The government pushed on, trying to secure an agreement with the Coalition. Greg Combet respected Rudd’s aspirations.
He was committed to action on climate change and he knew rightly that if he were able to go to the Copenhagen conference in 2009 having legislated an emissions trading scheme, introducing a carbon price into a fossil-fuel-intensive economy, that it would be significant. And it would have been. And it was quite right for an Australian Prime Minister to have the aspiration to go to that conference with that piece of legislation.
Lachlan Harris recognised the risk in what Rudd was trying to do.
We had a very complex piece of policy which we were trying to sell domestically … and it was difficult. It involved increasing prices on basic stuff like food and electricity bills, and we connected the necessity for that policy to an international conference that we didn’t control. We connected it too directly and that was the oversight.
On the eve of the Senate’s second vote on the CPRS legislation, the conservative forces in the Liberal Party prevailed and Turnbull lost a leadership ballot by one vote to Tony Abbott. Rudd was overseas on the day of the Liberal leadership challenge but his staff watched the event unfold on television. Media adviser Sean Kelly was with Rudd’s chief of staff Alister Jordan and Senator Mark Arbib.
We were workshopping lines on the three possible leadership candidates, Turnbull, Abbott and Hockey, and we never thought we’d need the Abbott lines. And then Abbott got announced as the Leader and we were thrilled. We were over the moon. We were grinning from ear to ear.
The climate change conference took place in December in Copenhagen. Inside the conference centre, it was chaotic. Press secretary Fiona Sugden was in Rudd’s entourage.
There were no facilities. You could barely move. Once you were inside the conference venue you really couldn’t get out, and I remember falling asleep under a table at 3 a.m. in the morning one day because you couldn’t leave once you were there.
The media was cut off from the negotiators, leaving journalists scrabbling for footage to file news stories. After a worldwide search we found a few sequences of Kevin Rudd striding through the conference venue lobby and pacing behind the glass window of a meeting room, filmed from a distance. On the audio track you can hear the producer begging Rudd to walk in front of the window one more time to give them another shot.
The political dynamics of the conference were immediately apparent to Rudd.
There was an orchestrated campaign from the floor of the conference, not just by China and India at the time, but also by friends of China and India: countries such as Venezuela, countries such as Bolivia and others, who were effectively acting in concert with those two countries to prevent an outcome.
There was one piece of trivia I was prepared to indulge: did Kevin Rudd call the Chinese ‘ratfuckers’?
KR: I’d frankly not been to sleep for a couple of days. I cannot recall verbatim what I said. I don’t think anyone was there from my staff taking detailed notes of an off-the-record briefing.
SF: Does it sound like you?
KR: Well, I’m a person given often to fairly direct speech.
In the received narrative, Copenhagen was a failure. The subtleties of international diplomacy didn’t translate well to the evening news. But while no binding agreement emerged from the conference, there was an accord. Australia’s Special Envoy on Climate Change, Howard Bamsey, was part of the delegation in Copenhagen.
I don’t think it’s possible to say that any one person was absolutely critical to the Copenhagen outcome. President Obama was very important, Premier Wen Jiabao was very important … but I don’t think most people would contest that Kevin Rudd played a very strong role.
Bo Lidegaard, senior adviser to the chair of the conference, described how negotiations continued after President Obama and Premier Wen had left.
That is actually when the actual summit took place, because you had thirty, thirty-five leaders in a small room starting to actually negotiate the text between them. And the atmosphere there was very, very tense in the sense that it’s unusual to have world leaders sitting, hacking on the actual sentences.
British leader Gordon Brown was also at that marathon meeting.
We were meeting almost continuously for hours … I think he [Rudd] played a very powerful role. And although we didn’t get the full treaty, the fact that we got a Copenhagen Declaration, which has now led to the next stage that will be worked through, is in no small measure due to him.
But by the time UN chief Ban Ki-moon stood up to announce the agreement, Rudd knew the media caravan had already moved on.
By that stage it was un-newsworthy because the colour and movement of the other events had dictated in the mind of global public opinion that this had failed.
Fiona Sugden remembered the final day in Copenhagen.
I remember the press conference we did at the end was just, everybody was so tired, I mean the journalists themselves had barely slept for like two or three days and people were falling asleep. Penny Wong was nearly falling asleep herself. It was very unpleasant, is the only way really to describe it.
Gordon Brown gave his account of Rudd’s performance on the international stage across the GFC and the climate change negotiations.
[He is] someone who understands more than perhaps anyone does that when you have a crisis, you’ve got to think of the solutions and seize the importance of international cooperation. If anyone were to look back on the events of 2009 it’s the strong belief that was sent by Australia round the world that global problems need global solutions and you cannot do that without a degree of cooperation, that we’d never properly had before, even after 1945. Now, that will be Kevin Rudd’s message to the world at all times. But he showed that it could be put into practice in 2009.
But all politics is local, as they say. Thousands of kilometres away from Copenhagen, in the southern Sydney suburb of Hurstville, Senator Mark Arbib was watching a focus group with ALP national secretary Karl Bitar and strategist Bruce Hawker. Hawker described what happened.
The moderator of the group steered the conversation around to a price on carbon. The strong reaction from the group, both men and women but particularly men, was that this was a tax that was going to have dubious impact on global warming, at best, and at worst was going to have a big impact on their hip pockets.
According to Hawker, the message was coming through loud and clear.
It tended to confirm in everybody’s mind that something had to be done to start to walk back a little bit away from the CPRS, or the carbon tax … Abbott’s campaign was starting to cut with the electorate. At the conclusion of those groups we had a phone call through to Kevin in Copenhagen.
Hawker was in the room when Arbib and Bitar called Kevin Rudd. Notwithstanding the huge dislocation of time and surroundings, he said Rudd listened to what they were saying about the challenges ahead.
I understand he took the advice that was being proffered, which was you really now need to start looking at ways of withdrawing, not in a panic, but giving yourself some room to manoeuvre into a much more considered position that’s more in keeping with public opinion on the issue. He took that advice in a very intellectual way. There was no raging or railing or anything like that.
Rudd said he didn’t recall the conversation and claimed not to be guided by the findings of focus groups.
Focus groups, shmokus groups. I mean they come, they go. They’re a snapshot at a particular time. If I’d done focus groups on should I apologise to Indigenous people, they would’ve gone booooo! You know, particularly in western Sydney. So frankly that didn’t worry me so much.
He did remember that while he was in Copenhagen, Bitar and Arbib gave some advice to his chief of staff, who relayed it to him.
Bitar and Arbib said use the difficulties that you’ve run into in Copenhagen as an excuse to drop the emissions trading scheme, carbon pollution reduction scheme, altogether. That was their advice. I rejected
their advice.
Kevin Rudd returned from Copenhagen at the beginning of the summer holidays. Treasury secretary Ken Henry recalled the response of his colleagues.
We thought in the public service, you know, he’d come ridiculously close to pulling something off that seemed just impossible really. Many of us thought that was something of which he should’ve been really, really proud. Instead, he was quite despondent.
Rudd acknowledged his disappointment.
It’s human nature. You’re not an automaton. You’re a real, live, feeling human being, deeply committed to climate change, and you’ve thrown your everything at it, and of course it’s only partly worked. That’s life. But I’m also a deeply resilient person, deeply resilient.
Julia Gillard’s observation of Rudd was pointed. She doubted his resilience.
I was increasingly concerned that Kevin wasn’t in any way picking himself up off the mat where he’d ended up after Copenhagen. So yes, natural to be bitterly disappointed, but politics is a tough business and after you’ve taken the punch in the gut you’ve got to get back up. He didn’t look to me like he was getting back up and so I was very concerned about his frame of mind, [his] capacity to go and fight an election.
In the wake of Copenhagen, the Prime Minister faced a critical decision on whether to call a double dissolution election to push the government’s climate policy through the stalemate in the Senate. Wayne Swan remembered his first meeting with the Prime Minister a few days after Copenhagen.
I saw him at the meeting we had in the government offices on the twenty-third [of December] and he was not happy, he was tired, he wasn’t communicating well, and he wasn’t really focusing on where we should go. I think the failure of Copenhagen had a pretty dramatic impact on him.
Lachlan Harris recalled the debate about whether to go to an early election.
It was an idea that everyone agreed on but no-one wanted to put their name behind except [Senator] John Faulkner. He was the only person as far as I can remember who genuinely put his name behind and argued strongly for a double dissolution election.
Jim Chalmers was tasked to work on campaign contingency plans over Christmas.
In late December and early January, the Prime Minister was of two minds about an early election … It became very clear to us though, very quickly, that the Prime Minister was not likely to call an early election in that period. It didn’t seem to me that he was fully in harness for it.
Harris said the demanding year had taken its toll on the Prime Minister.
Lachlan Harris (LH): Rudd had been working very hard for a very long time and he’d been doing a lot of stuff outside of Australia, which means outside of the normal time zones. And was that starting to affect the people around him and affect Rudd? We have to accept it was.
SF: And how did it manifest itself?
LH: We were not hungry enough to go immediately to a double d[issolution election] after Copenhagen failed.
In retrospect, Labor’s decision not to seize the opportunity for an early election looks like the wrong one. New South Wales Senator Sam Dastyari certainly saw it as a mistake.
We should’ve gone to the polls. We would’ve won; we would’ve won big. We would’ve won with Kevin and perhaps Kevin would still be Prime Minister today … We had Abbott’s measure. We would’ve nailed him to a post if we’d gone to an election at the start of 2010.
The Prime Minister and his colleagues retreated for Christmas, Rudd taking up residence at Kirribilli House. It was here, in the new year, that one of the key scenes of The Killing Season took place: a meeting between Rudd and Gillard.
Four years later, Margie Abbott, wife of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, welcomed our crew to Kirribilli to film the sequence. Following producer Deb Master’s template, this would not be a literal reconstruction but a series of vignettes that suggested the events being described. We found a piece of archive of Kevin welcoming Julia at the front door of Kirribilli on another occasion: the scene was set.
Gillard described the meeting.
It’s a beautiful vista. It was a lovely day. I sat on the verandah with Kevin and the staff there brought little things to eat and cups of coffee.
Rudd’s memory was the same.
There’s a patio outside which reminds me a little bit of Queensland, so my natural instinct when you’ve got guests is take them out there and give them a cup of tea so they can enjoy the view, and then get down to the business.
That’s the point at which their recollections diverge. I had read Gillard’s account of this meeting in Paul Kelly’s Triumph and Demise, but the version in her own book was much less controversial. My concern was that on camera she would retreat from what she had told Kelly. I had a strategy for that but as it turned out, I didn’t need it.
Rudd recalled an abrupt start to their conversation.
She was into it straightaway when she said that she would not, under any circumstances, support a double dissolution on climate change.
Gillard remembered things differently.
I looked at Kevin and thought he has not refreshed over this Christmas–new year period. He doesn’t look rested. Every bit of me read him as reluctant to go to an early election, not physically [or] psychologically in the zone to go and fight an election campaign. I was actually just personally one to one very worried about him.
She went further in her assessment of Rudd’s mental state.
JG: I’m not a medically qualified person so I can’t, you know, diagnose anything. But just as one human being to another, my sense of him at that point was that he was spent in a physical and a psychological sense. He was very anxious and just not able to deal with issues in a methodical way. I thought he was, you know, sad, under pressure.
SF: The words you use, they sound like a layman’s description of a breakdown.
JG: I have used all sorts of words around this and rightly been chided by people who say, ‘Well, you’re not a mental health professional’. I’m not. But I was seriously worried about his psychological state. I thought he wasn’t coping and he wasn’t showing any signs of finding a way back to coping.
This was the first time in our interview Gillard said that Rudd wasn’t coping. She went on to use the word many more times; it had become the justification for the leadership change.
SF: If you’re concerned about his mental state you must’ve been concerned also about his capacity to be Prime Minister.
JG: Look, at that point, if you’d asked him to make a huge decision as Prime Minister on that day, yes, I would’ve been concerned about his capacity.
It was an extraordinary claim: that Rudd’s mental health was so compromised he couldn’t function properly as Prime Minister. I read out what Gillard had said to Rudd.
If that was [a] serious view on Julia’s part at the time, then she would’ve had an obligation to go to the National Security Committee of the Cabinet and put it forward, or to put it forward properly to the Cabinet. If that was her genuine concern at the time, which it was not. It didn’t form any element, direct or indirect, in our conversation. It’s absolute bollocks.
When I pressed the same point with Gillard, didn’t she have a responsibility to tell someone if she was concerned about Rudd’s mental state, she backtracked slightly but did not withdraw the original statement.
Oh look, if there had been an urgent decision, you know one urgent decision to be made, I think Kevin could’ve made that decision. What I’m really talking about more is bracing and being ready for the full weight of being Prime Minister, which is not can you do this one thing today? It’s can you juggle a hundred balls whilst you go about a spirit-crushing diary day after day after day. I didn’t think he was in the zone for that.
Why did Gillard wait more than four years to raise this point? Why didn’t she say anything at the time?
I kept my discussions with my colleagues about the political issues rather than my personal assessments of Kevin. Politics is a business where too much l
oose talk can cause all sorts of problems, so I didn’t feel that it was appropriate for me to be talking about my view of his psychological state.
Unsurprisingly, Rudd said Gillard’s claims were about justifying her later actions.
It’s simply a post-facto construction of yet another reason or justification for the coup in June of 2010, which any person familiar with Shakespeare will know was basically driven by personal political ambition.
We tested Gillard’s assessment with her senior colleagues. There was an acknowledgement that Rudd was tired and his mood low after Copenhagen, but no-one supported her view that Rudd was incapacitated or mentally diminished.
Leader of the House Anthony Albanese said it didn’t fit with his recollection.
Kevin got on with the business of government into 2010 … It’s up to people to make their own judgements, but no-one was saying that at the time.
It was a view shared by Agriculture Minister Tony Burke.
Tony Burke (TB): It doesn’t make sense. I saw no evidence of that.
SF: How was he during the Cabinet?
TB: Not that different to how he had been for a long time.
Gillard’s portrayal of Rudd became central to my negotiations for an interview with Chris Bowen. His wish to refute Gillard’s claim about Rudd’s incapacity was one of the reasons for him changing his mind about not participating.
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