She's back: Julia Gillard speaks.

By MAMAMIA TEAM

In her first television expansive interview since leaving the Prime Ministership in June this year, Julia Gillard will be sitting down for an hour-and-a-half interview with Anne Summers this evening.

Gillard will be talking about her time in office, her future, the legacy she has left behind – and we can’t wait to hear what she has to say. You can livestream the conversation on the ABC Big Ideas homepage and it will be screened live on ABC24.

JG on losing the Labor leadership:

Anne Summers starts the conversation with what everyone really wants to hear about: what it was like when Julia Gillard lost the Prime Ministership.

Gillard says that, “I’d known throughout the course of the day that I was in tremendous difficulty … We knew we were going to lose, it was a question of how much”

The former PM also joked that while she drank one glass of wine before going to visit the Governor General in June, “there was much more wine drunk” after that.

JG on the view that she stabbed Kevin Rudd in the back:

“My view of this is to ask your leader to have a leadership ballot – that’s legitimate. To do things continuously that undermine the Labor Party and the Labor government, then of course that shouldn’t be done by anyone.”

JG on the key difference between herself and Kevin Rudd: 

“I think the key difference is every day I was Deputy PM I spent all of my time doing everything I could to have the Labor government prosper.”

JG on the offensive images and descriptions of her on social media: 

Julia Gillard says she felt “more like murderous rage really”, in response to these cartoons. She continued, “Yes, I knew about them, but I also chose not to focus on them and I think that was probably the healthier option.”

She says such misogyny found easier expression because of social media, but that  “it would have been there anyway, and I had thought we were beyond that, and it’s kind of depressing that we’re not. But at least we know exactly where the balance of it is now and what more remains to be done for women to be truly equal.”

JG on ‘playing the gender card’:

Gillard asserts that ‘raising your voice about that isn’t starting a war, it isn’t playing the victim it’s just asking for what simply is right’.

On her now famous misogyny speech, Gillard says that she felt compelled to speak because: “After everything I’ve had to see on the internet, after all the gendered abuse that I’ve seen in newspapers, that has been called at me across the despatch box, now of all things I’ve got to listen to Tony Abbott lecture me about sexism.”

Julia Gillard on meeting President Obama:

Gillard revealed that the first time she met President Barack Obama he told her, ‘You know, I really envy your Question Time.’ She replied: “Are you mad?”

Gillard continues, “The second it was out of my mouth, I went, ‘That was a kind of really dumb thing to say to the leader of the free world on first meeting.’

“He laughed and I explained to him Question Time, it’s like, you know, an hour and a bit, four days a week when Parliament sits, 20 weeks a year and you take 10 questions and basically I take all of them and people are screaming abuse at you as you’re answering them, to which he had the good grace at the end of the conversation to say, “I am mad!’ That sounds dreadful.”

Mamamia will be live blogging the conversation, so please keep checking back for the best insights from the evening.

We’d love to know what you think of Julia Gillard’s return to the public eye?