The Killing Season Uncut

by Sarah Ferguson

  The mining tax exposed the fault lines running through the Rudd government. Relationships were fracturing and public approval was waning. Jim Chalmers saw how the mining industry used the government’s predicament to their advantage.

  They were better funded, they had a willing media behind them. We did not have a shed full of political capital to spend on a difficult reform, which was a big problem. We weren’t riding high like we were earlier on in the life of that first term of the government. We were very close to an election. There was a whole lot of tension around some of our other reforms simultaneously. And so we were comprehensively beaten by the industry in the argument about a mining tax. We just didn’t have the sorts of weapons that they had at our disposal.

  After we’d dealt with the mining tax in Rudd’s interview, we agreed to take a break, and Rudd went into the green room for a fresh cup of his trademark tea. The tension eased. I leant back in my chair, the crew and producer Deb Masters and I by ourselves for the first time that day. We all started talking at once. After a few minutes I looked over at Rudd’s empty chair and the table next to it. There was an iPhone on the table, placed there by a staffer to record the interview. The recording was still going. I grabbed the phone and stabbed at the off button while the others looked on, frozen.

  CHAPTER 9

  THE LONG GAME

  This is not a story about one person. This is not a set of events around one person. It’s not even a set of events around two people, around me and Kevin. I think it’s a broader canvas about the life and functioning of a Labor government.

  Julia Gillard

  THE LABOR LEADERSHIP challenge of 2010 was unorthodox, driven from outside the centre of power and without a willing candidate. The agitators, while powerful figures in the Labor Party, were novices to Canberra; not even Julia Gillard fully trusted their abilities on the day of the challenge. The only senior player, by his own account, was Agriculture Minister Tony Burke.

  Gillard was no Keating to Rudd’s Hawke. She didn’t stalk him for the leadership. Not long before the challenge, Kevin Rudd’s chief of staff, Alister Jordan, told Assistant Treasurer Chris Bowen she was ‘the epitome of loyal’. So what made her ask Rudd for a ballot in his office on the night of 23 June?

  Kevin Rudd was a popular Prime Minister whose Caucus colleagues deserted him in less than twenty-four hours. What was it about Rudd that saw him isolated on the night of the challenge, no powerbroker marshalling support for the battle ahead? AWU leader Paul Howes called it the ‘$64 million question’.

  How can someone that was so effective in networking, so effective in building strong personal relationships, do away with them so quickly? If it was a work of fiction, if this was an episode of House of Cards or The West Wing, you wouldn’t believe it.

  The contemporaneous media and the books of the period laid out their versions of the challenge. For The Killing Season, our task was to get as many firsthand accounts as possible on camera. By the time we finished filming, we had 144 hours of interviews with fifty-five people. A narrative emerged of Rudd’s unravelling and Gillard’s ascendancy, but no single truth.

  As Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner observed, ‘the truth is always conditional in politics’.

  There are certain things that are on the public record that are not disputed, so you can fairly safely say those things are true. Then there are other things that there are differing interpretations of, where it’s probably not possible to get a conclusive position. And there are other things that we’ll probably never know.

  There were two months between the leak of the decision to delay the ETS and the removal of Rudd. What happened in that time?

  In April 2010, Kevin Rudd knew how it felt to be on the wrong side of a public opinion poll. His personal popularity had taken a hit, and the backward slide was always going to be problematic for a Prime Minister who had used his public support to take the leadership of the party.

  Senator Michael Forshaw, convenor of the New South Wales Right, said Rudd’s security depended on the voters’ support.

  After the election I think he was very popular, but you know I’ve always thought that that popularity was very much based on his electoral success. The Caucus didn’t love Kevin Rudd like they loved Kim Beazley or Bob Hawke or even Paul Keating.

  Rudd set himself apart from his colleagues early on, according to West Australian Senator Chris Evans.

  I think Kevin became quickly isolated as Prime Minister and that was obviously his own doing. I think he didn’t have strong relationships with enough people who had sway in Caucus, and he didn’t look to build those relationships. He got there on his own personality and effort and I think he thought that would sustain him.

  When I re-read the interview transcripts, I was surprised by how much good material Evans had provided. I wondered whether in writing the series, I had associated him too much with the criticism of Rudd over the Oceanic Viking and missed his most valuable quality: fairness.

  The disquiet in Caucus in early 2010 caused some Labor backbenchers to hold meetings to discuss the government’s prospects. Piecing together the narrative of their discontent was tricky: some wouldn’t talk, and those that did hid as much as they revealed.

  South Australian Senator Don Farrell was one of the instigators. ‘We started having meetings, eventually with quite a broad range of people, about the problems that the party was facing.’ Farrell listed some of the attendees. ‘There was a range of people: David Feeney, Bill Shorten, Steve Hutchins, Mark Bishop, amongst others, Gary Gray.’

  David Feeney, Steve Hutchins and Gary Gray wouldn’t speak on camera. Victorian Senator David Feeney was one of the key players in the challenge, along with Bill Shorten and Mark Arbib; he gave a research interview early in the production but then withdrew his co-operation. Mark Bishop was also difficult to pin down. He said yes, then cancelled and disappeared from view, despite our attempts to get him back. Towards the end of filming, he called to say he had heard that Wayne Swan had done something like ten hours of interviews, and now he wanted to have his say. It wasn’t true that Swan had been interviewed for so long, but it didn’t matter. We wanted Bishop’s account.

  They start as all meetings do: innocently … The view that emerged was that the government was perilously close to losing [its] ability to be elected or re-elected.

  Victorian Senator Stephen Conroy said no-one paid much attention to the backbenchers at the time.

  Well, people were frustrated they hadn’t been promoted … This is a normal political dynamic. It’s just a few unhappy people. They haven’t been promoted to a parl sec or they haven’t been promoted to the ministry.

  I asked Don Farrell why they didn’t take their concerns to the Prime Minister.

  Don Farrell (DF): All of us had formed a view about Kevin’s ability to receive bad news and to be given advice, and he just wasn’t in the mood to listen to any advice that we might give him. So in a sense you had to work around him.

  SF: Is that fair though, just to make that assumption and not test it?

  DF: Yeah, look, I think it is fair.

  Chris Evans didn’t pay much attention to the malcontents either.

  Chris Evans (CE): I didn’t see them as being particularly influential or necessarily representative of the broader Caucus. I didn’t rate the danger as highly as I should’ve.

  SF: You say they weren’t influential. How did they manage to wield so much influence so soon after that point?

  CE: That’s a very interesting question that I don’t really have a satisfactory answer for.

  Stephen Conroy observed that they were helped by the geography of Parliament House.

  One of the great design flaws of Parliament House, and if you talk to the people who designed it, they would say the one change they would make would be not to create a ministerial wing. I worked in the Old Parliament House. Nothing could happen without everybody knowing. The physical separation of the ministerial wing from the rest of the parliame
ntary team leaves you isolated, and if you’re exceptionally busy it can leave you very isolated.

  Whether it was geography or secrecy, very few people had any idea those meetings were taking place.

  Evans said that Rudd had no equivalent of the hard men who had managed Caucus for previous Labor prime ministers.

  He just didn’t have that sort of organisational support or power base … certainly he didn’t have lieutenants who managed the Caucus for him.

  One person who had performed some of that role, not as an enforcer but at least as a go-between, was Mark Arbib. In March he emailed Rudd’s chief of staff to warn him about backbench discontent: ‘Btw It would be worth Kevin doing a round of dinners with mps from each class. There is backbench unrest but manageable’. Alister Jordan told Arbib they were already arranging dinners with backbenchers but he was happy to do more.

  There were thirty-eight new MPs and senators in a Caucus of 115. Many of them had a relationship with Kevin Rudd in opposition, particularly those in marginal seats. But after Labor won government, the relationships changed.

  Victorian MP Alan Griffin didn’t think this was a problem.

  SF: People complained a lot about not being able to see Kevin Rudd, that they weren’t able to get the attention that they thought they were due. Is that fair?

  Alan Griffin (AG): I don’t think it is fair. I know that with Paul Keating I had two conversations with [him] and I was a member of his government for the term ’93 through to ’96. One was in the first week of the ’93 election campaign and the other time was about three months after the ’96 election. And I don’t have a problem with that because prime ministers should be running the country, and if they’re spending too much time talking to junior backbenchers then frankly they’re not doing their job.

  Mark Arbib occupied an unusual position in Rudd’s circle. He had only been in the Senate since July 2008 but as a former secretary of NSW Labor, he was part of the government’s political strategy group that included Rudd, Swan and Gillard. Media adviser Sean Kelly said Arbib was a regular presence.

  Mark was in and out of the office all the time. On any significant matter, Kevin would want to know what Mark thought. That wasn’t an uncommon phrase at all, ‘What does Mark think about this?’ Mark Arbib was an incredibly important figure. He had an enormous amount [of] power in the New South Wales Right and New South Wales politics in general, and of course he was also viewed as having a very impressive political antenna.

  Arbib helped Rudd prepare for the health debate against Tony Abbott at the National Press Club in Canberra in March and congratulated him in an email afterwards: ‘U slaughtered him—mojo really back’.

  There’s no doubt that Arbib was still talking to Rudd, but according to Julia Gillard, as 2010 went on, their relationship was strained.

  Mark had been in this uncomfortable position with Kevin where he was never afraid to speak truth to power. One of Kevin’s standard reactions to that was to put Mark, as we used to refer to it, in the freezer. I’d sit there with Mark or I’d sit there with Karl Bitar or even sit there with Wayne and there’d be a standing joke: ‘Who’s in the freezer this week? Oh, Mark’s back in the freezer’. So yes, I absolutely understood that that was an increasingly troubled relationship.

  As Rudd’s standing in the polls dropped, Julia Gillard’s was rising. Victorian ALP state secretary Nicholas Reece commissioned the polling in his state.

  She was Deputy Leader at that point and that’s a different situation to being the leader, but I’d never seen a political figure with such high approval ratings as Julia Gillard was enjoying in Victoria in those early months of 2010. And I certainly conveyed that to her, more for our amusement than anything else.

  Greg Combet watched her popularity evolve inside the Caucus.

  She had huge work areas and very large reforms in education and industrial relations and she performed them beyond people’s expectations actually. She was tremendous in Question Time, I think our strongest performer at that time, and so her stocks were riding high. And it’s little wonder that when confidence fell in Kevin Rudd, people start thinking who’s next, that the gaze goes to Julia Gillard.

  That line appeared in the series, but in the interview Combet went on.

  She was our outstanding performer at the time, but was she ready for the prime ministership?

  As early as March 2010, journalists were asking questions about the Labor leadership. The media fascination with leadership tension was not new, nor was it unique to Australia. Years ago in the UK, I watched close up as the grandees of the Conservative Party moved on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Just before the first challenge, I went to a cocktail party at Number 12 Downing Street, two doors down from the British PM’s residence and home to the government’s Chief Whip. Barely understanding the tension I could feel, I watched Thatcher move through the small, hostile crowd at the party with such force I wondered her enemies didn’t all resign on the spot. The British media wrote about every permutation in that period, as they did about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, as we did about Hawke–Keating and Howard–Costello. But something changed under Rudd–Gillard. Certainly the media cycle was faster, demanding much more coverage, and our political terms are shorter than those in the UK, making our politics generally more volatile. But it took collusion between Labor politicians and the media to turn leadership coverage into a full-blown pathology.

  In 2010 that phenomenon was in its early stages. It didn’t matter how many times Gillard laughed it off, the questions kept coming.

  While making The Killing Season, I spent a lot of time trying to see the events of 2010 through Gillard’s eyes. She didn’t make it easy. Her answers at times were maddeningly opaque. It may have been an unrealistic ambition, but I’d wanted her to be more personal, less political. It was too late for that: she was locked into the minimal narrative set out in her book and in the speeches she gave after leaving politics. The language she chose was ambiguous, leaving too many questions unanswered. After two interviews, the exact evolution of her decision to challenge remained a mystery. I am left thinking she wants it that way.

  I found one early description in an interview with Liz Jackson for Four Corners in February 2011.

  These were tremendously pressurised and difficult times, and I’m not going to canvas how I felt in individual parts of it. But it certainly was a, you know, very, very tough time for me, a very tough decision to make, and I came to it very, very slowly.

  It made sense. I read out the quote to Gillard during our interview in Adelaide.

  I didn’t, well that’s, I don’t know where I’ve said that but I didn’t in my own mind cast around about the leadership over many many months. That’s not how it happened.

  I gave the context for her quote and read it out again.

  Well I’m surprised by that because that’s not really how I feel about it or how I think I would ever have summarised it.

  The description ‘I came to it very, very slowly’ seemed unremarkable but she denied it nonetheless.

  SF: When did you first begin to think that taking over from Kevin, replacing him, could be a solution?

  JG: There’s not a moment that I started thinking the solution to this is changing leader. I did have some Caucus colleagues talk to me in hedged, almost code language about, well, haven’t we got to the stage where we need to think about the leadership, and I’d always stop those discussions and get straight out of them as soon as possible.

  When she talked about Kevin Rudd, her argument was clear.

  JG: I was increasingly across those months, February going into March, March going into April, April into the Budget season of May, doing everything that I could to take things off his shoulders by increasingly interacting with his staff and getting things done directly that way.

  …

  SF: So he still wasn’t coping?

  JG: No, he wasn’t coping.

  I put Julia Gillard’s description to Kevin Rudd.
>
  SF: ‘By 2010 I was doing everything I possibly could to take things off his shoulders.’

  KR: By 2011 Julia was doing everything she could to rewrite history.

  In Paul Kelly’s book Triumph and Demise, MP Tony Burke outed himself as one of the first people to raise the leadership with Gillard after the decision to delay the CPRS was leaked.

  The cameras for the Tony Burke interview were set up in the basement Marble Bar of Sydney’s Hilton Hotel, which Burke remembered as an old haunt. He was more forthcoming than we expected. His interview had an intimate quality: not confessional but candid.

  Burke said he had been unhappy with Rudd for a while. He complained that after the 2007 election he was no longer able to call Rudd directly, as he had in opposition. He was also disappointed to be made Agriculture Minister, a policy area he had no connection with. By 2010, his grievances had deepened.

  I thought the policy calls we were making had started to be wrong, I thought our capacity to communicate had all but evaporated, and I thought we were probably headed to a defeat. You put those three together, for me that was enough to talk about what you ordinarily wouldn’t want to.

  Rudd said he was unaware of Burke’s discontent.

  In fact, Tony Burke had always been expressing his support and loyalty to myself, and I had not long previously promoted him and expanded his portfolios to include Population Policy.