenge the leadership of your political party. There is nothing pleasant about it, there's nothing fun about it. It's quite a horrible gut-wrenching process.

— Julia Gillard

Tactics hadn't gone [Rudd's] way – I had taken a view about something else forming the issue of the day – and after the tactics meeting broke up he very physically stepped into my space, and it was quite a bullying encounter. It was a menacing, angry, performance.

— Julia Gillard

I thought that, that side of [Rudd's] character – the very anxious, 'I must be in the media, I must shine in Parliament today' – would fall away when he became Labor leader and there was no more fighting for the spotlight; the spotlight was well and truly on him.

— Julia Gillard

The sense of regret that we didn't need to be here. The sense of friendship lost, something very special lost, the team ability of the two of us. That was sitting very heavily on me.

— Julia Gillard

I was seriously worried about his psychological state, I thought he wasn't coping, and he wasn't showing any signs of finding a way back to coping ... At that point, if you'd asked him to make a huge decision as Prime Minister on that day, yes, I would have been concerned about his capacity. My sense of him at that point was that he was spent in a physical and psychological sense.

— Julia Gillard

Kevin was very fragile in the face of criticism including the implied criticism that comes with bad polls or bad news stories.

— Julia Gillard

In terms of the big decisions before the Government, he was incapable of making them. He, as a seasoned politician from the TV cameras could turn it on, but his demeanour behind closed doors was absolutely miserable, irritated. If I was going to summarise it: personally miserable, politically paralysed.

— Julia Gillard

It is not normal for a Deputy Prime Minister to end up running a Prime Minister's diary, chairing staff meetings. It's not normal for a Deputy Prime Minister to be trying to manage so that quality speeches are given.

— Julia Gillard

I don't think it would have been possible ... You always have choices, yes, but I don't think there was any way of stuffing the genie back into the bottle.

— Julia Gillard

I always had this long shadow from the way in which I became Prime Minister, and active steps were taken basically every day of my prime ministership to have that shadow become darker and darker, not lighter and lighter.

— Julia Gillard

I was very conscience that if you put even your toe on this very sticky piece of paper, then you would be caught on it.

— Julia Gillard

There is nothing that should lead you to expect bastardry of that magnitude. Hard things happen; a hard thing happened to Malcolm Turnbull, a hard thing happened to Bob Hawke, a hard thing happened Kim Beazley, a hard thing happened to Kevin Rudd, a hard thing happened to me. You can still make choices on how you conduct yourself.

— Julia Gillard

I really don’t know why this wasn’t a career ending moment for Tony Abbott. Sexism is no better than racism.

— Julia Gillard

When there was bad behaviour – and Kevin consistently danced right out on that line of bad behaviour – I couldn’t do that much to discipline him because the nature of minority government is kind of everybody’s got their hand on the grenade and anybody could pull the pin.

— Julia Gillard

It did seem to me that tomorrow you could wake up to anything, and that there just are no rules anymore.

— Julia Gillard

It was inconceivable to me that the kind of anti-Labor work that Kevin had been involved in – the destabilisation, the leaking – would be rewarded by the leadership.

— Julia Gillard

I could hear the forces massing. I was very keen to make sure that I got our big reforms done before those forces could reach a critical point.

— Julia Gillard

You've got to gather yourself, you've got to give the speech, go see the Governor-General, do all of that. And then you get to have a few drinks with friends, so that's not that hard.

— Julia Gillard

I don’t see what alternate reality was possible other than the one’s we lived through. So I think people are really wistfully hoping for something that was never going to be.

— Julia Gillard

Education equals economic growth.

— Julia Gillard

Our future growth relies on competitiveness and innovation, skills and productivity... and these in turn rely on the education of our people.

— Julia Gillard

Through hard work and education, we can deliver a strong economy and opportunity for all.

— Julia Gillard

We know that literate people are more likely than others to participate in their societies' democratic institutions and that the risk of war drops as more of a country's citizens receive a secondary education.

— Julia Gillard