The Killing Season Uncut

by Sarah Ferguson

  Early on in the conversation Gillard raised the topic of Rudd’s mental state, though her friends, she said, had told her not to. ‘I’m no medical person’, she said, before questioning Rudd’s mental capacity when he was Prime Minister. I thought it was a misjudgement, the act of someone trying to justify their actions. I wanted to lean over and say so.

  Gillard’s other focus was the book which she was bringing out later that year. She wanted to protect its exclusivity. Unlike Rudd, she had already begun shaping the perception of her story. It seemed to me that in the contest to define the history of the era, she had the upper hand.

  I was struck by how different Rudd and Gillard’s approaches were in those early meetings. Their engagement with the series mirrored their styles in politics. Gillard was punctual, efficient, precise—the word most often used to describe her by her peers is transactional. Rudd was usually late, less efficient, but also given to more engagement. Gillard was private; Rudd wore his heart on his sleeve.

  In one of the earliest interviews for the series, Kevin Rudd’s press secretary, Lachlan Harris, reflected on how those different personalities had created such a successful combination in 2006.

  Rudd was all energy and emotion and Gillard was all discipline and delivery, and together they were an incredibly formidable force … He was incredibly good in the media; he was likeable, he had the kind of big picture stuff. Gillard was much more straight down the line, much more disciplined, in the weeds of the hard draft of policy.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself. The interviews with Rudd and Gillard had been agreed to in principle but were still many weeks away; the negotiation with Rudd over the location of his interview hadn’t even begun.

  On the day I began working on the series, I picked up the episode briefs and read a scathing assessment of Kevin Rudd, provided off the record by a backbencher. I knew we couldn’t accept as final judgements the views of unknown backbenchers. They had a role, but we needed Rudd and Gillard’s Cabinet peers to tell their stories, and many of them were still saying no. I was also uncomfortable about the number of off-the-record interviews. This series would have no unsourced material. Anyone who wanted to shape the narrative had to appear in it, in full view where their colleagues could judge them and the truth of what they were saying.

  We created detailed files on the ‘hold-outs’; we wrote new, more frank letters. I went from office to office in Parliament House. I got myself invited to book launches so I could bail up the recalcitrants. The pitch to everyone was the same. We had three episodes to tell the story of almost seven years. It would be told only by firsthand accounts, by people who were in the room. Tone was important too. This would be no hatchet job: if Labor had a good story to tell beyond the infighting, then they should tell it. (The pitch to Labor powerbroker Mark Arbib was more bespoke but I’ll get to that later.) I also believed they owed the public an explanation; the audience was entitled to understand what happened to the government they elected in 2007—the pollsters had observed that the public’s interest in politics had been reignited by the arrival of Kevin Rudd. Moving on might be politically desirable for Labor, but in my view, not before they had explained themselves. It seemed extraordinary to me that many of the key players thought the subject could be avoided.

  Bill Shorten was in a category of his own. By the time we started filming, he’d become the leader of the Labor Party. Shorten told us he was reluctant to take part but agreed to a meeting. We went to dinner at a restaurant in Canberra. In a private dining room, a screen hid us from a curious public—a perfect metaphor for Shorten’s desire to avoid scrutiny. Every time the conversation turned to the Rudd–Gillard period, he would pivot to asking me questions about myself, my childhood, anything but politics. The technique, while charming, was also transparent. I’m a journalist; that’s what I do.

  Shorten had been in federal Parliament for less than three years when he moved against the Prime Minister. He had never fully explained why he’d done it, perhaps in the hope there would be little trace of his involvement on the record. It seemed to me there was another layer to his reluctance. Because he’d never told the complete story on camera, with the exception of a few shots of him in a restaurant on the night of the challenge, the archive was clean. He wanted to keep it that way.

  Gillard and many of Shorten’s colleagues chose to protect him, forming a phalanx around the leader. When his name came up, their memories suddenly became hazy. But there were enough exceptions to place Shorten at the heart of the drama.

  And what truths were contained in the boxes of archive material that lined the shelves of our office? Led by Deb Masters, the team was on its way to logging, almost shot by shot, more than 1500 hours of archive—there are physiotherapy bills to prove the hours spent hunched over tape decks.

  The Killing Season was told as a drama. There were scenes, moments, tiny gestures in those pictures that we needed to tell the story visually. Our drama began in the first moments of the Rudd–Gillard partnership. The Labor story had turned so dark that revisiting those scenes surprised us. The archive shows a bright, energetic pair. We found a Lateline story about a fundraiser on the day Rudd asked Beazley for a leadership ballot; miraculously, the raw footage had been kept. At twilight in a vineyard outside Melbourne, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd step out of a white Comcar into the glare of the media spotlight, their freshness unmistakeable. Gillard is sweet, untutored even.

  Gillard recalled the feeling that was so evident on the screen.

  The media interest’s so much more intense, the reaction if there was an error so much more profound, so you want to make sure everything’s right. So yes, the whiteness, the brightness of the spotlight did strike me very, very strongly.

  As series producer, Masters realised that the archive alone would not be enough to drive this story, and traditional reconstructions wouldn’t produce the energy the drama required. She envisaged a seamless combination of the two. So at the same vineyard near Melbourne, cinematographer Louie Eroglu, perched in a cherry picker, filmed sweeping shots of a white Holden with number plates made by the ABC props department, driving up in the late afternoon. These shots were edited in with the archive.

  Rudd had his own recollection of the evening.

  I think what we were both adjusting to was the fact that we were now a duo, the dynamic duo. That was kind of fun, because Julia had and has extraordinary attributes and she was out there going hard at it, full, strong.

  I asked Julia Gillard if she liked Kevin Rudd then.

  I was genuinely friendly with Kevin. Our friendship grew. I mean from 1998, coming into Parliament, I’d never met him, so off that start you did things together, a sense of connection grew. That sense of connection really moved into being a strong, personal friendship.

  It was an obvious place to start: the moment in late 2006 the two came together on the leadership ticket. Simon Crean called the partnership ‘a marriage of convenience’. Kevin Rudd, a public servant and Christian, ostensibly from Queensland’s Right, had teamed up with Julia Gillard, a Labor lawyer and professed atheist from the Left, a woman who had fought her way through Victoria’s arcane factional system and survived.

  They came to Parliament at the 1998 election and delivered their maiden speeches on the same day, 11 November, a date steeped in significance for the Labor faithful: the day Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was removed from office in 1975.

  Kevin Rudd said he paid close attention to Gillard’s first speech.

  Kevin Rudd (KR): Very much so. It’s your best opportunity to learn what makes a person tick and why they are there.

  Sarah Ferguson (SF): Given that she was somebody else who’d been picked out as a future major player in the party, were you also wary of her ability?

  KR: Not at all.

  Gillard touched on gender in her maiden speech, but by her own admission the issue did not feature prominently in her early parliamentary career.

  The impact of sexism and the gendered a
nalysis really didn’t present itself to me until the days of being Prime Minister, so I would look at my political career, coming into Parliament being a backbencher, being a shadow minister, and I wouldn’t be running a gender prism over all of that.

  Gillard and Rudd joined a deeply divided Caucus. The ALP was still recovering from the bruising it had received two years earlier when John Howard’s battlers had triumphed over Paul Keating’s true believers. Internally, Labor couldn’t agree on anything, including who should be their leader.

  Over time, Rudd cultivated his national media profile with regular appearances on Channel Seven’s breakfast program Sunrise, and writing op-ed pieces for newspapers. In the early days of his leadership, New South Wales MP Tony Burke said Rudd’s ability to communicate was outstanding.

  It was this capacity to move from simple, tight explanations of policy delivered in a fun, gentle way through to being able to analyse every scintilla of detail of complex areas of policy. It’s a rare skill.

  Gillard, too, had been building her profile, taking on the controversial Shadow Immigration portfolio in 2001 and Health in 2003. She claimed her progress was stifled by the party’s powerbrokers.

  I did it find it frustrating. Kim [Beazley] had this sort of set of confidants who were surrounding him. I was obviously the new girl on the block, but as I got more and more senior I felt like I wasn’t being given the kind of access that one would have wanted.

  Rudd was more direct.

  I think we both felt as if we’d been pretty brutalised by factional processes within the Labor Party, in particular some of the right-wing boyos of the Labor Party.

  Rudd singled out the Australian Workers’ Union (AWU), accusing them of keeping him and Gillard out of leadership contention.

  The AWU, they hated both of us in those days. Julia, she was, from the AWU’s perspective, way beyond the pale … they regarded her as this evil force from the Victorian socialist Left. She certainly knew that she was loathed by them.

  Gillard denied she ever held that view. Rudd said it was what brought them together.

  I think that’s where we genuinely bonded partly because of the experiences of being brutalised by the right-wing factional boyos of the AWU in the leadership contest after Mark Latham stepped down.

  Former head of the AWU, Paul Howes, who played a role in the 2010 challenge, rejected Rudd’s description.

  This notion that somehow having a view and being opposed to someone is brutalising someone is ridiculous … In terms of brutalisation and bully boy tactics, it’s not the way that the organisation has ever run. Frankly it’s laughable for him to categorise that union in that way considering his own behaviour.

  One of the most powerful AWU-aligned members of Parliament at the time was Wayne Swan, a former friend and close colleague of Rudd. He was frank about his efforts to thwart Rudd’s rise.

  I worked very hard during that period, when he [Rudd] was setting up his challenge against Kim Beazley, to try to convince people right across the party that this was going to be a difficult outcome …

  I interviewed Swan for the series at the ABC studios in Brisbane in October 2014. The cameramen were setting up in a boardroom when I walked in to find Swan in his underpants, changing his trousers for the interview. He handled it more coolly than I did.

  Swan was generous with his time throughout the making of the documentary but his antipathy towards Rudd suffused every aspect of the story he told. Rudd’s view that Swan betrayed him over the leadership challenge in 2010 produced some of the most intense drama of the series. Although it is a documentary, The Killing Season drew its inspiration from television drama, and drama thrives on ambition and betrayal. To understand the claim of treachery, you have to revisit the men’s original friendship.

  Swan worked with Rudd in Queensland politics when Swan was a party official and Rudd was Premier Wayne Goss’ chief of staff, the three of them known as ‘the troika’. Their families were friends; Rudd was godfather to one of Swan’s children. They fell out in federal politics. Factional and personal loyalties, and the Labor leadership, were at the heart of it.

  Swan maintained their friendship deteriorated as a result of Rudd’s ambition.

  As time went on we grew distant, and I did come to form the view that he was putting his own personal interests ahead of the Labor cause. I formed that view particularly during the various leadership tussles that took place in the early 2000s … I can’t say at that stage I’d formed the view that his Labor values were as shallow as I subsequently found them to be, but I began to have grave doubts about him, about his approach.

  Rudd said it was the assault on Labor leader Simon Crean in 2003 that drove a wedge between him and Swan.

  When they went in my view outrageously over the top, he [Swan] and Stephen Smith and Stephen Conroy, to destroy Simon Crean’s leadership, they were at me to go out and make similar declarations and I just refused to do it. They regarded that as a breach of solidarity and I think that was a turning point in our relationship.

  Rudd couldn’t rely on a media profile alone to drive his bid for the leadership. Lachlan Harris recalled that through those years in opposition, Rudd was everywhere.

  This is a person who literally put their life aside in the pursuit of the prime ministership for a very long period of time. Even in opposition I can remember Rudd would be turning up to the opening of a branch meeting in Wangaratta, a fundraiser for the local councillor who was trying to get onto the Baulkham Hills Council, and you don’t do that unless you have energy levels like a superhero.

  Bob Carr was the Labor Premier of New South Wales.

  Others who might have been considered credible alternatives weren’t working that hard. They weren’t turning up, they weren’t knocking on your door. You ended up thinking he [Rudd] was an inevitability. He made himself inevitable as Labor Party leader.

  Swan watched Rudd build support among the party’s powerbrokers.

  He identifies very methodically the sort of people that he needs to have contact with, what influence they may have, and then works very hard night and day to cultivate all of those contacts. He is probably one of the most effective networkers I’ve ever encountered or seen in operation.

  New South Wales state secretary Mark Arbib was one of the most influential people in the party. He would go on to play a decisive role in Rudd’s rise and fall. ALP strategist Bruce Hawker knew him well.

  Mark was a very serious player inside the Labor Party … Kevin knew that he actually had to have a relationship with the biggest branch of the party in the country if he was ever going to be the leader, and so he worked meticulously at that. He worked hard to demonstrate that he had what it took … People like Mark—young, ambitious—needed somebody who was going to show that they were bigger than the party they led.

  One of the puzzles of Rudd’s self-portrayal was the way he depicted himself as a political naif.

  I think my critics would legitimately say there’s a level of naivety about me concerning the deep machinations of the factional system of the Australian Labor Party. I think that’s true because I tend to take people at face value until I have evidence that you cannot trust them.

  Rudd suggested he was operating above the factional structure within the party.

  SF: You couldn’t have built the support that you did build in Caucus without a perfectly good understanding of the factions and how they worked.

  KR: The bottom line is the reason they chose in the end, that is the Caucus, was because they’d simply got tired of losing, and this guy, beyond faction land, had what they concluded to be a rapport with the Australian people.

  SF: I’m taking issue with you saying you don’t understand the factions because I think you understood those power groups perfectly well …

  KR: … The bottom line is, I think, most of these guys ultimately had doubts as to whether I was one of them. And what can I say? Their doubts were well founded.

  There are different views
about the importance of Labor’s factions in the leadership disputes. Wayne Swan said that by 2006, the operation of power had already become less rigid.

  I don’t see this in factional terms. Anyone who tries to describe the jockeying in the parliamentary Labor Party through the 2000s and onwards purely in factional terms doesn’t understand what is going on. When Kevin challenged Kim Beazley, he won elements of all factions. Strict factional discipline had broken down well before these leadership battles came along.

  Throughout 2006, the polls continued to suggest that victory for Labor with Kim Beazley as leader was uncertain. In the polls that year, Labor was close to the Coalition and sometimes ahead on the two-party-preferred vote. But on the preferred prime minister indicator, Beazley was consistently 20 or more points behind Howard.

  Rudd believed he could be the difference.

  I remember one day looking around the Caucus room and asking myself, ‘Who can take us to political victory?’ I couldn’t see anybody. I really couldn’t, for different reasons and different cases, and I couldn’t see it happening under Kim.

  Rudd didn’t have strong historical ties to the union movement. The trade unions were Beazley’s largest support bloc and his staunchest allies. Critically, the AWU, headed by Queenslander Bill Ludwig and Victorian Bill Shorten, kept faith with the leader.

  In the scramble for votes following the departure of Labor leader Mark Latham in January 2005, neither Rudd nor Gillard on their own could gain a sufficient number to take the leadership. Gillard described how she and Rudd came to form a joint ticket.