Post by Freddy on Jan 6, 2013 9:20:13 GMT 11
Or Treating the Electorate like Morons ?
www.heraldsun.com.au/news/with-tony-on-my-side/story-e6frf7jo-1226548140341
PETA Credlin knows the questions female voters have about electing Tony Abbott as prime minister.
Peta Credlin
Glamazon Peta Credlin was known for her huge hats when she was Racing Victoria's director of public affairs. Picture: Heath Missen The Sunday Telegraph
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As his female chief of staff, she occasionally gets pulled aside at functions, and her inquisitors all want to know the same thing.
"What's he like to work for as a woman? Isn't he tough on women's issues?"
"Isn't he anti-abortion?"
"Isn't he weird on contraception? What would he really do if he was the prime minister?"
But she knows all the questions already, since, not so long ago, Credlin asked them herself.
And then last year, she ended up learning more than she ever expected to about what Tony Abbott really thinks about all of these difficult, complex issues when she endured the personal heartbreak of multiple rounds of IVF treatment and no baby.
That's when Abbott surprised even her - by offering to keep her secrets and help store her fertility drugs in his office bar fridge.
Credlin, 41, a Catholic, is also pro-choice on abortion. She's married to Liberal Party director Brian Loughnane, who will run Abbott's campaign for The Lodge - a true power couple in Canberra.
Intensely private, she has never given an on-the-record interview - until recently.
But she attracts attention, as you do when you're a six foot-tall glamazon with long brown hair in a leopard-print dress.
In a previous incarnation as a public relations executive for Victoria Racing, she turned heads by wearing giant hats. She would make a formidable politician and one day she most probably will.
After working for Liberal leaders Brendan Nelson as an adviser and then Malcolm Turnbull as his deputy chief of staff, Credlin took the surprise election of Abbott as Liberal leader in 2009 as a green light to exit politics and return to Melbourne to practise law. But Abbott urged her to stay.
Could she work for a man who described Australia's abortion rate as an unutterable shame? Over a coffee in Canberra last Sunday, Credlin tells Agenda she didn't think she could. So, early in 2010, she told him it was a big reason why she wouldn't stick around.
"Look, there was this elephant in the room, which was Tony and women's issues," Credlin says.
She wasn't worried about his personal dealings with women - Abbott had surprised her with his warmth. Plus, he had always had female chiefs of staff.
The issue was his views on abortion, IVF and contraception. Credlin had been on the opposite side to Abbott during the RU486 abortion drug debate when she worked for former Senate leader Robert Hill. The original decision was about whether Abbott should be able to maintain his ministerial powers to veto the drug. Some argued he was unqualified on the grounds of his Catholicism.
"While it started out as an issue of ministerial authority, it became code for so much more," she says.
Credlin says she told Abbott: "I will just never agree with you on abortion."
Abbott asked: "Well, what do you think my position on abortion is?"
"And I said, 'Well, I think you are opposed to it, and you would like to see it restricted'. And he said, 'Well, that's just bullshit. I believe it should be safe, legal and rare'."
Abbott was using the terminology of US President Bill Clinton. He confirmed he did have a problem with "the quantum", the number of abortions in Australia, and he didn't back away from that. But crucially, he did not want to ban or restrict access.
"And I agree with that myself. No woman wants to think it's a decision that's not taken carefully and in a considered way, and I can't see that for the vast majority of women it wouldn't be. I think it's one of the toughest decisions a woman can make," Credlin says.
"And I think most women would want to hope that your sister or your friend or yourself would have choices before it got to that point."
In many ways, Credlin's conversation with Abbott as she wrestled with working for him is similar to many of the questions women have as they weigh up voting for him at the next election.
It's a political fault line Julia Gillard tapped into in her speech to parliament accusing him of misogyny - a hatred of women - and attacking Abbott for describing abortion as an "easy way out" (he didn't actually say that, as it turns out). Other senior ALP women have returned to the theme, suggesting it is showing up in party polling.
Credlin kept ticking off her concerns during her conversation with Abbott that day in 2010. "I also heard you are against contraception," she said. Abbott replied this was "ridiculous" as he was the father of teenage girls.
"And I said, 'The last one is all that kerfuffle about IVF. I can't say at my age I might not need it. How could you be against IVF?' "
It was a remark that would prove to be prophetic.
Abbott insisted this was wrong too: " I am not against IVF, I am passionate for IVF. Anything that helps families is a good thing, it's not a bad thing." Credlin left the conversation surprised that Abbott's position on IVF, abortion and contraception wasn't as black and white as she had assumed. Why did she think otherwise? A big reason is Abbott's own words.
"We have a bizarre double standard; a bizarre double standard in this country where someone who kills a pregnant woman's baby is guilty of murder, but a woman who aborts an unborn baby is simply exercising choice," Abbott told parliament in 2005.
"I want to make it clear that I do not judge or condemn any woman who has had an abortion, but every abortion is a tragedy and up to 100,000 abortions a year is this generation's legacy of unutterable shame."
In 2005, the Howard government floated a plan to restrict the number of IVF cycles for women over the age of 42 when Abbott was health minister. Asked about the debate in 2009, Abbott offered these words to describe his reflections on the controversy that followed: "It [the proposal] fell foul of the 'I'm over 40 and I need my baby' brigade," Abbott said.
Not exactly the remarks of a sensitive new-age guy.
Could it be that, during their fateful conversation, Abbott was simply telling Credlin what she wanted to hear?
She insists this is not the case.
"I think it is important that people, especially women, hear the truth about Tony Abbott, and not just the myths," she says.
As the next federal election looms, Team Abbott has wheeled out a succession of women to endorse his female-friendly credentials to assure the voting public he's not the anti-woman ogre they were led to believe.
The most powerful intervention was naturally his wife Margie Abbott and his daughters. Then there's his sister Christine Foster, who has spoken of her brother's supportive embrace when she came out as a lesbian.
Credlin's decision to speak out publicly as his chief of staff is highly unusual.
Yet her candour is not only motivated by a deep loyalty to Abbott and a desire for voters to know the truth about what Abbott would do as prime minister on reproductive health issues, she is also ready to talk about her own painful experience of infertility, in which she tried, and, in her own words, failed to fall pregnant after back-to-back cycles of drugs, egg collections and IVF treatments.
"This is a really important election and you can't leave these things unsaid if they need to be addressed."
Credlin agreed to a brief question-and-answer session with the glossy Marie Claire magazine late last year. But her candid response, when asked about her toughest day at work, shocked even the press secretary from Abbott's office sent along to chaperone the interaction.
The magazine will publish the piece on Wednesday.
"There was a grubby joke told about me at a union event attended by some Labor MPs in Canberra. I didn't hear about it until the next day," Credlin told the magazine.
"The joke didn't faze me - politics is tough - but on that day I had come to the office straight from hospital after my fifth failed IVF attempt. All I wanted to do was go home to bed, pull the doona over my head and cry. But if I didn't front up, there would be a sense that the joke had got to me. So I had to sit through Question Time in the advisers' box and have a smile on my face. It was personally tough."
The "joke" was a smutty reference to longstanding innuendo about her close relationship with Abbott.
Credlin could have probably left it there, but she agreed to a request by The Sunday Telegraph to talk about her IVF experience. Some will be cynical. Credlin is not fazed.
"I have never given an interview in over a decade in politics. I'm doing this now, about an issue so deeply personal, because I'm determined to set the record straight and because I chose to be as honest as I could in the magazine article," she said.
Her decision to try IVF after the 2010 election brought about another difficult conversation with Abbott on a plane back from Afghanistan in October, 2010.
"I had been to see the doctor a number of years before I finally bit the bullet," Credlin tells Agenda.
"And for many reasons that anyone who has ever done IVF knows - it's expensive, it's intrusive, you lose control.
"(But) I didn't think I could wait another three years before I gave it a go. I hesitated to raise it with Tony because I didn't want him to think I wasn't committed to the job. But there was a window that was closing and I knew that if I didn't decide if I was in or out of it, I might end up never making a conscious decision to try to have kids.
"And there will be a point if I don't try that I would regret it for the rest of my life. So I said to Tony, I just want to try, I may not get there, but I want to try."
Credlin asked Abbott if she should resign as other friends had to focus on IVF.
"And he said, 'absolutely put all those thoughts out of your head'. He said, 'you are my chief of staff, who is going to do IVF. You're not going to go and do anything else. You can make it work. We can juggle things'.
"I said, 'It's really intrusive, I don't want people to know about it'. He said, 'Nup, I will run interference'.
Credlin says that Abbott in his "usual style of practically pulling apart a problem" said: "Well, drugs? That's easy - we will just put them in my bar fridge, no one will go in my bar fridge. Bathroom? Well, you obviously can't use a public toilet can you? Well, that's fine, I will clear my stuff out and you can use my bathroom for the needles. And he made it sound like it could work."
As she talks about the experience of doing IVF over and over again and not getting close to even the possibility of a pregnancy, the word "failure" crops up and Credlin begins to cry.
At one point she says Abbott even cried with her one day as she "wallowed" in a pretty awful IVF experience, which would be almost impossible to believe apart from the fact that it's hard not to feel moved by how honest Credlin is about it all."(Abbott's) just such an optimist. He'd say, 'it's OK. You're going to try again'. And I am like, 'Oh God. I am just coming off failure'," she laughs. "It would be so easy with IVF to wallow in your failures. But I never want to be one of these people whose whole life gets defined by whether I had kids. You also have to dust yourself off and keep going."
Credlin gives every impression of someone who has conquered every problem in her life by just working harder, trying harder, studying harder, training harder.
But infertility isn't like that.
You can't always beat it into submission by doing fertility treatments that wreak havoc on your body and sometimes your mind over and over again. Sometimes IVF just doesn't work.
Credlin would still dearly love to be a mother, but doesn't think she will try IVF again in an election year.
"It's more the fact we are in the fight of our lives and you have to be committed. And it takes over your life," she says.
"And that's just the nature of it an election year.
"It consumes your life and your partner understands that, and your family understands that. I don't want to have my attention divided. So I probably wouldn't.
"I've got one job this year and that's to change the government.
"But what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger."
--------------------------
Now excuse me while I'll go and throw-up
www.heraldsun.com.au/news/with-tony-on-my-side/story-e6frf7jo-1226548140341
PETA Credlin knows the questions female voters have about electing Tony Abbott as prime minister.
Peta Credlin
Glamazon Peta Credlin was known for her huge hats when she was Racing Victoria's director of public affairs. Picture: Heath Missen The Sunday Telegraph
< Prev
1 of 2
Next >
Access all Areas. $1 for the first 28 days. Only $2.95 a week thereafter. Learn more.
As his female chief of staff, she occasionally gets pulled aside at functions, and her inquisitors all want to know the same thing.
"What's he like to work for as a woman? Isn't he tough on women's issues?"
"Isn't he anti-abortion?"
"Isn't he weird on contraception? What would he really do if he was the prime minister?"
But she knows all the questions already, since, not so long ago, Credlin asked them herself.
And then last year, she ended up learning more than she ever expected to about what Tony Abbott really thinks about all of these difficult, complex issues when she endured the personal heartbreak of multiple rounds of IVF treatment and no baby.
That's when Abbott surprised even her - by offering to keep her secrets and help store her fertility drugs in his office bar fridge.
Credlin, 41, a Catholic, is also pro-choice on abortion. She's married to Liberal Party director Brian Loughnane, who will run Abbott's campaign for The Lodge - a true power couple in Canberra.
Intensely private, she has never given an on-the-record interview - until recently.
But she attracts attention, as you do when you're a six foot-tall glamazon with long brown hair in a leopard-print dress.
In a previous incarnation as a public relations executive for Victoria Racing, she turned heads by wearing giant hats. She would make a formidable politician and one day she most probably will.
After working for Liberal leaders Brendan Nelson as an adviser and then Malcolm Turnbull as his deputy chief of staff, Credlin took the surprise election of Abbott as Liberal leader in 2009 as a green light to exit politics and return to Melbourne to practise law. But Abbott urged her to stay.
Could she work for a man who described Australia's abortion rate as an unutterable shame? Over a coffee in Canberra last Sunday, Credlin tells Agenda she didn't think she could. So, early in 2010, she told him it was a big reason why she wouldn't stick around.
"Look, there was this elephant in the room, which was Tony and women's issues," Credlin says.
She wasn't worried about his personal dealings with women - Abbott had surprised her with his warmth. Plus, he had always had female chiefs of staff.
The issue was his views on abortion, IVF and contraception. Credlin had been on the opposite side to Abbott during the RU486 abortion drug debate when she worked for former Senate leader Robert Hill. The original decision was about whether Abbott should be able to maintain his ministerial powers to veto the drug. Some argued he was unqualified on the grounds of his Catholicism.
"While it started out as an issue of ministerial authority, it became code for so much more," she says.
Credlin says she told Abbott: "I will just never agree with you on abortion."
Abbott asked: "Well, what do you think my position on abortion is?"
"And I said, 'Well, I think you are opposed to it, and you would like to see it restricted'. And he said, 'Well, that's just bullshit. I believe it should be safe, legal and rare'."
Abbott was using the terminology of US President Bill Clinton. He confirmed he did have a problem with "the quantum", the number of abortions in Australia, and he didn't back away from that. But crucially, he did not want to ban or restrict access.
"And I agree with that myself. No woman wants to think it's a decision that's not taken carefully and in a considered way, and I can't see that for the vast majority of women it wouldn't be. I think it's one of the toughest decisions a woman can make," Credlin says.
"And I think most women would want to hope that your sister or your friend or yourself would have choices before it got to that point."
In many ways, Credlin's conversation with Abbott as she wrestled with working for him is similar to many of the questions women have as they weigh up voting for him at the next election.
It's a political fault line Julia Gillard tapped into in her speech to parliament accusing him of misogyny - a hatred of women - and attacking Abbott for describing abortion as an "easy way out" (he didn't actually say that, as it turns out). Other senior ALP women have returned to the theme, suggesting it is showing up in party polling.
Credlin kept ticking off her concerns during her conversation with Abbott that day in 2010. "I also heard you are against contraception," she said. Abbott replied this was "ridiculous" as he was the father of teenage girls.
"And I said, 'The last one is all that kerfuffle about IVF. I can't say at my age I might not need it. How could you be against IVF?' "
It was a remark that would prove to be prophetic.
Abbott insisted this was wrong too: " I am not against IVF, I am passionate for IVF. Anything that helps families is a good thing, it's not a bad thing." Credlin left the conversation surprised that Abbott's position on IVF, abortion and contraception wasn't as black and white as she had assumed. Why did she think otherwise? A big reason is Abbott's own words.
"We have a bizarre double standard; a bizarre double standard in this country where someone who kills a pregnant woman's baby is guilty of murder, but a woman who aborts an unborn baby is simply exercising choice," Abbott told parliament in 2005.
"I want to make it clear that I do not judge or condemn any woman who has had an abortion, but every abortion is a tragedy and up to 100,000 abortions a year is this generation's legacy of unutterable shame."
In 2005, the Howard government floated a plan to restrict the number of IVF cycles for women over the age of 42 when Abbott was health minister. Asked about the debate in 2009, Abbott offered these words to describe his reflections on the controversy that followed: "It [the proposal] fell foul of the 'I'm over 40 and I need my baby' brigade," Abbott said.
Not exactly the remarks of a sensitive new-age guy.
Could it be that, during their fateful conversation, Abbott was simply telling Credlin what she wanted to hear?
She insists this is not the case.
"I think it is important that people, especially women, hear the truth about Tony Abbott, and not just the myths," she says.
As the next federal election looms, Team Abbott has wheeled out a succession of women to endorse his female-friendly credentials to assure the voting public he's not the anti-woman ogre they were led to believe.
The most powerful intervention was naturally his wife Margie Abbott and his daughters. Then there's his sister Christine Foster, who has spoken of her brother's supportive embrace when she came out as a lesbian.
Credlin's decision to speak out publicly as his chief of staff is highly unusual.
Yet her candour is not only motivated by a deep loyalty to Abbott and a desire for voters to know the truth about what Abbott would do as prime minister on reproductive health issues, she is also ready to talk about her own painful experience of infertility, in which she tried, and, in her own words, failed to fall pregnant after back-to-back cycles of drugs, egg collections and IVF treatments.
"This is a really important election and you can't leave these things unsaid if they need to be addressed."
Credlin agreed to a brief question-and-answer session with the glossy Marie Claire magazine late last year. But her candid response, when asked about her toughest day at work, shocked even the press secretary from Abbott's office sent along to chaperone the interaction.
The magazine will publish the piece on Wednesday.
"There was a grubby joke told about me at a union event attended by some Labor MPs in Canberra. I didn't hear about it until the next day," Credlin told the magazine.
"The joke didn't faze me - politics is tough - but on that day I had come to the office straight from hospital after my fifth failed IVF attempt. All I wanted to do was go home to bed, pull the doona over my head and cry. But if I didn't front up, there would be a sense that the joke had got to me. So I had to sit through Question Time in the advisers' box and have a smile on my face. It was personally tough."
The "joke" was a smutty reference to longstanding innuendo about her close relationship with Abbott.
Credlin could have probably left it there, but she agreed to a request by The Sunday Telegraph to talk about her IVF experience. Some will be cynical. Credlin is not fazed.
"I have never given an interview in over a decade in politics. I'm doing this now, about an issue so deeply personal, because I'm determined to set the record straight and because I chose to be as honest as I could in the magazine article," she said.
Her decision to try IVF after the 2010 election brought about another difficult conversation with Abbott on a plane back from Afghanistan in October, 2010.
"I had been to see the doctor a number of years before I finally bit the bullet," Credlin tells Agenda.
"And for many reasons that anyone who has ever done IVF knows - it's expensive, it's intrusive, you lose control.
"(But) I didn't think I could wait another three years before I gave it a go. I hesitated to raise it with Tony because I didn't want him to think I wasn't committed to the job. But there was a window that was closing and I knew that if I didn't decide if I was in or out of it, I might end up never making a conscious decision to try to have kids.
"And there will be a point if I don't try that I would regret it for the rest of my life. So I said to Tony, I just want to try, I may not get there, but I want to try."
Credlin asked Abbott if she should resign as other friends had to focus on IVF.
"And he said, 'absolutely put all those thoughts out of your head'. He said, 'you are my chief of staff, who is going to do IVF. You're not going to go and do anything else. You can make it work. We can juggle things'.
"I said, 'It's really intrusive, I don't want people to know about it'. He said, 'Nup, I will run interference'.
Credlin says that Abbott in his "usual style of practically pulling apart a problem" said: "Well, drugs? That's easy - we will just put them in my bar fridge, no one will go in my bar fridge. Bathroom? Well, you obviously can't use a public toilet can you? Well, that's fine, I will clear my stuff out and you can use my bathroom for the needles. And he made it sound like it could work."
As she talks about the experience of doing IVF over and over again and not getting close to even the possibility of a pregnancy, the word "failure" crops up and Credlin begins to cry.
At one point she says Abbott even cried with her one day as she "wallowed" in a pretty awful IVF experience, which would be almost impossible to believe apart from the fact that it's hard not to feel moved by how honest Credlin is about it all."(Abbott's) just such an optimist. He'd say, 'it's OK. You're going to try again'. And I am like, 'Oh God. I am just coming off failure'," she laughs. "It would be so easy with IVF to wallow in your failures. But I never want to be one of these people whose whole life gets defined by whether I had kids. You also have to dust yourself off and keep going."
Credlin gives every impression of someone who has conquered every problem in her life by just working harder, trying harder, studying harder, training harder.
But infertility isn't like that.
You can't always beat it into submission by doing fertility treatments that wreak havoc on your body and sometimes your mind over and over again. Sometimes IVF just doesn't work.
Credlin would still dearly love to be a mother, but doesn't think she will try IVF again in an election year.
"It's more the fact we are in the fight of our lives and you have to be committed. And it takes over your life," she says.
"And that's just the nature of it an election year.
"It consumes your life and your partner understands that, and your family understands that. I don't want to have my attention divided. So I probably wouldn't.
"I've got one job this year and that's to change the government.
"But what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger."
--------------------------
Now excuse me while I'll go and throw-up
?