‘I will not’: how Julia Gillard’s words of white-hot anger reverberated around the world

I was nervous about looking back at the words I wrote on 9 October, 2012. I didn't think my reporting would be terrible, I just doubted I'd be proud of it. Back then, my primary job was liveblogging federal politics. The Age, the broadsheet newspaper I worked for then, was transforming itself into a digital-first news agency. The transition was brutal. There was mass job shedding as the internet blew a hole in our business models. Journalists wondered what journalism actually was in this new age, and there were turf wars going on inside Fairfax as the newspaper and digital arms were integrated.

Live reporting was a refuge from those existential uncertainties. In that mode, I covered parliament in 10-or-15-minute intervals, sometimes posting for 12 hours at a time. We were making this style of reporting up as we went. Readers had a voracious appetite for news as it happened, and we were trying to migrate the old newspaper values to live reportage in the new world. None of this scene setting is an excuse, it's just context. I'm scoping out my professional milieu as I sat, plugged into the matrix, and listened to Julia Gillard hurling the words that became the misogyny speech - a set of words powerful enough to travel around the world.

That day in the 43rd parliament was much like all the others. Labor governed in minority and every day was a struggle. My first post on the live blog that day was at 9.30am. This was a late start because I'd been out watching Gillard at a breakfast event outside the parliament. My last post on the blog on that day was at 10.35pm that night.

We'll get to the specifics of the day shortly, but first some broad scene setting about the 43rd parliament. The Gillard government lacked a majority in both chambers but it had an ambitious policy agenda that it pursued relentlessly through the rollercoaster of contested party leadership. As Labor legislated a carbon price, paid parental leave and a national disability insurance scheme, Kevin Rudd hungered to return to the prime ministership he lost in 2010. As Labor slogged forward, battling what felt like a game of inches, the endorphin-charged opposition leader, Tony Abbott, intent on victory, engineered a daily sense of crisis in the parliament.

Abbott was a creature of institutions - Riverview, Oxford, the seminary, the Liberal party - and understood how to harness their power. Federal parliament was his playground. The pugilistic sound stage suited him. He moved near-daily suspensions of the standing orders - a procedure used to disrupt the parliamentary program - to create a palpable sense of the Gillard government teetering on the edge of collapse. Abbott was expert at cueing Australia's rightwing media - the Murdoch-owned metropolitan tabloids, the national broadsheet the Australian, the "just us blokes" zone of talkback radio - and he used the content hungry white-water news cycle to amplify a governance crisis he fomented with ferocious precision.

On the day of the misogyny speech, the House of Representatives Speaker, Peter Slipper, was embroiled in a serious controversy. Labor had wooed Slipper, a Liberal, to the Speaker's chair in an effort to bolster its control of the chamber. On that day in October, Abbott had moved to have Slipper removed as the Speaker. This followed the release of crude text messages Slipper had sent to a former adviser, James Ashby. The messages had surfaced in a sexual harassment case Ashby had launched against Slipper. Abbott was again on the offensive. "This Speaker had failed the character test," he thundered in the parliament, adding Gillard had "failed the judgment test" by appointing him as a presiding officer.

Shame was Abbott's rhetorical weapon of choice. "Should she (she being the prime minister) rise in this place to try to defend the Speaker, to say that she retains confidence in the Speaker, she will shame this parliament again," Abbott said. "And every day the prime minister stands in this parliament to defend this Speaker will be another day of shame for this parliament, another day of shame for a government which should already have died of shame."