She is one of the nation’s most powerful women – but Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has suffered immense personal heartache.
In the July issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly, on sale now, she reveals that after she suffered a miscarriage at age 36, but after that, she had thought pregnancy would “just happen”.
But when it didn’t, she began a painful and stressful series of IVF procedures, which is so familiar to many Australian women.
She tells The Weekly, “It was all very rushed – all the appointments and needles. Every time you go, you think it is going to happen this time and there is the hope and the expectation.
“I don’t think I did tell anyone – with the morning appointments you can hide it from people. Honestly, maybe half of me thought I’d fall pregnant naturally if the IVF didn’t work.”
But she and then husband Simon Every, were determined to start a family. At the time, Annastacia was working as a media adviser in State Government, and was not yet in the top role.
“I can’t believe I actually did any of my jobs because it [IVF] was completely draining.”
We always hear success stories, but rarely the figure that for women aged 35 to 40, there’s less than a one in four chance of a baby after each IVF cycle.
For Annastacia, now aged 47, that success never came.
Infertility is tough on any marriage and she says it is one of the reasons her marriage to Simon ended in 2009, and she now has a new partner, Shaun Drabsch.
Australia has had seven female premiers. In a telling statistic, perhaps linked to the 18-hour days needed to rise to the top or maybe a coincidence, three have no children.
Personal interviews are few and far between for political leaders. Most prefer to talk policies. Yet the Premier has invited The Weekly into her home to share her revealing story of tragedy, sexism, bullying and a political baptism of fire.
Hers is a state forged on mining, farming and battling big disasters, so it’s heartening it’s onto its second female Premier – and from the notoriously blokey Labor Party to boot.
In an historic first, her Cabinet has more female ministers than male.
Add in a public war of words with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull – the Premier called him “arrogant and disrespectful” in a stoush over the treatment of Queensland – it’s going to be one hell of a run to the election.
The $64 million question is: exactly when? Annastacia tells The Weekly, “An election is due by February next year. As I say to everyone, ‘I like January elections, even though it is very hot up here in Queensland.'”
Read more about Annastacia’s incredible rise to power and her brave migrant family who fled Germany in the July edition of The Australian Women’s Weekly, in newsagents and supermarkets now, and subscribe to the magazine by visiting Magshop.
