During the course of 2006 we individually, increasingly, became concerned that we weren’t going to make it in 2007. I and Kevin talked about those things conversationally and then those conversations became more structured. They started to involve [Victorian Left powerbroker] Kim Carr who was tick-tacking back and forth between me and Kevin, and that ultimately developed into a political accord that the best way forward for Labor was for us to form up as a team and to challenge Kim Beazley.
Gillard had visited Mark Arbib to sound him out about the leadership.
I went and spoke to Mark Arbib and within the first fifteen seconds after, you know, ‘Hello. How are you? Do you want a cup of coffee?’, Mark said, ‘Whatever you’re here for, you need to understand this. The New South Wales Right is not going to support you as leader. They’re going to support Kevin Rudd.
Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) secretary Greg Combet, a Beazley loyalist, was deeply offended by the attempt to oust the Labor leader. Combet gave one of the most passionate interviews of the series: candid, outspoken and enriched by an earthy invective. He decried with more passion than anyone the culture that overtook the Labor Party during those years.
If anything, this tragedy of Labor in this period is about that, the humanity of it, the poor judgements that are made, the ambitions, the egos and the darker arts that some people are drawn to, the backgrounding, the leaking and the backstabbing. Awful things that I’d like to exterminate from Labor conduct.
We met Combet on the twenty-fourth floor of Sydney’s Chifley Tower. With its sweeping views of the CBD and the harbour receding into the distance, it felt a long way from the barricades. Just before we began, producer Justin Stevens recalled that I had told Combet that the series’ timeslot allowed some leniency in our use of language. Early in the interview Combet responded to the threat Rudd and Gillard posed to Beazley.
After the 2004 calamity where the Caucus saw fit to install Mark Latham and Labor lost both houses of Parliament, the Senate and the House of Reps, I thought, you know, fuck this, to be frank about it.
Combet was aware of the destabilisation campaign being run against Beazley.
I remember doing my block when I became aware that polling was being touted around Victorian union officials as an attempt to undermine Kim and install Kevin … It had become standard operating procedure in the Labor Party by that time.
I asked Julia Gillard if that was how leadership challenges worked.
Ah yes, you know, it is …
Gillard stopped, perhaps realising the implication of what she had said. She started again.
I can understand Greg’s perspective. He was leading the trade union movement and the movement was rolling out an incredibly sophisticated campaign about WorkChoices, so for there to be any moves and changes within the Labor Party was something that would cause Greg a great deal of anxiety.
Other key figures saw the political landscape differently to Combet. Then Shadow Minister for Finance Lindsay Tanner had supported Rudd’s leadership ambitions since Latham left the leadership.
Prior to Kevin Rudd being elected as leader there was a mood of trepidation. There was a lot of affection for Kim Beazley, including from me, but it was his third time around. He wasn’t getting the kind of traction that people would have liked, and once you’ve been in opposition for a long time it really eats away at you.
Lindsay Tanner was one of the few senior ministers in the Rudd and Gillard governments who was interviewed but did not appear in the series. Many reasonably assumed he had refused to participate. The author of Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy, a trenchant critique of the media, wasn’t inclined to provide answers that suited the tempo of the program.
In late November 2006, Labor leader Kim Beazley addressed a crowd of more than 40 000 at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Organised by the union movement, the rally was the last national protest against John Howard’s industrial relations reforms: WorkChoices. Rudd had given Combet his word that he wouldn’t move on the leadership until the union’s major mobilisation was over. Combet understood that with the Melbourne event out of the way, Rudd was now free to act.
It was very sad when I was at the MCG that day watching Kim Beazley because I pretty much knew that within days he’d be replaced, and I felt that was a loss for the country actually.
Television writers are always listening for lines that tell a visual story. Kevin Rudd delivered the first scene of Episode 1 with such a line.
Rudd was trying to describe the moment he left his office in Parliament House to tell Kim Beazley he was challenging him for the Labor leadership. At his first attempt, he used the word ‘toddle’. I told him that wouldn’t work and asked him to tell us again.
It’s a very very sobering and lonely walk as you walk down the corridor in Parliament House, those stark hospital-like walls, down the carpet towards the leader’s office. Then you walk in the door and Kim had this marvellous personal assistant sitting at the desk to the right as you walk into the leader’s office. Now she had tears streaming down her face because she’d been in politics a long time and she knew what this meant.
To make this scene work, we needed a shot of Rudd early in his career walking alone in Parliament House. Eventually one was found but it was shot on the Senate side of the building where the carpet is red. The aficionados would never have let us get away with that, so the carpet was coloured green in post-production.
I asked Rudd if this scene had come back to him when Julia Gillard challenged him for the leadership in June 2010. I sensed the cameramen leaning in.
SF: Did it flash through your mind all those years later?
KR: Of course not. No no no, because Julia was my loyal deputy. And I didn’t believe she would do that until that point.
He had just given us the episode’s title: ‘The Prime Minister and His Loyal Deputy’.
By the morning of the ballot, Deputy Leader Jenny Macklin knew Beazley’s leadership was finished, but she believed there was enough support among her Caucus colleagues for her to hang on as Deputy.
People had indicated to me that they were going to vote for Kevin but that they would vote for me [as deputy], so I had a difficult decision to make. Would I continue to stand, or would I accept the verdict of the Caucus that Kevin and Julia were on a joint ticket? And so I’d spoken to some very close colleagues and decided that if, as we expected, Kevin would win, then I wouldn’t stand against Julia.
Macklin recognised Julia’s determination.
I knew Julia wasn’t going to stop, she would continue until she won, and I didn’t think that was good for the Labor Party.
Greg Combet recalled his dissatisfaction.
Here were two people coming along to displace someone of that standing and experience and maturity, with two who’d never been in a leadership role of any description, who were pretty unproven, fairly inexperienced at a number of levels. Obviously very intelligent, bright, capable and committed people, but you know, how did it work out again?
After their win in Caucus, Rudd said Gillard wanted to change the traditional seating in Question Time.
Julia came to me and said could she sit with me during Question Time at the table, at the dispatch box. She said, ‘This is a joint leadership ticket’.
This was how Gillard put it.
We had a discussion about the best way of presenting that dynamic in the Parliament, whether to shake it up from the usual look of an opposition leader at a table, I would sit alongside him at the table. The view was it was better to have the more traditional pattern.
Gillard has often said she would have been content to finish her career never reaching beyond the position of Deputy. Some of her colleagues, like Leader of the House Anthony Albanese, saw it differently.
I think Julia always wanted to be the leader of the Labor Party. So did Kevin. There’s nothing wrong with that and certainly it meant that they were very strong, when they were working together.
In her 2014 book My
Story, Julia Gillard wrote for the first time about an incident that took place between her and Rudd when they were still in opposition. She claimed that when she was running the ALP’s parliamentary tactics committee, Rudd lost his temper with her. I asked her about that scene and she recounted it in detail, to the fascination of the media writing about the series.
After the tactics meeting broke up he very physically stepped into my space and it was quite a bullying encounter … I mean I was never thinking he was going to physically hurt me. It wasn’t that, but it was a menacing angry performance, and caused me to assess the character I was dealing with.
In spite of that, Gillard formed a joint leadership ticket with Rudd, endorsing him as a future prime minister. The decision to publicly revisit the incident more than a decade later seemed very deliberate.
Towards the end of the interview with Kevin Rudd in Boston, I read out Gillard’s account of the ‘bullying encounter’. I wanted to shock him to ensure he returned for the second interview. It was a risky strategy. His response to the allegation was emphatic.
That is utterly false. Utterly, utterly false.
After the interview, Rudd left Boston for Saudi Arabia. He called me twenty-four hours later from a hotel in Riyadh, troubled by the assertion I had put to him. He wanted to know, was there more of that to come?
CHAPTER 2
THE VICTORY
He didn’t just sneak into government. He stormed to government.
Jim Chalmers
WHEN I ENCOUNTERED Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard during preparations for The Killing Season, they inhabited the nether world that lies beyond political power. These were politicians who had been cut off in their prime: the two great Labor stars of their generation had put out each other’s lights. They both claimed to have moved on but it didn’t feel true in either case. Julia Gillard remained in Australia after retiring from Parliament to write the book that would stake out her version of the era. Kevin Rudd had gone more fully into exile, with no book in prospect.
Rudd was teaching at the Kennedy School at Harvard University near Boston. The course was called ‘Politics and Purpose’. His staff had suggested other locations for the interviews—hotels in Dubai or Beijing, way-points in Rudd’s frequent travel—but they accepted our request for Harvard. In October 2014, we had three interview slots over three days and a short period of time to film a scene placing him in his location.
Rudd’s instincts for how the media works were as sharp as ever. He foiled all our attempts to film him by himself, unwilling to be depicted as a lonely exile. Most of the time we were in Boston, Rudd was accompanied by a young Chinese PhD student called Jing. It’s an established pattern of Rudd’s to surround himself with youthful advisers: chief of staff Alister Jordan, press secretary Lachlan Harris and economic adviser Andrew Charlton were all in their late twenties when they joined the Prime Minister’s office. We filmed Rudd walking through the elegant alleyways of Harvard Yard, the oldest part of the university campus, where the maple and chestnut trees bore the last brilliant leaves of the New England autumn. Students milled around Australia’s former Prime Minister, oblivious. It should have been a perfect scene. But Rudd insisted on having Jing alongside him in every shot and talking to him in Mandarin, even though Jing spoke good English. It made the scene unusable.
We got Rudd alone once, in a car on the way to a train station, but even then he insisted on sitting next to the driver and talked most of the way. At the station, he chatted to some tourists from New Zealand who approached him on the concourse, then sat amicably in a café with our cameramen, Louie Eroglu and Dan Sweetapple. By the time he boarded a train to New York we had managed a single shot of him in repose, in the car removing his glasses. At least that shot made it into the series’ beautiful opening titles.
Tony Burke watched the way Rudd tailored his media performance as Opposition Leader.
In the morning he’d be joking around with Joe Hockey on Sunrise and by night he’d be talking foreign policy on Lateline. You had somebody who was just completely spanning every aspect of communications in a way that no other politician in the country could.
Lachlan Harris agreed.
Kevin Rudd did TV better than any politician in the country. Better than John Howard, better than Peter Costello. It was a combination of his capacity for discipline but also his capacity to broadcast warmth, and it was an incredible skill to watch … the brutality of the civil war in Labor robbed him of that greatest talent.
Rudd asked me to meet him in New York for breakfast the day before our interviews began, which would have meant a seven-hour round trip by train for a half-hour meeting. I wondered if Rudd understood how his crazy plans alienated people. We met instead, the night before the interview, at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge’s Harvard Square. I sat in a deep leather armchair in the lobby, watching what looked like a Secret Service detail muttering into earpieces, waiting for some more-current leader than Rudd. After reading and thinking about him for so long, when Rudd appeared it was a shock to see him in person. He was alone except for Jing: no security or minders. I thought of the vertiginous fall from power felt by all our former prime ministers, but surely more acutely by Rudd, Gillard and Tony Abbott for the untimeliness of their removal.
We sat in an empty faux-rustic café in the rear of the hotel, to the chagrin of a waitress who said we were not supposed to be there at that hour. Rudd wouldn’t move. She was rude and he was stubborn. Again I wondered if he noticed the effect he had on people. Jing sat with us, wide-eyed at the relaxed conversation; he may have thought I lacked deference. I explained Australia’s flat hierarchy but he looked unconvinced.
We ordered tea and cake. It was late, and what I really wanted was a whisky, but that seemed overfamiliar. I laughed when Rudd made an oblique joke about Julia Gillard. Humour is an effective technique for establishing rapport, but in this case it felt wrong, like a betrayal of the rules of neutrality.
I faced the opposite challenge with Julia Gillard. She invited series producer Deb Masters and me to her home in Adelaide for our second pre-interview. She came out to the driveway and welcomed us warmly. The surroundings were modest, the Australian way, I thought: no Blair- or Clinton-style fortunes for our ex-leaders. It was more relaxed than the first meeting, but not much. I was puzzled. Gillard’s close friends and colleagues attest to her great personal warmth and I expected to see it here especially, but she remained reserved. She has a reputation for humour but there were no jokes with us. I was curious about why she didn’t try and engage more, not least because the series was likely to reach an audience twenty times larger than the readership of the book she was writing.
Gillard has spoken about her natural reserve. In My Story, she compares herself to Barack Obama in that regard. In our interview, Gillard said that engaging with the media did not come naturally.
For me there’s always a bit of an intake of breath, going out and doing media.
In Adelaide, sitting across the dining room table from us, right-hand man Bruce Wolpe at her side—keeping strict time—she looked quizzically at us at times, I thought looking for confirmation that we agreed Rudd’s behaviour was reprehensible. She and Rudd despised the media for taking sides when they were in power but now they looked, perhaps involuntarily, for signs we were ‘onside’. I hoped she would trust us a little more. I would need to get behind the reserve to reflect on her position as Australia’s first female Prime Minister.
At the hotel in Harvard Square, Kevin Rudd made lists in a small notebook of the material I hoped to cover the next day, but mostly I think he was working me out. Wayne Swan’s view of Rudd’s relationship with the media was that every move was calculated to deliver a benefit down the track.
Kevin was very close to many people in the media and he was very good at exchanging information off the record, to in return receive favourable coverage for things that he might do down the track. I’ve never seen a more effective media operator than Kevin, someone networki
ng in the gallery, and if you like putting in place reservoirs of support for future activities in return for the provision of information.
Rudd was easy company but we were wary of one another. It had taken a lot of negotiation to reach that point, not initially through any fault of Rudd’s. The irony was that Rudd was not difficult until gossip columnists started writing that he was. The first piece appeared in June, saying Rudd had refused to be interviewed by Chris Uhlmann, the ABC journalist who had started the series. The truth was that Julia Gillard had also refused. Rudd accused us of ‘leaking’ the information and wanted the ABC to investigate; he also wanted an undertaking there would be no further leaks, which was impossible since the information hadn’t come from us. We urged him to ignore it.
Just as preparations for the interviews were being finalised, another piece appeared. Joe Aston, writing in the Financial Review, called the former Prime Minister ‘an unmitigated, unreconstructed tosser’. He said Rudd had insisted I fly to the US for a pre-interview chat. The idea that an ABC budget would fund an overseas trip for a chat was laughable. I was appalled at the language but I hoped Rudd would ignore it. He didn’t. He wanted ABC managing director Mark Scott to get involved. It was a return to the old theme that the ABC had mistreated Rudd while Labor was in power. The relationship between the documentary team and Rudd’s staff was strained: the obvious point that we would not leak against our own interests carried no weight. While producer Justin Stevens dealt with terse emails from Rudd’s staff demanding further ‘investigations’, I stayed out of it.
The Killing Season Uncut Page 3