The Killing Season Uncut

by Sarah Ferguson

  It was a deliberate choice because of what I’d said, that the abuse of union-based factional power had gone on for far too long … Julia was on board with that, and off we went. You know, we’re not blind to some political realities, but you couldn’t justify having people in significant positions who didn’t have the ability.

  His Deputy had the same view. In opposition in March 2006, Gillard had given a robust public speech at the Sydney Institute in support of reform, calling the factions a ‘cancer’ in the party.

  It’s time to stop mincing words and to acknowledge that factionalism in the Labor Party is out of control and destructive.

  Gillard said the factional system was outdated.

  I thought the lines between who was in which faction really didn’t make any political sense in the modern age. I generally thought they’ve turned into patronage machines [and] that doesn’t have a meaningful politics to it any more. So I thought the leader should get to pick his or her team and I said that publicly.

  The proposal went to the Caucus after the election. A few MPs resisted giving unfettered discretion to the party leader. One of them was West Australian Senator Glenn Sterle, who gave a research interview.

  The rot set in the day that it was decided. We went to the voices in the Caucus. All those in favour of the leader picking his leadership team or his shadows—aye. Those against—no. I was a no. Senator Steve Hutchins was a no.

  Caucus voted overwhelmingly in favour of gifting the new Prime Minister what he wanted. But according to New South Wales Senator Michael Forshaw, there were factional leaders who still resented Rudd’s rise.

  There were significant members of Parliament, factional operatives and union leaders, who didn’t like Kevin and didn’t want him as leader. In the end he won the election and they had to live with that.

  Among the most powerful of the incoming union bosses was former AWU head Bill Shorten, the new Member for Maribyrnong. Rudd offered Shorten the role of Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services.

  West Australian Senator Mark Bishop said Shorten would have expected more.

  Bill’s always had a highly developed sense of his own worth. He’s always had high-level ambitions … Bill was and is a skilful operator. He might have been aggrieved that he had to spend time as a parl sec.

  According to Rudd’s chief of staff, David Epstein, the Prime Minister was wary of Shorten.

  They were both talented politicians and in essence they were like fighters eyeing each other off from one corner of a ring to the other. Kevin Rudd could see someone who was bright, who had ambition, who might be on his tail if he tripped in his political life instead of hugging his enemy closely or embracing Bill and husbanding that ambition, he thought he could marginalise him.

  Julia Gillard said the final make-up of the new Cabinet was not especially divisive.

  There never had been and never will be a ministry selection in any political party that doesn’t leave a trail of broken hearts behind it, and that was true of the ministry in 2007, but it wasn’t anxiety above the norm.

  The Rudd government’s first ministry was sworn in by Governor-General Michael Jeffery on 3 December 2007. Simon Crean summed up the mood of the majority.

  It was looking terrific! We won. We won convincingly, defeated a Prime Minister. It was a very significant change and obviously the public had embraced that change in a big way. We had an authority, we had a support base. What we had to do was to work to justify that confidence, justify that faith.

  British MP Alan Milburn, who had been part of the campaign team, wrote Kevin Rudd a note with advice on the transition from opposition into government. The advice was specific to Rudd.

  It was a note about how I thought he could best run his government, given the personality that he had. The note really was about how could I save Kevin from himself. This was a guy with a steely determination, with a really forceful personality, with undoubted brilliance, but a huge ego … And that’s absolutely fine to be Opposition Leader to do that, because people will forgive you everything. It’s different when you’re prime minister, because you’ve got people who are big characters in their own right and expect to be treated accordingly. And if you don’t, that way lies disaster.

  In the spring of 2014, political journalist Paul Kelly published his sweeping account of the Rudd and Gillard governments, Triumph and Demise. I interviewed the author for an event at a bookshop in Sydney. I was chatting with Kelly afterwards in the history aisle when a man in a pin-striped suit approached us, a lawyer he said, and told us that Kevin Rudd’s Apology to the stolen generations was a waste of time, a meaningless gesture. I wondered again at people’s certainty. I had just watched the archive of the event, from 13 February 2008: the speech in the House of Representatives and the tearful faces of Indigenous people listening in the galleries and watching giant video screens on the grass outside. A cameraman had picked out an old man in the crowd, wearing a black hat with a feather, sitting upright watching a screen as a younger man next to him tenderly stroked his arm, both listening to Rudd’s opening words.

  The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

  After the 2007 election, Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin resolved that the Apology had to happen early in the life of the new government.

  It really became clear that people wanted the power of the first item on the first day of the new Parliament.

  A week before he was due to deliver the speech, Rudd asked Macklin to find him someone who would share their story of being taken from their family. Macklin called Christine Fejo-King, who was involved in the preparations for the Apology. Her mother, ‘Nanna Fejo’, was born in Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory and had been taken from her mother when she was around four years old. Christine organised for Nanna to come to Canberra to meet the Prime Minister and witness the Apology. Her story would be embedded in the Apology and the national psyche.

  In late 2014, we didn’t know if the elderly Nanna would be well enough to be interviewed for the series. She was: in December, local ABC journalist Charlie King did a gentle, skilful interview with her in Darwin.

  Rudd arrived with a paper bag full of mangoes for Nanna. Jenny Macklin remembered how Rudd put her at ease.

  He was incredibly respectful, he was very patient. He didn’t say very much. He let her talk; occasionally he’d encourage her.

  Nanna looked straight into the camera, with her watery blue eyes, and gentle face, her voice breaking.

  Nanna Fejo (NF): All mothers got feelings for their children and Mum fretted for me ’til the day she died. Like she was chasing that truck after when the government came and picked us up and took us, took us away from our Aboriginal families, that’s right.

  Christine Fejo-King: And that’s the last memory you have of her?

  NF: Yeah. Chasing that truck, crying. Yeah.

  Rudd said that when he went to visit Nanna, he had a ‘neat pile of blank paper’ where the words of the speech should have been. Rudd wasn’t the only contributor to the speech, but he was its principal author and his language and values are felt throughout it.

  For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants, and for their families left behind, we say sorry …

  To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry.

  On behalf of the Government of Australia, I am sorry.

  On behalf of the Parliament of Australia, I am sorry.

  And I offer you this apology without qualification.

  Rudd’s speechwriter, Tim Dixon, remembers the power of its ecclesiastical rhythms.

  What you see in the flow of language in the speech, if you know the prayer book piece, it’s Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. The rhythm of the language is actually the rhythm of the way in which the Apology is delive
red. It’s really quite extraordinary to listen to.

  Jenny Macklin had the last word on the Apology.

  He delivered the Apology which people had been calling for, for more than ten years. He mended terrible broken hearts by delivering that Apology and nobody else can ever take that away from him. He did it.

  Ken Henry said the fact that 2008 was a leap year was the only reason he could clearly recall the phone call from the Prime Minister’s office asking him to join Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan on a flight to Gladstone, Queensland on 29 February.

  Six years later, on a warm spring afternoon in a wood-panelled room at Sydney University, the crew of The Killing Season set up for an interview with the former Treasury secretary. For everyone who worked on the series, Ken Henry’s was one of the stand-outs of the fifty-three on-camera interviews. His answers were self-deprecating (not an abundant tone among the political interviewees) and he was able to praise Rudd and also reproach him without rancour.

  There are many scenes in The Killing Season that take place on planes and many more arrivals and departures at airports. The scene of the Gladstone flight, which lasts for one minute and thirty seconds, includes shots from five different locations filmed on two cameras over three months in Canberra and Sydney. At the Fairbairn RAAF base, from where the Prime Minister’s plane departed, Louie Eroglu, Greg Nelson and Justin Stevens had thirty minutes and a Defence Force supervisor telling them, ‘Hustle lads, hustle’. The final shot of the sequence is a VIP jet taking off into the evening sky, silhouetted against Black Mountain.

  Rudd had been contemplating the implications of the unfolding subprime mortgage crisis in the US. Henry said that when they were in the air, Rudd asked the Treasury secretary to tell him how bad it could get in Australia.

  The worst-case scenario is that the rest of the world simply stops financing our current account deficit, where it gets to the point where nobody, anywhere in the world is prepared to lend Australia anything. I said to him that the probability of that sort of thing is very low, but the consequence would be very big; it would be catastrophic.

  Henry told the Prime Minister and Treasurer that the worst-case scenario would mean a deep recession.

  Three weeks after that flight, US Treasury secretary Henry ‘Hank’ Paulson steered through the last-minute deal that saved American investment bank Bear Sterns from collapse. In the wake of the bailout, Rudd met with Paulson in Washington. Even as the crisis continued to cascade through the US financial system, Rudd made an impression.

  Kevin really stood out to me. He was quite a remarkable guy … this was the Prime Minister of Australia, [a] long ways away, coming into my office and wanting to have a serious discussion about what was going on, and he understood not just the politics, he understood the economics.

  After filming Rudd in Boston, we flew to Chicago to interview Paulson. The interview was important for the series because by 2014, an objective view of Rudd was hard to find.

  Paulson cuts an impressive figure: a star footballer in college, his athleticism is still evident. He is also atypical for a former CEO of one of the biggest US investment banks, Goldman Sachs. He has an interest in animal conservation, he’s an ascetic among the multimillionaires of Wall Street, and he’s a Republican somewhat in the mould of Nelson Rockefeller. Having spent his career in commercial banking, he had been reluctant to accept a position in government.

  When we arrived for our interview, the skyscraper housing Paulson’s office was bathed in gold in the early morning sun. It towers over a bend in the Chicago River in the city’s business district, rising from a cluster of Art-Deco and modern architectural masterpieces. You can feel the wealth of Chicago’s extraordinary nineteenth- and twentieth-century mercantile booms. It’s hard to imagine that in 2008, the financial system in the US was on the brink of disaster.

  On Monday 15 September, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy after attempts to find a buyer failed. The firm had 25 000 employees. That morning, the world watched images of them leaving their offices carrying boxes containing their possessions.

  Treasurer Wayne Swan remembered the moment.

  Fifteenth of September, Lehman Brothers goes over and basically the global economy is on the precipice. It’s on the edge of a cliff. The financial system is splitting apart at the seams, funding for financial institutions is drying up, markets are volatile and all over the place, and it’s doom and gloom.

  The Prime Minister’s press secretary, Lachlan Harris, accompanied Rudd on his trips to the US.

  Travelling to Washington, DC with Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister is the worst slash best thing you’ll ever do in your entire life basically. Forget about breakfast meetings. There’s meetings before the meeting before the breakfast meeting, and it goes on and on and on. It was like a meeting Tourette syndrome in DC. Henry Kissinger would be coming over to have tea before you had the meeting before breakfast, which was with Madeleine Albright. I mean this was a man who had a little black book and really wanted to use it. It was [a] UN nerd’s Tinder going off like you’ve never seen before.

  Harris thought Lehman was a turning point for Rudd as well as the government.

  All of a sudden you could feel that even the journalists themselves were looking for explanation and leadership. It was a very different tone from that moment forward. You had a different set of challenges. You had a different Kevin … Howard was in Washington for September 11 and it was the making of Howard in some ways, and absolutely no doubt it was the making of Rudd to be there in Washington in the days following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

  Ken Henry said Rudd was perfectly placed to handle the ensuing crisis.

  I think it is extremely likely that he was better prepared for any of this stuff than any political leader anywhere else in the world.

  Kevin Rudd travelled extensively during the crisis phase of the global financial meltdown. Julia Gillard was Acting Prime Minister. David Epstein noted how quickly she took to the role.

  She, and more particularly her staff at the time, were very ambitious. We used to have a game of cricket sometimes in the prime ministerial courtyard. That was cleared out so a photo opportunity could occur with Julia Gillard within about an hour of her arriving in the office as Acting Prime Minister. You probably can’t blame her. She’s an ambitious person who wanted to be Prime Minister. That ambition didn’t sit very far below the surface, even in the early days of the government.

  According to Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, Gillard was more efficient than Rudd when she deputised for him.

  The running joke inside the Cabinet is we’d all wait for Kevin to go overseas. You never bothered putting something you needed prime ministerial sign-off for into the PM’s office until you knew Julia was going to be in the chair. Now, responsibilities are different. Julia was filling in; she wasn’t engaged in the day-to-day stuff because Kevin was still the Prime Minister and, in terms of the politics, whatever was taking him overseas. But his office was famous for being just a black hole.

  Having arrived in New York for a session of the UN General Assembly, Rudd joined an impromptu gathering of world leaders at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, sometime around midnight. The Waldorf Astoria allowed our cameras in, but we didn’t know which room to film in. None of those present who we spoke to could agree exactly where the meeting had taken place, and in UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s account the meeting took place somewhere else altogether (either his memory was faulty or Brown didn’t want his Labor followers to know that global policy is sometimes determined in very swanky hotels).

  Economic adviser Andrew Charlton went into the meeting with Rudd.

  I thought there was another staffer in the room until he spoke in Spanish and I realised he was the Prime Minister of Spain.

  Gordon Brown said he and Rudd shared the view that existing global institutions couldn’t handle the developing uncertainty.

  The G20 became absolutely critical because the Western powers plus Japan, the origina
l G7, could not solve the crisis on their own … starting in September it was an extraordinary set of events that unfolded. I think Kevin [would be] in the same position as me in that he would wake up in the morning talking to a leader in one country, and go to bed at night after talking to leaders in another country. You had to use the different time zones so that you could talk successively to a series of leaders around the world, and I know Kevin was doing that night and day.

  Hank Paulson also backed Rudd’s call on the G20.

  We were reviewing the G20 and I told him I thought history would remember him kindly, that he was taking the right stance there.

  History may be kind but contemporary Australian politics are not. At home there was limited acknowledgement of Rudd’s efforts in ensuring Australia’s place in the international response to the global financial crisis (GFC).

  In late September 2009, at a Leaders’ Summit in Pittsburgh, the G20 was designated the ‘premier forum for international economic cooperation’.

  By October 2008, as Ken Henry had predicted months earlier, the flow of foreign capital into Australia was drying up. Henry said that when the International Monetary Fund released its World Economic Outlook, the forecast was sobering.

  It was saying that there was going to be a recession in the developed world and there was nothing that could be done about it. On top of that, the Australian financial system could not borrow from offshore—that’s toxic, absolutely toxic.