00:00:08
Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Something to Talk About, the Stella podcast. I'm Sarah Lamarquand, your host, and every week I sit down with some of the biggest names in the country, because when Australia's celebrities are ready to talk, they come to Something to Talk About. You might think you know a lot about Peter Credlin, but in truth, you probably don't. After all, she doesn't give many interviews. In fact, today's conversation with Stella is her first in 10 years. So sure, you might know Peter as the host of Credlin on News 24 or as a former Chief of Staff to Australia's 28th Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, a role which saw her become arguably the most famous parliamentary staffer in Australia. But before any of that, she was a country girl from the tiny Victorian town of Witchproof. and with no political connections and certainly no grand plan to end up in Canberra.
00:01:01
Speaker 2: I never wanted to be rich. I never wanted to be famous. I never wanted an easy life, actually. I just wanted to make a difference, right?
00:01:09
Speaker 1: In today's episode, Peter also gets personal about going public with her IVF journey, how a doctor quote-unquote saved her life when she was entering menopause, and how she's transitioned over the past decade from a career in Canberra to that of a television anchor and columnist. She also shares her complicated perspective on women and power, revealing why, even as she worked for the opposition in trying to defeat Julia Gillard, she still wanted Australia's first female Prime Minister to succeed.
00:01:41
Speaker 2: Along comes a female Prime Minister in Australia, and I want her to be a success, even if my job is to work for a bloke who wants to beat her. I want her to be a success.
00:01:50
Speaker 1: This is Peter Credlin, the woman behind thousands of headlines like you've never heard her. Peter Credlin, welcome to the Stella podcast.
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Speaker 2: I tell you what, this is a little bit of a reversal because I don't think I've been interviewed for a good decade, Sarah. So I'm delighted to be here.
00:02:08
Speaker 1: We thought it was a good time because this year is actually marking 10 years since you have been working at News24, previously known as Sky News Australia, and been writing columns.
00:02:19
Speaker 2: And writing for the paper.
00:02:21
Speaker 1: Exactly, published by the News Corp papers. But before all of that, of course, you're one of the most high-profile political staffers in Australian history, worked in Canberra for 16 years. But I actually want to go back even a little bit further, Peter Credlin, before all of that. You are a country girl from regional Victoria. You grew up in a town called Witchproof, which according to the 2021 census, had a population of 610. Tiny little town.
00:02:52
Speaker 2: It's on the road between Melbourne and Mildura. I'll put it into some context, about halfway up. So three and a half, four hours from Melbourne. And when I was growing up, I had a grandma in Melbourne. We'd go to Melbourne... a lot, but that was considered very cosmopolitan. I mean, I knew people I went to school with that had never really left the town. My dad's side moved there in the 1850s. Victoria only became Victoria about that same time. So long history on the land, hot in summer, you know, mid 40s, a salt of the earth people, most people with pretty rudimentary education in my dad's era, Obviously, my time, if you wanted to go beyond high school, you really had to leave the town. But it shaped me enormously, you know. And maybe it's a story of a Gen X person who lived before devices. But, you know, on the weekends, you're on the bike, you swim in the channel. I used to kill the sheep with my dad, so he had fresh lamb in the freezer. Yeah. Um, you rode motorbikes, you left early in the morning and you came home when it got dark, you know, enormous freedom. None of the pressures I think that young people have today, probably a lot more risk. And we're a bit naive to the risks, but also I have to say a blessed childhood, right? There's nothing, we didn't have a lot of money, but we just had glorious years, I think, to really find who I was and and get that resilience, I think, that I drew on when I got to Canberra.
00:04:23
Speaker 1: You are definitely someone who went on to be a person who really had to hold your own in rooms with some of the most powerful people, not just in the country, but in the world. And often one of the only women, if not the only woman in that room. I have had the privilege in this role of talking to a lot of incredible women. And it's interesting, quite a few of those women did also grow up in regional parts of the world and regional parts of Australia. Some of them have said everyone's experience is different. There can just be a little bit of a straight shooter element and something about learning to hold your own. Would you agree with those observations from your own experience?
00:05:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's pretty true. I mean, I think certainly for me growing up in the country, it was a stripped back, resilient environment. bare upbringing, if I can say that, because I was often told, you're too blunt. But blunt was prized where I grew up, the authenticity, the honesty, a little bit like Hanson, direct and to the point, as opposed to often in Canberra, there's that circuitous language that people have. I never know when I might need that person's vote down the track. So I'm not going to tell them that they're a dickhead, but they are. So you sort of, you crowd it out with all that language that we often don't like to see or hear in our politicians. So there was that. I think my dad was a huge role model. My dad was a really strong country man. He didn't have much formal education, Sarah. He left school when he was 12 years of age, not year 12, 12 years of age. But he's got five kids and all the kids have got postgrads. So that tells you in a generation, A, he prized education. He wanted us to be better educated than he was. But he also taught us to stand up for ourselves and particularly the girls in the family. We found our voice pretty young and he really encouraged that, right? So in a room, I've never been the wallflower in the room. I've never felt like I have to speak. He also used to say to me, you know, you can shut up and let people think you're stupid, but you can open your mouth and demonstrate you are. So, you know, be careful when you do open your mouth that you've got something worthy to say. But also that if you're there, take that seat at the table, like be a part of the conversation and, you know, own your opinion. And I think they're sort of the lessons that have stuck with me.
00:06:58
Speaker 1: Tell me about your own experience about moving away from your hometown and You studied law at the University of Melbourne. Was that a difficult decision? And how was life when you moved from it being this glamorous place you would visit, relatives, to being somewhere where you were living and studying full time?
00:07:17
Speaker 2: A bit intimidating, if I'm honest. You know, at the end of my high school years, I went to a girls' school in Geelong. And my mum will always say they sort of rounded out the rough edges and made me a bit more presentable. I suppose that's very true. And those girls are my squad, right? I am still really, really close to girls I went to school with. There's a couple that I travel overseas with every year on holidays. We're on a girls chat. I'd hate to see that ever published in the media because it gets pretty wild on some occasions. My husband calls us the Catholic mafia and he's a bit of a girls Catholic mafia. But Even with that little sort of urban age in Geelong, I still arrived at Melbourne Uni and was pretty intimidated. Law school in those days didn't have that many girls there. Certainly there were plenty compared to earlier generations, but nowhere near 50% or anything like that. And I lived on campus at a residential college, a Newman College run by the Jesuits. I threw myself into college life, perhaps a bit too much in the first couple of years. I played a lot of sport. I think that's a great leveller, helps you meet people. I still, I think, had a bit of a chip on my shoulder that I came from a really tiny part of Victoria. Now I own that as a badge of pride, but I think perhaps I was a bit intimidated by the big private schools in Melbourne and things like that. So that took a while to settle in.
00:08:41
Speaker 1: I think a chip on a shoulder can be a really good thing sometimes to have in your toolkit, maybe especially during those early years.
00:08:50
Speaker 2: Not that it was a negative. I wouldn't say I was embarrassed about where I came from. But maybe it was like a reservation, a reserved me not thinking perhaps I was up to the mark. And two things happened there. One, that made me work even harder to prove that I was to myself more than anyone. But then I also recognised it when I got to Canberra and dealt with people who were perhaps coming in to see a minister or lobbying on an issue. And if they were from a country area or if I felt that they... you know, like a fish out of water in Canberra, I sort of try and find a way to put them at ease, you know, as an equaliser, because I recognised in them what I knew to be, you know, how I felt when I crossed the threshold into a foreign environment. Absolutely.
00:09:41
Speaker 1: I think any of those, whatever we call them, rough edges, experiences, Chip on the shoulder. Anything that I think results in some sort of empathy and shorthand throughout your life. It's a really remarkable quality.
00:09:55
Speaker 2: And look, we're lucky. We're lucky, you know, my generation that our lives weren't documented. like they are today. You know, we can make the mistakes. I do get bad images of me in my 20s thrown at me by my girlfriends every once in a while to bring me down to earth. But, you know, all the mistakes that you make, there was a latitude to make them knowing they weren't documented. But they're also not coming back to haunt you, which I think is one of the reasons why A lot of people now think twice about public life. You know, what's going to be dredged up from the past? What have I done? What have I said? What's going to get me cancelled? And I don't think that's good for democracy.
00:10:28
Speaker 1: That's right, because it's narrowing the pool, isn't it, of people that will put their hand up. Peter, once you graduated, as I understand it, you were then admitted as.
00:10:38
Speaker 2: A barrister in Victoria. Yeah, that came later on, Sarah, actually. I was to have a year off. This is long before the years of gap years. I'd finished my degree. And a girlfriend and I planned to go to London for a year. She was working in finance. I was going to just work in pubs and travel around and whatever. And my dad died very suddenly. I was in my early 20s at this stage. So I held back my flight, hoping to join her. And within a couple of months, my mom had a massive heart attack, quad bypass, touch and go with her. She would survive. And she's 14 years younger than my dad. So the thought that, you know, you could lose both your parents' youngs My brother and my sister were still at school and that really shook me. So I decided not to go to the UK. But seeing at home and helping mum recover, I was bored out of my brain as well. So she said, you need to go and find something to do. And there was a job in the paper working for a senator, Kay Patterson, and I applied. And I took that job and I did that job. And within the first few months of sitting in Canberra in the sort of the eye of the storm, commuting backwards and forwards between Melbourne and I thought, there's no way I'm going to stand by a photocopier as a first-year law student. I don't want to do that. I mean, I'd worked in a law firm all the way through uni, so I knew that there was a huge amount of entry-level drudgery when you first start. And I had this opportunity with Kay to sit in the chamber. This is in the Howard government, up in the Senate, draft amendments to bills, some of them very, very basic, sure, ticked off by the tables, Clark, but they make their way into legislation. I mean, how intoxicating is that? And I remember writing a little speech for her to take note after question time one day, and she read it into the Hansard, and then she gave me a copy of it and signed it. I still have that. I still have that. And when she retired from the parliament, and MPs in those days got all of their speeches in a bound book, she went out of her way, case extraordinary, to find that particular volume of Hansard that had my first ever written speech for a politician in it. And she presented it to me as a sort of a farewell gift. And, you know, there's lots of things I've done and seen in all those years in politics, but that volume is incredibly special to me. And she went on, Kay, I don't know if people know, to be our aged commissioner on the Human Rights Commission. She's in her 80s now. She's a gerontologist. We're still really close. But she gave me this advice really early on when I started in politics. She said, this place will suck you in and you'll think that these people are your friends forever and a day and you will grow distant from those you've loved and your mates prior to this place. And she said, that is a big mistake because the old friends will be there when you leave here and you'll be lucky to get just a handful to come out of the Canberra world. And so I took those words to heart. She certainly did. And I fostered all my old relationships and I still have them. And I look at people that went through politics about the same era as me and they've come away and they don't have political friends because they evaporate and they lost contact with the people they knew before they went in. And I think that's something I'm really pleased she said to me early enough that I took notice.
00:14:07
Speaker 1: It's such great advice. And I think it's so important in something like the bubble, what we call the Canberra bubble, but for other industries as.
00:14:17
Speaker 2: Well that feel all-consuming. Absolutely. You see your name up in lights, you think you're incredibly important, or you get title inflation in your job at KPMG or wherever it is, right? And you're now too important or too different or too disconnected from people that you grew up with. And I think you've... I judge someone who can't keep old friends. I've worked for some politicians that have no one in their lives that knew them when they were not important. And I think that's a telling thing.
00:14:51
Speaker 1: The sliding doors moment, you say you had that moment working in Kay's office where you thought, I'm not going to be standing by the photocopier as a legal clerk. Would you ever have imagined yourself in Canberra if life hadn't taken that turn?
00:15:08
Speaker 2: I think she was the first politician I never met. I applied for the job thinking, I'm going to get it. I didn't join the Young Liberals. I wasn't involved in any of that. I rode at university. I was in the mooting team. I played pretty hard, as I said, but I didn't have a storied political history or anything like that. And I know that's how many people ended up staffers But we had the interview and she asked me about books and we got onto books. And she asked me if I'd been involved in the Liberal Party and I said no. And she said, were you hired? And I said, how on earth did I get the job having no experience in the party? And she said, A, I want someone in my office that hasn't come out of the party stream, and that's you, which I thought was admirable. But two, if you're going to write speeches for me, if you're going to sit in meetings with people in the real world, the fact that you have all these other interests, the fact that you love to read, And she said, I'm a science background and I've been in politics a long time and I've narrowed out my interest stream. And she said, I wanted someone to come in who had a whole different skill set than me. And, you know, as I went through working, what, seven ministers, I think, yeah, you come across politicians that like to hire people different than them, smarter than them, more experienced than them. And those that want a whole lot of people that just say yes, or they want people that know it in their office smarter than them so they're never, ever tested, you know? So she was definitely the foreman at the latter.
00:16:40
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask you a little bit, Peter, about the general culture in Canberra as you recollected back then in the late 1990s. And you would stay in Canberra until 2015. What were your observations as a young woman working in this before, previously very unfamiliar environment, as you say, you hadn't come from those political circles.
00:17:07
Speaker 2: I think it was pretty, well, it was a big step up for me, right? Because everything you touched mattered. Everything you did mattered. Politics, it wasn't as blow by blow as we get now with social media, the coverage of I think midway through those early years, Sky News started back then. That was the first time we really had that 24-7 style US news cycle. But everything was important. Everything that happens at a national level really matters. So the enormity, the responsibility weighed heavily on me. But in terms of the workplace culture, I'd have to say it was more respectful then than it ended up when I left. And you think, how does that work? Because things in the mainstream, in the culture, you'd say, we put more time and effort, more policies in place, more conversations were had about workplace respect and all the boundaries. But I think there was a level of old style, old form politeness there. Whether that was led by John Howard, who was a real stickler for behavior and manners and form, government form, orderly government form, or whether that was just the times. You know, perhaps, I used to say I'm going to write a thesis one day, and not a memoir or anything like that, but a thesis about how I think the mobile phone has really disrupted our politics. And by that, the phone, I also mean the smartphone and the internet access and being able to photograph people when they shouldn't have been photographed or record them when they shouldn't have been recorded. But it goes down to the point that, you know, when the Michelle Grattons of the world used to ring a minister, they went through the switchboard, they ended up at the receptionist, and then the receptionist would walk out the back of the ministerial office and say, hey, boss, Michelle Gratton's on the phone for you. Well, everyone in the office knew the boss was going in to speak to Michelle Gratton. So they went on the record. And if they had nothing to say, they didn't speak to Michelle Grant. It went through the press sec. Nowadays, you've got all of these unnamed sources. You've got all the allegations and claims and rumour to have said, no one's putting their name to them. And as a consequence, the headlines are just running off gossip, basically, interpersonal gossip or who's going to roll who or movements around the cabinet, as opposed to the days when you'd have a rounds journo doing a deep dive into social policy and defence policy and you know, reading the reports and the documents, the costing of these items. I think then we got a better treatment about the issues facing our country than we do about the sort of the personality politics that we're getting now. And I think it all goes back to MPs behaving badly, really, about the conversations with journalists and it's flowed from then. And now I'm on the other side contributing to it, I suppose.
00:20:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes so much sense because then once that becomes the new machinery, the whispers and so-and-so or I could pick up so-and-so said this on TikTok and that somehow becomes a basis of a substantial story. People learn to manipulate the algorithm and And get the stories out that they want and, you know, background against one another, as you say, in a way there was the technology required a certain.
00:20:41
Speaker 2: Level of transparency. A lot of our focus is what's going on inside the Liberal Party informed by Liberal Party leaks or what's going on inside the Labor caucus informed by Labor Party factional leaks. It's not about what's the Libs got on the table in terms of that policy solution to that problem and what's the government or Labor Party's or their understanding of the issues confronting the country. We're not having that longer-form policy discussion anymore. We're not having that conversation about a decade out, where do we want to go as a country. It's incredibly short-term and it's incredibly cheap in terms of its intellectual content, but it's all rumours and it's all gossip And it's all personality based. And I think that's a real problem.
00:21:34
Speaker 1: And I think a lot of people would find it surprising to hear that observation because in a lot of ways, we think generally as a country in a lot of workplaces, including in Parliament House in Canberra, that the culture has improved. And as you're talking about back then, it felt like actually there was, people were more civilised. There was a degree of decorum and transparency and.
00:22:01
Speaker 2: Less sort of insidious.
00:22:05
Speaker 1: Nature of communication, I think it would come as a surprise to a lot of people who would hope that the culture's improved and that we don't get away with the things that we do.
00:22:16
Speaker 2: Well, look at the conduct in Parliament, though. You know, like it hasn't improved. That's gone backwards. And maybe on Pollyanna, maybe because in the Howard era, I had 10 years working in the Senate and that's more collegiate, right? It's a different place. In those days, it wasn't such a big crossbench. There were the Democrats. There was a couple of Greens, a couple of Independents. So there was, I guess, more attempt to come together on amendments and things like that. And the nature of the Senate is senators work on committees, a lot of inquiries. They build rapport with each other. So there's a level of humanity perhaps that you don't see in the House. You know, it's very combatant in the House. And I certainly know when I moved down to the House and worked for Brendan Nelson after Howard lost the 07 election, you know, I was staggered at how sort of brutal the House is. And that just got more brutal over the years. And I think it is now. I think this is where, you know, I watch parliamentary questions in the United Kingdom and the format of their questions over there are, where the Prime Minister comes in once a week, it's a lot more attention on answering the question. It doesn't seem anywhere near as staged as the wasted time we have with the Dorothy Dix's and things like that. And I think it's a better parliamentary experience for voters than perhaps we've got in Australia. I think the Senate is also a different beast as well.
00:23:50
Speaker 1: Coming up, Peter on the 13 rounds of IVF she kept hidden from almost everyone around her. So Peter, as I said, I wanted to talk a little bit about the chief of staff era. So your profile definitely rose dramatically when starting really at the end of 2009 when Tony Abbott became opposition leader of the Liberal Party and you were his chief of staff and then there were three years in opposition and in 2013 he was elected prime minister. The Abbott government was formed and you became chief of staff to the prime minister. I might just start, because we're not a political podcast, for people that have never been inside Parliament House, much less the Prime Minister's office, and they go, I know that Peter Credlin was the Chief of Staff in the Prime Minister's office. I've heard about that. I've seen documentaries. I've seen fictional counterparts. As you and I both know, there's still plenty of people that think all politics is still like the West Wing or something like that. What was the reality of the day-to-day job for you as Chief of Staff?
00:25:03
Speaker 2: Look, it is a bit West Wing-y. I sort of wish it was more West Wing-y sometimes, but it's also a lot of Yes Minister. If you've watched Yes Minister, it sort of collides with the two. Again, go back to when I started, I sort of fell into the job with Kay Patterson out of university. I didn't really ever have a plan, right? So I say this to anyone who's young and is interested in politics or or whatever it is in a career sense. Um, sometimes you don't have to have a plan to end up somewhere pretty fabulous, right? I have just gone with my gut. Um, I've progressively got better at being really tough about who I work with, choosing the people that I think I will get along with, um, to throw my lot in with. I, I think that's part of the battle. It's working with good people and then you bring the best out in yourself. But also, um, being prepared to leave any job if I needed to leave a job, so be financially independent enough to walk on my own terms. But I had been a chief of staff a number of times before I was Tony Abbott's chief of staff, and I'd worked for both Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull in their time as leader, so in and around the House of Representatives from 07 until I worked for Tony in 09. So it struck me as really bizarre that all of a sudden there's Peter Credlin. I'm like, well, Peter Credlin's been here since 98. And I don't know, sort of I rationalized it at the time. What is it? Is it that I'm female and he's this hyper masculine leader. I don't know what sort of made it explode as it exploded. I don't know that it was such a big feature of my time in the opposition era. I think it became more of a story at the time when he was obviously prime minister. Part of it was, as I said, the juxtaposition with this hyper masculine guy. who up against a female prime minister at that time, Julia Gillard. A little bit of timing, obviously he was there with Rudd, but then it was predominantly Gillard. I think that narrative that was building that Tony had a problem with women or whatever, I was sort of the inconvenient argument that, well, he can't have a problem with women because look at his female chief of staff. And then there was this sort of, because I was married to a party official and still am married to a party official, some of the early commentary was, clearly it's nepotistic, she's not up to the job. Again, even though I'd been there for, at this stage, 10 years, that didn't matter. Then it became... well, we can't run that line because look how well they did in the 2010 election. There's the hung parliament after one term. Then the line shifted over here to say, you know, she's not just on top of her brief, she's a micromanager and she's dogmatic and she's this. So you're either Madonna or a whore, aren't you? Like you're one or the other. There's extremes in how we see women leaders or women in positions of authority. And the day... well, you asked me about the day, I better get back on topic, sorry.
00:28:20
Speaker 1: No, this is all fascinating.
00:28:21
Speaker 2: Being a bit discursive for you, but it just struck me that I was either one or the other. But it's a job that's very hard to describe outside of a parliamentary office. Politicians know what the job is, staffers know what the job is, but in the real world it's really hard to translate. It's sort of a jack-of-all-trades and it's probably not as enjoyable, if I'm really honest. I'm a policy wonk before I'm a political strategist. And my most enjoyable jobs have been when I was sort of the broadcasting advisor or the defence advisor in an office reporting to a chief of staff and a minister. Because you become hands-on, you become the expert in, in my case, broadcasting, the ABC and the funding models and da-da-da, defence. I did all the international defence policy, all the international intelligence and cables. That was fascinating. When you're the chief of staff, you're responsible for running the reception and the admin staff and the people that go in the road. And you oversight the press office and the movement of paper through the office and the boss's diary, as well as the policy team and cabinet papers. So you'd be administrator-in-chief is almost probably the better term. You have to have an understanding of all the moving parts. Politics and officers can be sclerotic. You know, things can start here and they just don't get moving because people are risk adverse or they don't make decisions. So part of your job is just to keep the machine moving. And obviously every year, every three years federally, you've got the report card of a federal election result. And so you've got to work constantly to get election ready. And then you are judged at that election and you survive or you don't survive. And one thing you have to come to grips with when you're a political staffer is the uncertainty that at any point you can lose your job, right? You minister Cox up. and they get sacked, you're gone. You literally are, you are gone. You may get rehired by somebody else, but you're gone. You've lost your job. There could be a reshuffle and you've lost your job. There's an election and you've lost your job. So if you can deal with that uncertainty, and that isn't easy when you've got responsibilities or kids or a house or whatever, it is an adrenaline ride, right? And you feel like you are, for all the right reasons, doing something extraordinary for your country or And there is monotony, sure, but there's a real sense of achievement when you can take a problem and you can fix it.
00:31:03
Speaker 1: It would seem to me there was a bit of an unobserved contradiction in the fact that you were working for a prime minister who was, as you say, caught up in a narrative that the Liberal Party in general, or he specifically as prime minister, had a problem with women. And then you're there as... his female chief of staff. So it was used partly, as you say, some people would have gone, well, there's obviously not a problem there. But also you're dealing with people accusing the person you work for of sexism, while I would say dealing with quite profound sexism yourself from all sides of the political divide.
00:31:42
Speaker 2: What are your thoughts? Yeah, I don't think I, to be fair, I don't think I faced, I don't think I faced political sexism in my workplace. I think there are occasions where I had to fight to be taken seriously, but I think men can face that as well. I don't want to overstate how politicians on the left and the right and staff on the left and the right treated me. I think I stood my own ground. And I was experienced before I turned up in Tony's office. I think it would have been hard if I'd come from an external workplace and landed in politics at a senior level like that. But I think that the media treatment was pretty sexist, but that was less really about me and the fact that I was female being used as a way to, you know, the politics of the time, used by opponents occasionally, not always. I think with with Gillard and Ann Abbott at that time, one of the problems she had and it dogged her in her entire political career is there was never a real reason why Kevin 07 was removed in his first term. And I think what she struggled with was an adequate explanation of why he had to go. And I think people had invested a lot in Kevin 07, the main year of that year, that election year when Howard lost There was a huge level of optimism, the 2020 summit and all of that, right? And so even though the political class in Canberra had decided, the Labor political class, what have we done? We can't stand this guy, clearly. The community wasn't there yet, right? They were a long way removed from that. So they wake up one night, wake up one morning and the prime minister has changed. Well, that doesn't happen in Australia. And we just elected this guy and we quite like him. And we've got this woman and who is she and why is she there? And then not long after that, she went to an election and we end up with a hung parliament. I think that's a combination of all of those things that made it a really, um, uh, a tinderbox. And, and on the, on the female prime ministership, and I've thought a lot about this, I really wanted to see a female prime minister. I clearly wanted to see it from my side more than Labor, obviously, but, and, and I'm a huge fan of Thatcher, given the times that she won and her tenure, her length of time in office back in the 70s is just extraordinary, right? So along comes a female prime minister in Australia, and I want her to be a success. Even if my job is to work for a bloke who wants to beat her, I want her to be a success. And it still disappoints me that if I look back the primary assessment we have of the Gillard era is that misogyny speech, right? There's not much else that you attribute to her time in office. And the fact that she was then removed, taken out by her side, that claims this moral mantle about women, well, that doesn't get spoken about much. Ditto with Jacinta Allen in Victoria, installed by one male premier, taken out by another male premier, and she's never faced an election as Labor leader. And I was in the chamber the day of that misogyny speech, right? So I had a seat in the advisor's box and we'd gone into the chamber and Abbott had started a suspension motion because there had been reports in the paper, printed text messages from Peter Slipper at the time, referring to female genitalia as shellfish and mussels and oysters and really, really, disgusting stuff about the very essence of who we are, mockery, absolute mockery. And if he was forced to resign or if she was forced to remove him as her speaker, it was very likely she would have had to call an early election. So she had to go in there all guns blazing and protect her speaker because she was protecting her job. So that's what that speech was about. It wasn't this great call to arms for women. This was a desperate woman protecting a man who deserves to be thrown out in order to save her job, right? And then it's turned into this great fighting speech. But if that's her epitaph, you know, I would want the first female prime minister to have more to show on her CV of achievement than just that.
00:36:27
Speaker 1: As you say, she was removed by her own party in a leadership spill in June 2013. We haven't had another female prime minister since then. Susan Lee was opposition leader of the Liberal Party for only nine months. She was also replaced by Angus Taylor in a leadership spill earlier this year. Do you think that Australia is ready for.
00:36:53
Speaker 2: A female prime minister? Absolutely, yeah, 100%. And a leader. I mean, Lee was removed because she had polls down at 15. A man would have been removed long before the polls got to 15. I mean, let's be brutally honest. The job of the opposition leader is to make you competitive to win the next election. A 15% primary is not competitive. You know, if she'd been on a 25% primary, Susan Lee would be in her job. And I guess, you know, bluntly and brutally, we women in whatever careers we're in, if we don't rate, you don't sell magazines, if I don't rate at night on TV, or if my primary votes at 15... We will be sacked and moved on as we should be. I mean, I believe in equality, not equity. And the lawyer in me says that's two very different things. I want a fair go. I don't want a leg up. I want a fair go. And you will judge me based on my effort and my merit. And if I don't make the grade, you know, if I sit on News 24 every night and I'm a cellar dweller in the ratings, well, I'll get coat hanging out of the way if I write a column. for this paper and no one wants to read it. Well, you won't keep my column there, will you? I mean, this is the nature of the beast. And so if you go into politics or you go into any senior job, you have to accept the scoreboard and that's the challenge. So do I think we're ready, Australia's ready for a woman leader, prime minister? Absolutely. But we just have to have really good competitive candidates. Now, the argument is how do women get the opportunity? Absolutely. I think that is a fair fight to have. But it's not about being installed into these jobs. That never works. You have to win it fair and square.
00:38:42
Speaker 1: You said once in an interview that when you first met Tony Abbott to start working for him as Chief of Staff, that you described yourself as a right-wing feminist. You sitting here with me in the latter half of 2026, how would you describe yourself in.
00:38:59
Speaker 2: Terms of feminism? I think I think if I had to say who I was, and have I changed a lot in life? Have you had a journey of discovery or anything like that? I think I have all the experiences, the knocks and the scars have made me a better judge of character. I think they've enriched me and they've enriched my life. I think I've said before, I'll say it again. I mean, I never wanted to be rich. I never wanted to be famous. I never wanted an easy life, actually. I just wanted to make a difference, right? And I am, as a kid from which you prove, I have far exceeded any expectation I ever had in my life, right? I think I'm blessed to live the life I do and to sit on TV like I do every night and to to be able to have an honest opinion, right? But I think along the way, at 27, 28, I don't think I'm any different than I was then. I think that was when I was a fully formed person, particularly on this issue of feminism, right? I would probably at uni have pooh-poohed the idea that you even needed feminism. And I think it's a really loaded term. It's a hard one. I know a lot of women on the right won't have a bar of it. To me, as a kid of the 70s, it's about a fair go. It's women having a fair shot. It's unencumbered opportunity. It's the opportunity to rise as high as our brains and our effort and our competence should mean we rise. But it's not where it is now. where it becomes, again, equity versus equality, where it is you need to be pushed into a role, there needs to be a seat held for you at the table that you haven't necessarily earned with hard effort, or there has to be some sort of other advantage paid to you by your gender. And particularly when we start having this whole conversation about what is a woman anyway, I just think it's absolutely fanciful that we have this debate about looking after women and helping women when basically anyone under the law can be a woman. And again, that's another legacy of Gillard. She changed the Sex Discrimination Act to remove our biological rights. And I think that's incredibly dangerous for women. So I'm an old style feminist where I think women's biological rights matter.
00:41:43
Speaker 1: We were talking about the fact that you haven't done many interviews.
00:41:46
Speaker 2: I'm probably getting myself in a lot of trouble here.
00:41:49
Speaker 1: No, I remember it was a really powerful interview. And people don't always, I think, attribute where interviews originate. So as a journalist, I'm a big believer in giving credit where it is due. And this was to Marie Claire in 2013. And I remember at the time being very moved by the fact that you opened up about undergoing IVF. And you at that time were obviously working as Chief of Staff in opposition and then actually in the Prime Minister's office. So as being touched upon, a very big, high-pressure job. It doesn't matter what a woman is going through in her life. IVF is a gruelling experience. But you were in this intense environment working Opening up about that in 2013, it was incredibly rare. And I remember having great admiration and empathy for you. In 2013, that was not a conversation that was happening in Australia. What are your memories like? of that time and looking back now again, as you and I are chatting here in the second half of 2026, do you think that the conversation has moved on about how we grill other women about their fertility journey and their experience with motherhood?
00:43:11
Speaker 2: Well, even now I don't know why I even said it, right? I didn't do any media. And one of the reasons why I think I found– The last few years when I worked for Tony and then obviously he was removed as PM and there was all that media retention, we weren't allowed, staff don't do interviews. And so I had no voice to contend with this growing narrative, right? That's the first thing. And part of the reason I ended up on News 24 and agreed to start working TV in 2016 was I knew you can't contest the narrative if you don't put yourself out there. and allow people to have an alternative view. And I didn't go through all the stuff that had been raised, seriatim or anything like that. I didn't tackle every single point of every single book. But what I decided to do was, if I was advising a politician how to arrest an old narrative, I'd say, put yourself out there and people will make up their own mind. But they've got to hear a primary source from the horse's mouth and make a judgment about your character. So that's why I got into TV. Now, I was asked to do a photo shoot for Women Leaders or something, I think that was. And I was talking to the makeup artist. Now, that's a fatal mistake, isn't it? Lovely girl, did a great job with my makeup. And I think the journo that was there at the shoot overheard and said, oh my God, I had no idea, can I use that? And I sort of, I think I might have even got teary at the time. And I said, yeah, okay. And then only when I got in the cab and went back to go to Cambridge, I think, what the heck have I done? And I had to ring my husband and say, I've just, you know, because it's not, yes, the woman is at the pointy end of the process, but it's, both of you were trying to have children, obviously, having a child. Partly, I think the reason why I left it on the table was, and I don't want to sound like this is an arrogant comment, it's not, because Everything I sort of have achieved, I have worked really hard, right? And some of them have been worked hard and it's come easy. Some of them have been worked hard and it's come really hard, right? But I took up rowing when I got to university and I ended up rowing for the university. I decided I wanted to go to law school. I worked really hard at the end of high school and I ended up in a law school. I wanted to make a real success of my time in politics. I ended up a Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister. If I've set my mind on something, Sarah, I've put the effort in and tried to land it. This was the first really big important thing in my life that I thought would come easy, didn't. I then go the hard route of IVF and I had 13 cycles and there were 13 egg collection cycles as opposed to all the other transfers on top of that. If anyone is listening that's done IVF, that's harrowing, right? And I did all of that, tried to keep it private, didn't want even people in the office to know. Really hard when you're carrying around drugs and you're travelling like you do in politics. And I had to sort of, through all of that, come to terms with the idea that I was not actually going to be successful. And so you've got to grieve and you've got to do all of that privately. At the same time, you're in a hung parliament, you're getting ready for an election, you're thinking, is there a space where I can have another go at this? And at this stage, I'm in my late 30s, and that window closes fast. And I think I probably believe too much of the bullshit that IVF would just solve the problems for you. If I'd known 30 to 35 is the closing window, not 35 to 40. For most people, everybody's different. But for me, by the time I started trying in my mid-30s, it was already going to be tough. And I now know that trying to have a baby and IVF collided with perimenopause. And so coming out of IVF, this is 39, probably by now 40, I hit menopause and really hard. And early menopause in your 40s back then when HRT really wasn't on the table, I was saved by an amazing female doctor in Canberra who said, I don't believe the tiny little sample studies. I want to send you to a professor in Sydney who's a great male, fabulous man. And I went on HRT and that saved my life because if I, you know, I'm in my 50s, mid-50s now, if I had not had HRT, And everybody's different. I'm not pushing that barrow. But if I had not had someone who took perimenopause seriously or menopause seriously all those years ago, I would be in a totally different headspace. It's a conversation we're having now. Absolutely. And we didn't have for such a long time. So I feel like I proselytize a little bit on menopause with my girlfriends who are only just getting there now. But I say, you've just got to be really aggressive about your own health. And along the way, part of that for me is nutrition and discovering the gym and making appointments in my diary to look after me. When you work in politics or you're busy in any job, right, you allow everybody else's urgent to crowd you out of your own life. So I would put stuff in the diary to do health-wise or exercise-wise, but there was a brief that needed to be done or a cabinet paper to be looked over or someone else's time was um, more important than mine. Now I put stuff in the diary early morning to exercise and I don't move it. Like it doesn't move. And that helps keep my head straight. And it's taken me a long time to get there. You know, that was, that was all of those experiences. but it was also, you know, six lockdowns in Melbourne and I really struggled. And I'd say I've got a resilient mental health, Sarah, but I found the isolations, the lockdown, no access to the gym. Melbourne, you couldn't even walk around with an open coffee cup, right? You, you, the, the mask, The ridiculousness of Melbourne meant it was just a really, really tough two-year period. And I came out of that and thought, okay, I'm changing my life. And I've tried in what, that's six years now, to stick at it, fall off the wagon a little bit. But by and large, I've got to a place where I'm really comfortable in my skin.
00:50:01
Speaker 1: Let's go back to 2015. There's another leadership spill. Your time in Canberra comes to an end. You start over the following year writing a column for the News Corp papers. As we've talked about this earlier in our conversation, as yourself, Peter Credlin, the political commentator, not a chief of staff, not running a prime minister's office or an opposition leader's office. Then in the 2016 federal election, you started doing some commentating and appearances on then Sky News Australia and now News 24. And here we are, 2026, 10 years later, you're still writing the column and hosting your own show four nights a week. Tell me a little bit about the shift, first of all, in your public profile, because I've asked you before about this very unexpected, possibly unprecedented experience of becoming a incredibly well known as a political staffer, not something that happens normally in Australia.
00:51:04
Speaker 2: Partially caricature. I think partially caricature because I didn't add to the voice in that, Sarah. That was everybody else's extrapolation or interpretation. Partly, I think Malcolm Turnbull learnt from Julia Gillard's mistake of not being able to have an explanation for terminating a prime minister. And his explanation was Um, you know, Abbott had lost all these news polls, cabinet government wasn't working, his office was maniacal, dah, dah, dah, dah, right? So, so in that respect, I was collateral in, in that assessment. So I come out and decide, okay, fine. When I got offered to do some commentating for the campaign and I was working for James Packer at the time, uh, again, never intending to have a public life after that, um, after leaving Canberra. I agreed to do it to disrupt the narrative in part because even as I got around Sydney and Melbourne, I look like Peter Credlin, right? So people had a view about me and I couldn't adjust that view unless I adjusted the narrative. So I agreed to do it. I liked it. I liked lifting the veil a little bit on my assessments of, okay, they're saying that in the campaign, this is really what's going on or This is a pretty ordinary policy response, and this is a pretty good policy response. And I love a campaign, like I'm a natural campaigner. So I liked it, right? Really liked it. And then that experience turned into a program. It's still daunting. Like I much prefer, say, radio or writing a column because TV, it's live. Every night at six o'clock, it's live. And so you've just got to ride that wave. I'm not a TV journo, right? I'm not as practiced as some of my amazing colleagues. I'm not as smooth as they are. But when I'm talking about politics, I know what I'm talking about, right? So I forget that the cameras are there and I'm in the moment, but I still have about two and a half seconds at the start of every night going, what the heck am I doing here? How did I get here? Or Or I see myself, as I do in Sydney, on the side of a bus, you know, News 24, you know, the new branding. I still think that's a bit wild. But again, all I wanted out of life was to do something I loved, right? To get out of bed and do a job that every day I'd say to myself, I'd do this for free. You know, if I could afford it, would I still do this job? Would I do this job for free? And I don't think there's ever been a job in politics or now in the media where At a time that I've thought, this is drudgery, I wish I was doing something else. When I was at uni and I was waitressing or I used to work in the boxes of the footy, in the corporate boxes, that was hard work. Or retail, that's hard work. Or working on a farm, that's hard work. I am blessed to do what I do, Sarah. It's not hard work. It's not hard work. And given where we are in Australia at the moment, to be able to have... And to be able to voice it fearlessly. And I don't get it right all the time. Absolutely not. And people will disagree with me because of my politics. But you're in the debate, right? You're in the eye of the storm. And that's a pretty lucky place to be.
00:54:39
Speaker 1: I think my final question might be about the sliding doors moment again. We spoke earlier about that realisation when you were in Kay Patterson's office thinking, okay, well, Canberra, here we are. I'm not leaving. And then as we're sitting here and you've marked 10 years on News 24 and as a columnist and now when people... come up to you and we see you on the side of a bus. It is as Peter Credlin, not the character chewer. It is you. And you're, of course, yes, there's still people don't really ever know someone. I mean, still people transferring things, but it's very much your own voice, your own platform. That I imagine is also nothing that you ever expected. Do you throw forward to 10, 20 years and think, What is the next sliding door ahead of me? Because, as you say, you're in your mid-50s. That's the other aspect of this conversation, isn't it, that's so great, is that used to be a time where, like, thank you, you're done now, not just in politics, in all areas. So, you know, potentially looking forward, if you want to, for working for another 30 years. What is the other sliding door that might be down.
00:55:55
Speaker 2: The track, do you think? Oh, gosh, yeah. You know, I was doing something at Melbourne Uni as an honorary professorial fellow for a while. And I love that involvement with the 20-somethings at uni, you know, because I remember any exposure I had then to a judge or a lawyer or– There's some amazing feminist academics that I spent time with then that I didn't always agree with, right, but just got me thinking and reading and debating. And so, you know, maybe it's uni, something with a uni, maybe it's writing a book. Again, I would never write a memoir. Because being a staffer and being in that room, you're not the principal, right? You're not the elected person in the room. You're someone who has the privilege to be in the inside of the process. And I think I would be dishonoring a lot of confidential and private moments that my access was... privileged, I suppose, is the best word for it. And I wouldn't want to do that, right? I think that's, I think that crosses a line as a staffer. But, you know, remember that book, Primary Colors? Yeah. Yeah, anonymous. Maybe one day there'll be a campaign book that turns out written by me, but not me. I don't know that the work of fiction, maybe. I don't know. I just want to, I just want to do something I love, right? And In all of it, and I'm really careful what I say on air and stuff, I just want to be authentic. I want to be able to look back at things I've said and by and large still own them and still believe in them and still fight for them. You know, the country kid in me, Sarah, wants to be, I don't want to ever think I'm too good for the issue or the people or I just want to be real. And I think this is where You know, we haven't really talked about Hanson. We've talked about other party politics. But part of the reason why the system's in such flux is the staged politician, that era of the staged politician regurgitating the lines, not honouring their commitments. I think that's really being disrupted at the moment. And I think in everything, right, even right down to social media reels, authenticity is prized. And I want to stay in that space.
00:58:40
Speaker 1: Peter Credlin, it's been so fascinating, a real delight to talk to you.
00:58:44
Speaker 2: I think you are the first interview. My very first interview was David Spears when I left politics to go on the channel. And 10 years later, you are my second interview.
00:58:53
Speaker 1: Well, I hope I haven't disappointed you and don't leave it for another 10 years. And you can see and hear more of Peter on Credlin, Monday to Thursday at 6pm on News24 on Foxtel and news24.
00:59:06
Speaker 2: Com. au.
00:59:07
Speaker 1: Peter, thanks again for joining us. me here today.
00:59:10
Speaker 2: You're welcome, Sarah.
00:59:12
Speaker 1: If you've enjoyed this episode, we'd love it if you'd take a moment to leave a review. We'll be back with another episode of Something to Talk About next week.
Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to Something to Talk About, the Stella podcast. I'm Sarah Lamarquand, your host, and every week I sit down with some of the biggest names in the country, because when Australia's celebrities are ready to talk, they come to Something to Talk About. You might think you know a lot about Peter Credlin, but in truth, you probably don't. After all, she doesn't give many interviews. In fact, today's conversation with Stella is her first in 10 years. So sure, you might know Peter as the host of Credlin on News 24 or as a former Chief of Staff to Australia's 28th Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, a role which saw her become arguably the most famous parliamentary staffer in Australia. But before any of that, she was a country girl from the tiny Victorian town of Witchproof. and with no political connections and certainly no grand plan to end up in Canberra.
00:01:01
Speaker 2: I never wanted to be rich. I never wanted to be famous. I never wanted an easy life, actually. I just wanted to make a difference, right?
00:01:09
Speaker 1: In today's episode, Peter also gets personal about going public with her IVF journey, how a doctor quote-unquote saved her life when she was entering menopause, and how she's transitioned over the past decade from a career in Canberra to that of a television anchor and columnist. She also shares her complicated perspective on women and power, revealing why, even as she worked for the opposition in trying to defeat Julia Gillard, she still wanted Australia's first female Prime Minister to succeed.
00:01:41
Speaker 2: Along comes a female Prime Minister in Australia, and I want her to be a success, even if my job is to work for a bloke who wants to beat her. I want her to be a success.
00:01:50
Speaker 1: This is Peter Credlin, the woman behind thousands of headlines like you've never heard her. Peter Credlin, welcome to the Stella podcast.
00:02:00
Speaker 2: I tell you what, this is a little bit of a reversal because I don't think I've been interviewed for a good decade, Sarah. So I'm delighted to be here.
00:02:08
Speaker 1: We thought it was a good time because this year is actually marking 10 years since you have been working at News24, previously known as Sky News Australia, and been writing columns.
00:02:19
Speaker 2: And writing for the paper.
00:02:21
Speaker 1: Exactly, published by the News Corp papers. But before all of that, of course, you're one of the most high-profile political staffers in Australian history, worked in Canberra for 16 years. But I actually want to go back even a little bit further, Peter Credlin, before all of that. You are a country girl from regional Victoria. You grew up in a town called Witchproof, which according to the 2021 census, had a population of 610. Tiny little town.
00:02:52
Speaker 2: It's on the road between Melbourne and Mildura. I'll put it into some context, about halfway up. So three and a half, four hours from Melbourne. And when I was growing up, I had a grandma in Melbourne. We'd go to Melbourne... a lot, but that was considered very cosmopolitan. I mean, I knew people I went to school with that had never really left the town. My dad's side moved there in the 1850s. Victoria only became Victoria about that same time. So long history on the land, hot in summer, you know, mid 40s, a salt of the earth people, most people with pretty rudimentary education in my dad's era, Obviously, my time, if you wanted to go beyond high school, you really had to leave the town. But it shaped me enormously, you know. And maybe it's a story of a Gen X person who lived before devices. But, you know, on the weekends, you're on the bike, you swim in the channel. I used to kill the sheep with my dad, so he had fresh lamb in the freezer. Yeah. Um, you rode motorbikes, you left early in the morning and you came home when it got dark, you know, enormous freedom. None of the pressures I think that young people have today, probably a lot more risk. And we're a bit naive to the risks, but also I have to say a blessed childhood, right? There's nothing, we didn't have a lot of money, but we just had glorious years, I think, to really find who I was and and get that resilience, I think, that I drew on when I got to Canberra.
00:04:23
Speaker 1: You are definitely someone who went on to be a person who really had to hold your own in rooms with some of the most powerful people, not just in the country, but in the world. And often one of the only women, if not the only woman in that room. I have had the privilege in this role of talking to a lot of incredible women. And it's interesting, quite a few of those women did also grow up in regional parts of the world and regional parts of Australia. Some of them have said everyone's experience is different. There can just be a little bit of a straight shooter element and something about learning to hold your own. Would you agree with those observations from your own experience?
00:05:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's pretty true. I mean, I think certainly for me growing up in the country, it was a stripped back, resilient environment. bare upbringing, if I can say that, because I was often told, you're too blunt. But blunt was prized where I grew up, the authenticity, the honesty, a little bit like Hanson, direct and to the point, as opposed to often in Canberra, there's that circuitous language that people have. I never know when I might need that person's vote down the track. So I'm not going to tell them that they're a dickhead, but they are. So you sort of, you crowd it out with all that language that we often don't like to see or hear in our politicians. So there was that. I think my dad was a huge role model. My dad was a really strong country man. He didn't have much formal education, Sarah. He left school when he was 12 years of age, not year 12, 12 years of age. But he's got five kids and all the kids have got postgrads. So that tells you in a generation, A, he prized education. He wanted us to be better educated than he was. But he also taught us to stand up for ourselves and particularly the girls in the family. We found our voice pretty young and he really encouraged that, right? So in a room, I've never been the wallflower in the room. I've never felt like I have to speak. He also used to say to me, you know, you can shut up and let people think you're stupid, but you can open your mouth and demonstrate you are. So, you know, be careful when you do open your mouth that you've got something worthy to say. But also that if you're there, take that seat at the table, like be a part of the conversation and, you know, own your opinion. And I think they're sort of the lessons that have stuck with me.
00:06:58
Speaker 1: Tell me about your own experience about moving away from your hometown and You studied law at the University of Melbourne. Was that a difficult decision? And how was life when you moved from it being this glamorous place you would visit, relatives, to being somewhere where you were living and studying full time?
00:07:17
Speaker 2: A bit intimidating, if I'm honest. You know, at the end of my high school years, I went to a girls' school in Geelong. And my mum will always say they sort of rounded out the rough edges and made me a bit more presentable. I suppose that's very true. And those girls are my squad, right? I am still really, really close to girls I went to school with. There's a couple that I travel overseas with every year on holidays. We're on a girls chat. I'd hate to see that ever published in the media because it gets pretty wild on some occasions. My husband calls us the Catholic mafia and he's a bit of a girls Catholic mafia. But Even with that little sort of urban age in Geelong, I still arrived at Melbourne Uni and was pretty intimidated. Law school in those days didn't have that many girls there. Certainly there were plenty compared to earlier generations, but nowhere near 50% or anything like that. And I lived on campus at a residential college, a Newman College run by the Jesuits. I threw myself into college life, perhaps a bit too much in the first couple of years. I played a lot of sport. I think that's a great leveller, helps you meet people. I still, I think, had a bit of a chip on my shoulder that I came from a really tiny part of Victoria. Now I own that as a badge of pride, but I think perhaps I was a bit intimidated by the big private schools in Melbourne and things like that. So that took a while to settle in.
00:08:41
Speaker 1: I think a chip on a shoulder can be a really good thing sometimes to have in your toolkit, maybe especially during those early years.
00:08:50
Speaker 2: Not that it was a negative. I wouldn't say I was embarrassed about where I came from. But maybe it was like a reservation, a reserved me not thinking perhaps I was up to the mark. And two things happened there. One, that made me work even harder to prove that I was to myself more than anyone. But then I also recognised it when I got to Canberra and dealt with people who were perhaps coming in to see a minister or lobbying on an issue. And if they were from a country area or if I felt that they... you know, like a fish out of water in Canberra, I sort of try and find a way to put them at ease, you know, as an equaliser, because I recognised in them what I knew to be, you know, how I felt when I crossed the threshold into a foreign environment. Absolutely.
00:09:41
Speaker 1: I think any of those, whatever we call them, rough edges, experiences, Chip on the shoulder. Anything that I think results in some sort of empathy and shorthand throughout your life. It's a really remarkable quality.
00:09:55
Speaker 2: And look, we're lucky. We're lucky, you know, my generation that our lives weren't documented. like they are today. You know, we can make the mistakes. I do get bad images of me in my 20s thrown at me by my girlfriends every once in a while to bring me down to earth. But, you know, all the mistakes that you make, there was a latitude to make them knowing they weren't documented. But they're also not coming back to haunt you, which I think is one of the reasons why A lot of people now think twice about public life. You know, what's going to be dredged up from the past? What have I done? What have I said? What's going to get me cancelled? And I don't think that's good for democracy.
00:10:28
Speaker 1: That's right, because it's narrowing the pool, isn't it, of people that will put their hand up. Peter, once you graduated, as I understand it, you were then admitted as.
00:10:38
Speaker 2: A barrister in Victoria. Yeah, that came later on, Sarah, actually. I was to have a year off. This is long before the years of gap years. I'd finished my degree. And a girlfriend and I planned to go to London for a year. She was working in finance. I was going to just work in pubs and travel around and whatever. And my dad died very suddenly. I was in my early 20s at this stage. So I held back my flight, hoping to join her. And within a couple of months, my mom had a massive heart attack, quad bypass, touch and go with her. She would survive. And she's 14 years younger than my dad. So the thought that, you know, you could lose both your parents' youngs My brother and my sister were still at school and that really shook me. So I decided not to go to the UK. But seeing at home and helping mum recover, I was bored out of my brain as well. So she said, you need to go and find something to do. And there was a job in the paper working for a senator, Kay Patterson, and I applied. And I took that job and I did that job. And within the first few months of sitting in Canberra in the sort of the eye of the storm, commuting backwards and forwards between Melbourne and I thought, there's no way I'm going to stand by a photocopier as a first-year law student. I don't want to do that. I mean, I'd worked in a law firm all the way through uni, so I knew that there was a huge amount of entry-level drudgery when you first start. And I had this opportunity with Kay to sit in the chamber. This is in the Howard government, up in the Senate, draft amendments to bills, some of them very, very basic, sure, ticked off by the tables, Clark, but they make their way into legislation. I mean, how intoxicating is that? And I remember writing a little speech for her to take note after question time one day, and she read it into the Hansard, and then she gave me a copy of it and signed it. I still have that. I still have that. And when she retired from the parliament, and MPs in those days got all of their speeches in a bound book, she went out of her way, case extraordinary, to find that particular volume of Hansard that had my first ever written speech for a politician in it. And she presented it to me as a sort of a farewell gift. And, you know, there's lots of things I've done and seen in all those years in politics, but that volume is incredibly special to me. And she went on, Kay, I don't know if people know, to be our aged commissioner on the Human Rights Commission. She's in her 80s now. She's a gerontologist. We're still really close. But she gave me this advice really early on when I started in politics. She said, this place will suck you in and you'll think that these people are your friends forever and a day and you will grow distant from those you've loved and your mates prior to this place. And she said, that is a big mistake because the old friends will be there when you leave here and you'll be lucky to get just a handful to come out of the Canberra world. And so I took those words to heart. She certainly did. And I fostered all my old relationships and I still have them. And I look at people that went through politics about the same era as me and they've come away and they don't have political friends because they evaporate and they lost contact with the people they knew before they went in. And I think that's something I'm really pleased she said to me early enough that I took notice.
00:14:07
Speaker 1: It's such great advice. And I think it's so important in something like the bubble, what we call the Canberra bubble, but for other industries as.
00:14:17
Speaker 2: Well that feel all-consuming. Absolutely. You see your name up in lights, you think you're incredibly important, or you get title inflation in your job at KPMG or wherever it is, right? And you're now too important or too different or too disconnected from people that you grew up with. And I think you've... I judge someone who can't keep old friends. I've worked for some politicians that have no one in their lives that knew them when they were not important. And I think that's a telling thing.
00:14:51
Speaker 1: The sliding doors moment, you say you had that moment working in Kay's office where you thought, I'm not going to be standing by the photocopier as a legal clerk. Would you ever have imagined yourself in Canberra if life hadn't taken that turn?
00:15:08
Speaker 2: I think she was the first politician I never met. I applied for the job thinking, I'm going to get it. I didn't join the Young Liberals. I wasn't involved in any of that. I rode at university. I was in the mooting team. I played pretty hard, as I said, but I didn't have a storied political history or anything like that. And I know that's how many people ended up staffers But we had the interview and she asked me about books and we got onto books. And she asked me if I'd been involved in the Liberal Party and I said no. And she said, were you hired? And I said, how on earth did I get the job having no experience in the party? And she said, A, I want someone in my office that hasn't come out of the party stream, and that's you, which I thought was admirable. But two, if you're going to write speeches for me, if you're going to sit in meetings with people in the real world, the fact that you have all these other interests, the fact that you love to read, And she said, I'm a science background and I've been in politics a long time and I've narrowed out my interest stream. And she said, I wanted someone to come in who had a whole different skill set than me. And, you know, as I went through working, what, seven ministers, I think, yeah, you come across politicians that like to hire people different than them, smarter than them, more experienced than them. And those that want a whole lot of people that just say yes, or they want people that know it in their office smarter than them so they're never, ever tested, you know? So she was definitely the foreman at the latter.
00:16:40
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask you a little bit, Peter, about the general culture in Canberra as you recollected back then in the late 1990s. And you would stay in Canberra until 2015. What were your observations as a young woman working in this before, previously very unfamiliar environment, as you say, you hadn't come from those political circles.
00:17:07
Speaker 2: I think it was pretty, well, it was a big step up for me, right? Because everything you touched mattered. Everything you did mattered. Politics, it wasn't as blow by blow as we get now with social media, the coverage of I think midway through those early years, Sky News started back then. That was the first time we really had that 24-7 style US news cycle. But everything was important. Everything that happens at a national level really matters. So the enormity, the responsibility weighed heavily on me. But in terms of the workplace culture, I'd have to say it was more respectful then than it ended up when I left. And you think, how does that work? Because things in the mainstream, in the culture, you'd say, we put more time and effort, more policies in place, more conversations were had about workplace respect and all the boundaries. But I think there was a level of old style, old form politeness there. Whether that was led by John Howard, who was a real stickler for behavior and manners and form, government form, orderly government form, or whether that was just the times. You know, perhaps, I used to say I'm going to write a thesis one day, and not a memoir or anything like that, but a thesis about how I think the mobile phone has really disrupted our politics. And by that, the phone, I also mean the smartphone and the internet access and being able to photograph people when they shouldn't have been photographed or record them when they shouldn't have been recorded. But it goes down to the point that, you know, when the Michelle Grattons of the world used to ring a minister, they went through the switchboard, they ended up at the receptionist, and then the receptionist would walk out the back of the ministerial office and say, hey, boss, Michelle Gratton's on the phone for you. Well, everyone in the office knew the boss was going in to speak to Michelle Gratton. So they went on the record. And if they had nothing to say, they didn't speak to Michelle Grant. It went through the press sec. Nowadays, you've got all of these unnamed sources. You've got all the allegations and claims and rumour to have said, no one's putting their name to them. And as a consequence, the headlines are just running off gossip, basically, interpersonal gossip or who's going to roll who or movements around the cabinet, as opposed to the days when you'd have a rounds journo doing a deep dive into social policy and defence policy and you know, reading the reports and the documents, the costing of these items. I think then we got a better treatment about the issues facing our country than we do about the sort of the personality politics that we're getting now. And I think it all goes back to MPs behaving badly, really, about the conversations with journalists and it's flowed from then. And now I'm on the other side contributing to it, I suppose.
00:20:15
Speaker 1: Yeah, it makes so much sense because then once that becomes the new machinery, the whispers and so-and-so or I could pick up so-and-so said this on TikTok and that somehow becomes a basis of a substantial story. People learn to manipulate the algorithm and And get the stories out that they want and, you know, background against one another, as you say, in a way there was the technology required a certain.
00:20:41
Speaker 2: Level of transparency. A lot of our focus is what's going on inside the Liberal Party informed by Liberal Party leaks or what's going on inside the Labor caucus informed by Labor Party factional leaks. It's not about what's the Libs got on the table in terms of that policy solution to that problem and what's the government or Labor Party's or their understanding of the issues confronting the country. We're not having that longer-form policy discussion anymore. We're not having that conversation about a decade out, where do we want to go as a country. It's incredibly short-term and it's incredibly cheap in terms of its intellectual content, but it's all rumours and it's all gossip And it's all personality based. And I think that's a real problem.
00:21:34
Speaker 1: And I think a lot of people would find it surprising to hear that observation because in a lot of ways, we think generally as a country in a lot of workplaces, including in Parliament House in Canberra, that the culture has improved. And as you're talking about back then, it felt like actually there was, people were more civilised. There was a degree of decorum and transparency and.
00:22:01
Speaker 2: Less sort of insidious.
00:22:05
Speaker 1: Nature of communication, I think it would come as a surprise to a lot of people who would hope that the culture's improved and that we don't get away with the things that we do.
00:22:16
Speaker 2: Well, look at the conduct in Parliament, though. You know, like it hasn't improved. That's gone backwards. And maybe on Pollyanna, maybe because in the Howard era, I had 10 years working in the Senate and that's more collegiate, right? It's a different place. In those days, it wasn't such a big crossbench. There were the Democrats. There was a couple of Greens, a couple of Independents. So there was, I guess, more attempt to come together on amendments and things like that. And the nature of the Senate is senators work on committees, a lot of inquiries. They build rapport with each other. So there's a level of humanity perhaps that you don't see in the House. You know, it's very combatant in the House. And I certainly know when I moved down to the House and worked for Brendan Nelson after Howard lost the 07 election, you know, I was staggered at how sort of brutal the House is. And that just got more brutal over the years. And I think it is now. I think this is where, you know, I watch parliamentary questions in the United Kingdom and the format of their questions over there are, where the Prime Minister comes in once a week, it's a lot more attention on answering the question. It doesn't seem anywhere near as staged as the wasted time we have with the Dorothy Dix's and things like that. And I think it's a better parliamentary experience for voters than perhaps we've got in Australia. I think the Senate is also a different beast as well.
00:23:50
Speaker 1: Coming up, Peter on the 13 rounds of IVF she kept hidden from almost everyone around her. So Peter, as I said, I wanted to talk a little bit about the chief of staff era. So your profile definitely rose dramatically when starting really at the end of 2009 when Tony Abbott became opposition leader of the Liberal Party and you were his chief of staff and then there were three years in opposition and in 2013 he was elected prime minister. The Abbott government was formed and you became chief of staff to the prime minister. I might just start, because we're not a political podcast, for people that have never been inside Parliament House, much less the Prime Minister's office, and they go, I know that Peter Credlin was the Chief of Staff in the Prime Minister's office. I've heard about that. I've seen documentaries. I've seen fictional counterparts. As you and I both know, there's still plenty of people that think all politics is still like the West Wing or something like that. What was the reality of the day-to-day job for you as Chief of Staff?
00:25:03
Speaker 2: Look, it is a bit West Wing-y. I sort of wish it was more West Wing-y sometimes, but it's also a lot of Yes Minister. If you've watched Yes Minister, it sort of collides with the two. Again, go back to when I started, I sort of fell into the job with Kay Patterson out of university. I didn't really ever have a plan, right? So I say this to anyone who's young and is interested in politics or or whatever it is in a career sense. Um, sometimes you don't have to have a plan to end up somewhere pretty fabulous, right? I have just gone with my gut. Um, I've progressively got better at being really tough about who I work with, choosing the people that I think I will get along with, um, to throw my lot in with. I, I think that's part of the battle. It's working with good people and then you bring the best out in yourself. But also, um, being prepared to leave any job if I needed to leave a job, so be financially independent enough to walk on my own terms. But I had been a chief of staff a number of times before I was Tony Abbott's chief of staff, and I'd worked for both Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull in their time as leader, so in and around the House of Representatives from 07 until I worked for Tony in 09. So it struck me as really bizarre that all of a sudden there's Peter Credlin. I'm like, well, Peter Credlin's been here since 98. And I don't know, sort of I rationalized it at the time. What is it? Is it that I'm female and he's this hyper masculine leader. I don't know what sort of made it explode as it exploded. I don't know that it was such a big feature of my time in the opposition era. I think it became more of a story at the time when he was obviously prime minister. Part of it was, as I said, the juxtaposition with this hyper masculine guy. who up against a female prime minister at that time, Julia Gillard. A little bit of timing, obviously he was there with Rudd, but then it was predominantly Gillard. I think that narrative that was building that Tony had a problem with women or whatever, I was sort of the inconvenient argument that, well, he can't have a problem with women because look at his female chief of staff. And then there was this sort of, because I was married to a party official and still am married to a party official, some of the early commentary was, clearly it's nepotistic, she's not up to the job. Again, even though I'd been there for, at this stage, 10 years, that didn't matter. Then it became... well, we can't run that line because look how well they did in the 2010 election. There's the hung parliament after one term. Then the line shifted over here to say, you know, she's not just on top of her brief, she's a micromanager and she's dogmatic and she's this. So you're either Madonna or a whore, aren't you? Like you're one or the other. There's extremes in how we see women leaders or women in positions of authority. And the day... well, you asked me about the day, I better get back on topic, sorry.
00:28:20
Speaker 1: No, this is all fascinating.
00:28:21
Speaker 2: Being a bit discursive for you, but it just struck me that I was either one or the other. But it's a job that's very hard to describe outside of a parliamentary office. Politicians know what the job is, staffers know what the job is, but in the real world it's really hard to translate. It's sort of a jack-of-all-trades and it's probably not as enjoyable, if I'm really honest. I'm a policy wonk before I'm a political strategist. And my most enjoyable jobs have been when I was sort of the broadcasting advisor or the defence advisor in an office reporting to a chief of staff and a minister. Because you become hands-on, you become the expert in, in my case, broadcasting, the ABC and the funding models and da-da-da, defence. I did all the international defence policy, all the international intelligence and cables. That was fascinating. When you're the chief of staff, you're responsible for running the reception and the admin staff and the people that go in the road. And you oversight the press office and the movement of paper through the office and the boss's diary, as well as the policy team and cabinet papers. So you'd be administrator-in-chief is almost probably the better term. You have to have an understanding of all the moving parts. Politics and officers can be sclerotic. You know, things can start here and they just don't get moving because people are risk adverse or they don't make decisions. So part of your job is just to keep the machine moving. And obviously every year, every three years federally, you've got the report card of a federal election result. And so you've got to work constantly to get election ready. And then you are judged at that election and you survive or you don't survive. And one thing you have to come to grips with when you're a political staffer is the uncertainty that at any point you can lose your job, right? You minister Cox up. and they get sacked, you're gone. You literally are, you are gone. You may get rehired by somebody else, but you're gone. You've lost your job. There could be a reshuffle and you've lost your job. There's an election and you've lost your job. So if you can deal with that uncertainty, and that isn't easy when you've got responsibilities or kids or a house or whatever, it is an adrenaline ride, right? And you feel like you are, for all the right reasons, doing something extraordinary for your country or And there is monotony, sure, but there's a real sense of achievement when you can take a problem and you can fix it.
00:31:03
Speaker 1: It would seem to me there was a bit of an unobserved contradiction in the fact that you were working for a prime minister who was, as you say, caught up in a narrative that the Liberal Party in general, or he specifically as prime minister, had a problem with women. And then you're there as... his female chief of staff. So it was used partly, as you say, some people would have gone, well, there's obviously not a problem there. But also you're dealing with people accusing the person you work for of sexism, while I would say dealing with quite profound sexism yourself from all sides of the political divide.
00:31:42
Speaker 2: What are your thoughts? Yeah, I don't think I, to be fair, I don't think I faced, I don't think I faced political sexism in my workplace. I think there are occasions where I had to fight to be taken seriously, but I think men can face that as well. I don't want to overstate how politicians on the left and the right and staff on the left and the right treated me. I think I stood my own ground. And I was experienced before I turned up in Tony's office. I think it would have been hard if I'd come from an external workplace and landed in politics at a senior level like that. But I think that the media treatment was pretty sexist, but that was less really about me and the fact that I was female being used as a way to, you know, the politics of the time, used by opponents occasionally, not always. I think with with Gillard and Ann Abbott at that time, one of the problems she had and it dogged her in her entire political career is there was never a real reason why Kevin 07 was removed in his first term. And I think what she struggled with was an adequate explanation of why he had to go. And I think people had invested a lot in Kevin 07, the main year of that year, that election year when Howard lost There was a huge level of optimism, the 2020 summit and all of that, right? And so even though the political class in Canberra had decided, the Labor political class, what have we done? We can't stand this guy, clearly. The community wasn't there yet, right? They were a long way removed from that. So they wake up one night, wake up one morning and the prime minister has changed. Well, that doesn't happen in Australia. And we just elected this guy and we quite like him. And we've got this woman and who is she and why is she there? And then not long after that, she went to an election and we end up with a hung parliament. I think that's a combination of all of those things that made it a really, um, uh, a tinderbox. And, and on the, on the female prime ministership, and I've thought a lot about this, I really wanted to see a female prime minister. I clearly wanted to see it from my side more than Labor, obviously, but, and, and I'm a huge fan of Thatcher, given the times that she won and her tenure, her length of time in office back in the 70s is just extraordinary, right? So along comes a female prime minister in Australia, and I want her to be a success. Even if my job is to work for a bloke who wants to beat her, I want her to be a success. And it still disappoints me that if I look back the primary assessment we have of the Gillard era is that misogyny speech, right? There's not much else that you attribute to her time in office. And the fact that she was then removed, taken out by her side, that claims this moral mantle about women, well, that doesn't get spoken about much. Ditto with Jacinta Allen in Victoria, installed by one male premier, taken out by another male premier, and she's never faced an election as Labor leader. And I was in the chamber the day of that misogyny speech, right? So I had a seat in the advisor's box and we'd gone into the chamber and Abbott had started a suspension motion because there had been reports in the paper, printed text messages from Peter Slipper at the time, referring to female genitalia as shellfish and mussels and oysters and really, really, disgusting stuff about the very essence of who we are, mockery, absolute mockery. And if he was forced to resign or if she was forced to remove him as her speaker, it was very likely she would have had to call an early election. So she had to go in there all guns blazing and protect her speaker because she was protecting her job. So that's what that speech was about. It wasn't this great call to arms for women. This was a desperate woman protecting a man who deserves to be thrown out in order to save her job, right? And then it's turned into this great fighting speech. But if that's her epitaph, you know, I would want the first female prime minister to have more to show on her CV of achievement than just that.
00:36:27
Speaker 1: As you say, she was removed by her own party in a leadership spill in June 2013. We haven't had another female prime minister since then. Susan Lee was opposition leader of the Liberal Party for only nine months. She was also replaced by Angus Taylor in a leadership spill earlier this year. Do you think that Australia is ready for.
00:36:53
Speaker 2: A female prime minister? Absolutely, yeah, 100%. And a leader. I mean, Lee was removed because she had polls down at 15. A man would have been removed long before the polls got to 15. I mean, let's be brutally honest. The job of the opposition leader is to make you competitive to win the next election. A 15% primary is not competitive. You know, if she'd been on a 25% primary, Susan Lee would be in her job. And I guess, you know, bluntly and brutally, we women in whatever careers we're in, if we don't rate, you don't sell magazines, if I don't rate at night on TV, or if my primary votes at 15... We will be sacked and moved on as we should be. I mean, I believe in equality, not equity. And the lawyer in me says that's two very different things. I want a fair go. I don't want a leg up. I want a fair go. And you will judge me based on my effort and my merit. And if I don't make the grade, you know, if I sit on News 24 every night and I'm a cellar dweller in the ratings, well, I'll get coat hanging out of the way if I write a column. for this paper and no one wants to read it. Well, you won't keep my column there, will you? I mean, this is the nature of the beast. And so if you go into politics or you go into any senior job, you have to accept the scoreboard and that's the challenge. So do I think we're ready, Australia's ready for a woman leader, prime minister? Absolutely. But we just have to have really good competitive candidates. Now, the argument is how do women get the opportunity? Absolutely. I think that is a fair fight to have. But it's not about being installed into these jobs. That never works. You have to win it fair and square.
00:38:42
Speaker 1: You said once in an interview that when you first met Tony Abbott to start working for him as Chief of Staff, that you described yourself as a right-wing feminist. You sitting here with me in the latter half of 2026, how would you describe yourself in.
00:38:59
Speaker 2: Terms of feminism? I think I think if I had to say who I was, and have I changed a lot in life? Have you had a journey of discovery or anything like that? I think I have all the experiences, the knocks and the scars have made me a better judge of character. I think they've enriched me and they've enriched my life. I think I've said before, I'll say it again. I mean, I never wanted to be rich. I never wanted to be famous. I never wanted an easy life, actually. I just wanted to make a difference, right? And I am, as a kid from which you prove, I have far exceeded any expectation I ever had in my life, right? I think I'm blessed to live the life I do and to sit on TV like I do every night and to to be able to have an honest opinion, right? But I think along the way, at 27, 28, I don't think I'm any different than I was then. I think that was when I was a fully formed person, particularly on this issue of feminism, right? I would probably at uni have pooh-poohed the idea that you even needed feminism. And I think it's a really loaded term. It's a hard one. I know a lot of women on the right won't have a bar of it. To me, as a kid of the 70s, it's about a fair go. It's women having a fair shot. It's unencumbered opportunity. It's the opportunity to rise as high as our brains and our effort and our competence should mean we rise. But it's not where it is now. where it becomes, again, equity versus equality, where it is you need to be pushed into a role, there needs to be a seat held for you at the table that you haven't necessarily earned with hard effort, or there has to be some sort of other advantage paid to you by your gender. And particularly when we start having this whole conversation about what is a woman anyway, I just think it's absolutely fanciful that we have this debate about looking after women and helping women when basically anyone under the law can be a woman. And again, that's another legacy of Gillard. She changed the Sex Discrimination Act to remove our biological rights. And I think that's incredibly dangerous for women. So I'm an old style feminist where I think women's biological rights matter.
00:41:43
Speaker 1: We were talking about the fact that you haven't done many interviews.
00:41:46
Speaker 2: I'm probably getting myself in a lot of trouble here.
00:41:49
Speaker 1: No, I remember it was a really powerful interview. And people don't always, I think, attribute where interviews originate. So as a journalist, I'm a big believer in giving credit where it is due. And this was to Marie Claire in 2013. And I remember at the time being very moved by the fact that you opened up about undergoing IVF. And you at that time were obviously working as Chief of Staff in opposition and then actually in the Prime Minister's office. So as being touched upon, a very big, high-pressure job. It doesn't matter what a woman is going through in her life. IVF is a gruelling experience. But you were in this intense environment working Opening up about that in 2013, it was incredibly rare. And I remember having great admiration and empathy for you. In 2013, that was not a conversation that was happening in Australia. What are your memories like? of that time and looking back now again, as you and I are chatting here in the second half of 2026, do you think that the conversation has moved on about how we grill other women about their fertility journey and their experience with motherhood?
00:43:11
Speaker 2: Well, even now I don't know why I even said it, right? I didn't do any media. And one of the reasons why I think I found– The last few years when I worked for Tony and then obviously he was removed as PM and there was all that media retention, we weren't allowed, staff don't do interviews. And so I had no voice to contend with this growing narrative, right? That's the first thing. And part of the reason I ended up on News 24 and agreed to start working TV in 2016 was I knew you can't contest the narrative if you don't put yourself out there. and allow people to have an alternative view. And I didn't go through all the stuff that had been raised, seriatim or anything like that. I didn't tackle every single point of every single book. But what I decided to do was, if I was advising a politician how to arrest an old narrative, I'd say, put yourself out there and people will make up their own mind. But they've got to hear a primary source from the horse's mouth and make a judgment about your character. So that's why I got into TV. Now, I was asked to do a photo shoot for Women Leaders or something, I think that was. And I was talking to the makeup artist. Now, that's a fatal mistake, isn't it? Lovely girl, did a great job with my makeup. And I think the journo that was there at the shoot overheard and said, oh my God, I had no idea, can I use that? And I sort of, I think I might have even got teary at the time. And I said, yeah, okay. And then only when I got in the cab and went back to go to Cambridge, I think, what the heck have I done? And I had to ring my husband and say, I've just, you know, because it's not, yes, the woman is at the pointy end of the process, but it's, both of you were trying to have children, obviously, having a child. Partly, I think the reason why I left it on the table was, and I don't want to sound like this is an arrogant comment, it's not, because Everything I sort of have achieved, I have worked really hard, right? And some of them have been worked hard and it's come easy. Some of them have been worked hard and it's come really hard, right? But I took up rowing when I got to university and I ended up rowing for the university. I decided I wanted to go to law school. I worked really hard at the end of high school and I ended up in a law school. I wanted to make a real success of my time in politics. I ended up a Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister. If I've set my mind on something, Sarah, I've put the effort in and tried to land it. This was the first really big important thing in my life that I thought would come easy, didn't. I then go the hard route of IVF and I had 13 cycles and there were 13 egg collection cycles as opposed to all the other transfers on top of that. If anyone is listening that's done IVF, that's harrowing, right? And I did all of that, tried to keep it private, didn't want even people in the office to know. Really hard when you're carrying around drugs and you're travelling like you do in politics. And I had to sort of, through all of that, come to terms with the idea that I was not actually going to be successful. And so you've got to grieve and you've got to do all of that privately. At the same time, you're in a hung parliament, you're getting ready for an election, you're thinking, is there a space where I can have another go at this? And at this stage, I'm in my late 30s, and that window closes fast. And I think I probably believe too much of the bullshit that IVF would just solve the problems for you. If I'd known 30 to 35 is the closing window, not 35 to 40. For most people, everybody's different. But for me, by the time I started trying in my mid-30s, it was already going to be tough. And I now know that trying to have a baby and IVF collided with perimenopause. And so coming out of IVF, this is 39, probably by now 40, I hit menopause and really hard. And early menopause in your 40s back then when HRT really wasn't on the table, I was saved by an amazing female doctor in Canberra who said, I don't believe the tiny little sample studies. I want to send you to a professor in Sydney who's a great male, fabulous man. And I went on HRT and that saved my life because if I, you know, I'm in my 50s, mid-50s now, if I had not had HRT, And everybody's different. I'm not pushing that barrow. But if I had not had someone who took perimenopause seriously or menopause seriously all those years ago, I would be in a totally different headspace. It's a conversation we're having now. Absolutely. And we didn't have for such a long time. So I feel like I proselytize a little bit on menopause with my girlfriends who are only just getting there now. But I say, you've just got to be really aggressive about your own health. And along the way, part of that for me is nutrition and discovering the gym and making appointments in my diary to look after me. When you work in politics or you're busy in any job, right, you allow everybody else's urgent to crowd you out of your own life. So I would put stuff in the diary to do health-wise or exercise-wise, but there was a brief that needed to be done or a cabinet paper to be looked over or someone else's time was um, more important than mine. Now I put stuff in the diary early morning to exercise and I don't move it. Like it doesn't move. And that helps keep my head straight. And it's taken me a long time to get there. You know, that was, that was all of those experiences. but it was also, you know, six lockdowns in Melbourne and I really struggled. And I'd say I've got a resilient mental health, Sarah, but I found the isolations, the lockdown, no access to the gym. Melbourne, you couldn't even walk around with an open coffee cup, right? You, you, the, the mask, The ridiculousness of Melbourne meant it was just a really, really tough two-year period. And I came out of that and thought, okay, I'm changing my life. And I've tried in what, that's six years now, to stick at it, fall off the wagon a little bit. But by and large, I've got to a place where I'm really comfortable in my skin.
00:50:01
Speaker 1: Let's go back to 2015. There's another leadership spill. Your time in Canberra comes to an end. You start over the following year writing a column for the News Corp papers. As we've talked about this earlier in our conversation, as yourself, Peter Credlin, the political commentator, not a chief of staff, not running a prime minister's office or an opposition leader's office. Then in the 2016 federal election, you started doing some commentating and appearances on then Sky News Australia and now News 24. And here we are, 2026, 10 years later, you're still writing the column and hosting your own show four nights a week. Tell me a little bit about the shift, first of all, in your public profile, because I've asked you before about this very unexpected, possibly unprecedented experience of becoming a incredibly well known as a political staffer, not something that happens normally in Australia.
00:51:04
Speaker 2: Partially caricature. I think partially caricature because I didn't add to the voice in that, Sarah. That was everybody else's extrapolation or interpretation. Partly, I think Malcolm Turnbull learnt from Julia Gillard's mistake of not being able to have an explanation for terminating a prime minister. And his explanation was Um, you know, Abbott had lost all these news polls, cabinet government wasn't working, his office was maniacal, dah, dah, dah, dah, right? So, so in that respect, I was collateral in, in that assessment. So I come out and decide, okay, fine. When I got offered to do some commentating for the campaign and I was working for James Packer at the time, uh, again, never intending to have a public life after that, um, after leaving Canberra. I agreed to do it to disrupt the narrative in part because even as I got around Sydney and Melbourne, I look like Peter Credlin, right? So people had a view about me and I couldn't adjust that view unless I adjusted the narrative. So I agreed to do it. I liked it. I liked lifting the veil a little bit on my assessments of, okay, they're saying that in the campaign, this is really what's going on or This is a pretty ordinary policy response, and this is a pretty good policy response. And I love a campaign, like I'm a natural campaigner. So I liked it, right? Really liked it. And then that experience turned into a program. It's still daunting. Like I much prefer, say, radio or writing a column because TV, it's live. Every night at six o'clock, it's live. And so you've just got to ride that wave. I'm not a TV journo, right? I'm not as practiced as some of my amazing colleagues. I'm not as smooth as they are. But when I'm talking about politics, I know what I'm talking about, right? So I forget that the cameras are there and I'm in the moment, but I still have about two and a half seconds at the start of every night going, what the heck am I doing here? How did I get here? Or Or I see myself, as I do in Sydney, on the side of a bus, you know, News 24, you know, the new branding. I still think that's a bit wild. But again, all I wanted out of life was to do something I loved, right? To get out of bed and do a job that every day I'd say to myself, I'd do this for free. You know, if I could afford it, would I still do this job? Would I do this job for free? And I don't think there's ever been a job in politics or now in the media where At a time that I've thought, this is drudgery, I wish I was doing something else. When I was at uni and I was waitressing or I used to work in the boxes of the footy, in the corporate boxes, that was hard work. Or retail, that's hard work. Or working on a farm, that's hard work. I am blessed to do what I do, Sarah. It's not hard work. It's not hard work. And given where we are in Australia at the moment, to be able to have... And to be able to voice it fearlessly. And I don't get it right all the time. Absolutely not. And people will disagree with me because of my politics. But you're in the debate, right? You're in the eye of the storm. And that's a pretty lucky place to be.
00:54:39
Speaker 1: I think my final question might be about the sliding doors moment again. We spoke earlier about that realisation when you were in Kay Patterson's office thinking, okay, well, Canberra, here we are. I'm not leaving. And then as we're sitting here and you've marked 10 years on News 24 and as a columnist and now when people... come up to you and we see you on the side of a bus. It is as Peter Credlin, not the character chewer. It is you. And you're, of course, yes, there's still people don't really ever know someone. I mean, still people transferring things, but it's very much your own voice, your own platform. That I imagine is also nothing that you ever expected. Do you throw forward to 10, 20 years and think, What is the next sliding door ahead of me? Because, as you say, you're in your mid-50s. That's the other aspect of this conversation, isn't it, that's so great, is that used to be a time where, like, thank you, you're done now, not just in politics, in all areas. So, you know, potentially looking forward, if you want to, for working for another 30 years. What is the other sliding door that might be down.
00:55:55
Speaker 2: The track, do you think? Oh, gosh, yeah. You know, I was doing something at Melbourne Uni as an honorary professorial fellow for a while. And I love that involvement with the 20-somethings at uni, you know, because I remember any exposure I had then to a judge or a lawyer or– There's some amazing feminist academics that I spent time with then that I didn't always agree with, right, but just got me thinking and reading and debating. And so, you know, maybe it's uni, something with a uni, maybe it's writing a book. Again, I would never write a memoir. Because being a staffer and being in that room, you're not the principal, right? You're not the elected person in the room. You're someone who has the privilege to be in the inside of the process. And I think I would be dishonoring a lot of confidential and private moments that my access was... privileged, I suppose, is the best word for it. And I wouldn't want to do that, right? I think that's, I think that crosses a line as a staffer. But, you know, remember that book, Primary Colors? Yeah. Yeah, anonymous. Maybe one day there'll be a campaign book that turns out written by me, but not me. I don't know that the work of fiction, maybe. I don't know. I just want to, I just want to do something I love, right? And In all of it, and I'm really careful what I say on air and stuff, I just want to be authentic. I want to be able to look back at things I've said and by and large still own them and still believe in them and still fight for them. You know, the country kid in me, Sarah, wants to be, I don't want to ever think I'm too good for the issue or the people or I just want to be real. And I think this is where You know, we haven't really talked about Hanson. We've talked about other party politics. But part of the reason why the system's in such flux is the staged politician, that era of the staged politician regurgitating the lines, not honouring their commitments. I think that's really being disrupted at the moment. And I think in everything, right, even right down to social media reels, authenticity is prized. And I want to stay in that space.
00:58:40
Speaker 1: Peter Credlin, it's been so fascinating, a real delight to talk to you.
00:58:44
Speaker 2: I think you are the first interview. My very first interview was David Spears when I left politics to go on the channel. And 10 years later, you are my second interview.
00:58:53
Speaker 1: Well, I hope I haven't disappointed you and don't leave it for another 10 years. And you can see and hear more of Peter on Credlin, Monday to Thursday at 6pm on News24 on Foxtel and news24.
00:59:06
Speaker 2: Com. au.
00:59:07
Speaker 1: Peter, thanks again for joining us. me here today.
00:59:10
Speaker 2: You're welcome, Sarah.
00:59:12
Speaker 1: If you've enjoyed this episode, we'd love it if you'd take a moment to leave a review. We'll be back with another episode of Something to Talk About next week.
