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Julie Bishop

Parliamentary Service

Elected to the House of Representatives for Curtin, Western Australia, 1998, 2001 and 2004.

Ministerial appointments

Minister for Ageing from 7.10.03.

Party Positions

Branch President, Liberal Party Perth Central Branch (Perth Division) 1992-95; Branch President and Senior Vice-President 1996; Senior Vice-President 1997-98.

Personal

Born 17.7.1956 at Lobethal, SA.

Qualifications and Occupation before entering Federal Parliament

LLB (Adel).

Advanced Management Program (Senior Managers) (Harvard Business School).

Barrister and solicitor 1979-98.

Managing partner, Clayton Utz, Perth, WA 1994-98.

Chair, Town Planning Appeal Tribunal of WA 1994-98.

Senate Member, Murdoch University from 1997-98.

Director, Special Broadcasting Services Television 1997-98.

Director and Fellow, Australian Institute of Management 1997-98.

Other Positions

Delegate to the Australian Constitutional Convention, February 1998.

The defeat she needed

Thursday, 21 February 2008 - Deputy Liberal Leader Julie Bishop got the headlines she needed when the Opposition made its decision not to use its numbers in the Senate to block Labor's industrial relations laws scrapping Work Choices and abandoning Australian work place agreements. more

Story	Date
A Campaign Kind Of Day	5 July 2006

Tight-lipped: Federal Minister Julie Bishop, Lord Mayor Peter Nattrass’ partner, refused to comment when she arrived in Perth yesterday.
- The West Australian, 1 July 2004

Michelle Grattan wrote in The Age on 11 October 2003:

A specialist in commercial litigation and former managing partner in Clayton Utz, she received her professional finishing touches at the Harvard Business School's advanced management program in 1996. The only past or present Howard Government female minister remotely like her is Revenue Minister Helen Coonan, and she's considerably older.

Bishop started her parliamentary career badly with Howard by defeating Allan Rocher in 1998 for Curtin. Rocher, a former Liberal, had become an independent, but he was still Howard's mate. Although the Liberal Party had invited Bishop to stand for preselection, she says "clearly the Prime Minister had suggested there be no Liberal candidate in Curtin, and had made that quite clear". She, however, believed Curtin was "Liberal Party territory" and "we should hold every seat we could". And for her, Curtin was "a neat fit" - it was where she lived and had her contacts.

Bishop was brought up in the Adelaide Hills, where her parents grew apples and cherries and ran sheep.

She was, however, mooted for leadership of the WA opposition after Richard Court lost the 2001 election. Court got the state party to vote for an extraordinary deal under which Bishop would leave Federal Parliament and take over from him. Bishop pulled out after uproar from Court's opponents, but not before federal colleagues were appalled at what they saw as a lapse of judgement. She insists the aborted arrangement wasn't bizarre, as many claimed at the time. "Maybe (it was) innovative, different."