Huge Job For Rudd's Right-hand Woman
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday November 30, 2007
THE incoming Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, plans to create a new super-department from which she will simultaneously oversee Kevin Rudd's "education revolution" and dismantle Work Choices.
Ms Gillard, who helped Mr Rudd muster the numbers to take over the Labor leadership last year, was yesterday handed the education portfolio in addition to her responsibility for employment and workplace relations.Mr Rudd said he believed Ms Gillard could handle both roles, and the merging of portfolios underlined his emphasis on addressing education."Julia Gillard is a first-class human being with a first-class mind ... It's a big job but for a very talented individual and if I did not have that confidence then I wouldn't have done it," he said.A spokeswoman for Ms Gillard said she had already discussed the formation of a new department with the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Dr Peter Shergold. The department will incorporate much of the Department of Education, Science and Training and the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations. Ms Gillard was one of the big winners in the unveiling of the cabinet yesterday. She also takes responsibility for a new portfolio, Social Inclusion, designed to lift disadvantaged communities and individuals out of long-term poverty and unemployment.Ms Gillard, 46, a former lawyer and member of Labor's Left faction from Victoria, was elected in 1998 and has been spokeswoman on health and indigenous affairs. She took on industrial relations after Mr Rudd won the Labor leadership and played a leading role in the election campaign as she helped to devise and sell Labor's response to Work Choices. In two weeks she is set to become Australia's first female acting prime minister when Mr Rudd attends the UN conference on climate change in Bali.
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald