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Notes
1. The government's push for population growth was accelerated by a new “baby bonus” cash handout to new parents, and increases to family payments.
2. Evident in comments from a number of politicians, including the right-wing One Nation party matriarch Pauline Hanson, who used her 1996 maiden speech in parliament to express fears that Australia was at risk of being “swamped by Asians.” More recently, the Liberal Party's Danna Vale made headlines by suggesting that Australians were “aborting ourselves almost out of existence”—a comment which was important background to the strong anti-abortion views held by the Liberal Party's 2010 Prime Ministerial contender, Tony Abbot (see Stephanie Peatling Citation2006).
3. With a broad Australian accent, and quirks of pronunciation ridiculed by comedians, anxieties about Gillard were also related to class. Previous Labor leaders from working-class backgrounds used the same pedigree to political advantage—developing career prospects through the union movement or associating their image with cultural stereotypes about larrikinism. (These trends were epitomized in the popular former Prime Minister Bob Hawke, who coincidentally became the subject of a dramatised telemovie during the course of the 2010 election campaign, at the same time that his wife, Blanche d'Alpuget, released a new, “tell-all” biography.) By contrast, the limited range of popular female working-class identities in Australia contributed to problems surrounding Gillard's “image,” directly contributing to campaign strategies to reveal “the real Julia” (ABC News Citation2010).
4. One of the first public controversies over Gillard's professional ambitions was sparked by a newspaper story in which she posed for photos in her kitchen. An empty fruit bowl was the basis for condemnations of Gillard's careerism which left her too busy for the ordinary comforts of home. Publicists explained that she had only just returned from overseas and had yet to unpack her suitcase at the time of the photo. Nonetheless, the story was part of the media landscape that led one opposition party MP to describe Gillard as “deliberately barren”—a statement for which Senator Bill Heffernan later apologized (Dan Harrison Citation2007).
5. In Australia ongoing evidence of a gender pay gap is compounded by figures showing female representation on major company boards is still hovering at 10 percent (Herald-Sun Citation2010; see Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency n.d.).
6. Australian Research Council Discovery Fellowship DP0770241, Working From Home: New Media Technology, Workplace Culture and the Changing Nature of Domesticity, interviewed twenty-seven office workers in four organizations over the period 2007–2009. Jobs ranged from journalism to marketing, web design to project management, as well as a number of university employees. The study included contract workers and salaried staff to reflect the different conditions both within organizations and across sectors. The research showed the lived reality of the freedoms being trumpeted by technology advertisers and governments alike in the shift to a knowledge economy. More details are published in Work's Intimacy (Gregg Citation2011).
7. Beyond statistical measures—and here Pru Goward (2005) is a good introduction to the Australian context—this fact was obvious in interviews for my study when women showed me where in the house they would set up their laptop to do work. Compared to their male colleagues and partners, who spent their time in separate home offices, women more often chose to place themselves at the dining room table, so as to move easily between paid work, supervising children, and cooking dinner. Indeed the decision to get wireless broadband was usually to improve the amount of time spent in the presence of children.
8. A sample of the excellent work in new media studies I refer to includes Vicky Mayer (Citation2011), Laurie Ouellette (forthcoming), David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker (Citation2010), Alison Hearn (Citation2010), Vicky Mayer, Miranda Banks and John Caldwell (2009), Rosalind Gill (Citation2002) and Tiziana Terranova (Citation2000).
9. One campaign on the eve of the election made fun of Abbott's comments to the media that female virginity was “a precious gift” that should not be given away lightly (see Philip Hudson Citation2010). The .jpg image which circulated through social media platforms urged women to use their “precious gift”—in this case their vote—to punish Abbott for patriarchal views. Another campaign, orchestrated by the online lobby group GetUp! Australia, produced a video which featured a range of ordinary women speaking lines that Abbott had voiced in previous public statements. In one of the comments, attributed to his student days, Abbott claimed: “I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons” (GetUp! Citation2010; see also ABC Television Citation2010).
10. I discuss the details of this broadband plan in the context of Australia's urban/rural political imaginaries in Gregg (Citation2010).