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“I feel very emotional,” Julie Bishop said, as she stared down a room of reporters on Thursday. She did not look it. Years after the former foreign minister last faced her Labor opponents across the dispatch box, Bishop retained the same detached stare, the same cool responses.
The chancellor of the Australian National University, who had announced that vice chancellor Genevieve Bell had resigned her role on Thursday to widespread delight on campus, was now determined to present herself as the woman to right the ship.
ANU Chancellor Julie Bishop declared she was emotional at the day’s events. It was hard to see on her face.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“We’re listening”, Bishop said, notwithstanding that complaints about her and Bell have been at fever pitch for months. The ANU was a “family”, albeit one where some staff say they have been left traumatised by management as it slashes costs. She and the university’s leadership would “turn the page”. An apology? Not from Bishop.
“I feel very confident and very positive about the university’s future,” she declared.
It is hard to imagine this is how Bishop believed her post-parliamentary career would pan out when she left politics in 2019 to enjoy a $200,000-odd pension and the many business opportunities that awaited a moderate Liberal with a partnership at corporate law firm Clayton Utz on her CV.
The ANU chancellorship, which she took up at the beginning of 2020, had scant hallmarks of a hard job. Such positions usually come with big hats, high status and a low workload. Most remain that way, even as the sector finds itself politically friendless and in financial strife.
But other Bishop projects have gone no better.
In 2020, Bishop was photographed at the international festival of the ultra-elite, Davos, throwing snow with Lex Greensill, the founder of an eponymous finance firm valued at up to $US30 billion. She had been an adviser to Greensill Capital since the year before, paid a reported $US600,000 annually.
Just a year after the Davos images, Greensill Capital collapsed amid a cavalcade of lawsuits and investigations.
Julie Bishop was all smiles with Lex Greensill meet in Davos, Switzerland in January 2020.Credit: Andy Mettler
By 2022, Bishop was a strategic adviser for Mineral Resources, a West Australian mining company that hit a market capitalisation of $17 billion that year. Since then, its value has slumped to $7 billion, amid a barrage of damaging headlines about chief executive Chris Ellison’s tax affairs.
“I have been an independent adviser to groups who find themselves in trouble,” Bishop said on Thursday. “I suspect that’s why they ask for my assistance.”
“I’m not an employee. I’m not a shareholder. I’m not involved in management. I provide strategic advice.”
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That may be true. But it is a line that won’t wash at the ANU.
It has been six years since Bishop had to face the press over anything more controversial than a red carpet softball and it showed.
She’s still got the death stare, but there was one sign the pressure was getting to Bishop: her hands. Hidden from the cameras by her lectern, Bishop’s fidgeting fingers pushed a ring round and round. One nail dug into her thumb, hard.
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