“I wouldn’t say it’s a role I relish,” she has told The Weekly. “It’s a role I am delighted to be able to do, but when I don’t have to do it, that’s fine too.”
In a wide-ranging interview, Margie – who until recently was holding down another demanding day-job, managing a community child-care centre on Sydney’s north shore – says the prospect of Tony being turfed from office is one that fills neither her nor Tony with any great sense of dread.
“Well, it would be hard,” she says. “(But) life presents one with all kinds of challenges. Certainly (if Tony were no longer PM), it would be a new chapter, but new chapters are different, new chapters can be energising, they can test you. So I think I would view it in that way, and I think Tony would too.”
The PM has only recently started to improve his political stocks after surviving a Liberal Party leadership spill in February.
Margie welcomed The Weekly into her home at Kirribilli House, where she obligingly posed for the magazine’s cameras, despite a distinct dislike of the limelight. The shoot is a stunning series of shots – both posed and candid – of one of the country’s highest-profile but least known women.
Whilst stating that “politics doesn’t define my life,” Margie uses the interview to nevertheless throw her support behind the PM’s embattled chief-of-staff, Peta Credlin.
Asked if she thought Ms Credlin was doing a good job, Margie replies: “I will leave that for others to judge. But at the end of the day Peta works incredibly hard and it is a tough job.”
The PM’s wife (who hates being referred to as The First Lady: “I am just Margie Abbott who happens to be married to Tony Abbott who happens to be the Prime Minister of Australia”) also reveals she recently lost 20 kgs in a matter of only 18 months, on the advice of her doctor.
Concerned that being 50-plus, menopausal and gradually putting on weight as she got older, Margie says her doctor warned her she was in danger of developing Type II diabetes unless she lost weight.
And so – like her husband – she took up cycling.
In the interview, Margie also reveals the first night she met the PM, the first date they went on and details about the night he proposed.
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