Burke said he and Gillard had ‘never been close’, but one evening in late April he went down to her office with a bottle of wine. Scenes we filmed with Tony Burke in Parliament House told the story.
It was a great warm and funny conversation. I left it to the very end. I wanted to make sure neither of us were in a leadership change challenge conversation, but I did want Julia to know that I believed at some point she’d be Prime Minister and I also wanted her to be able to deny that I’d said anything. So I just left the final comment, ‘There’s one issue tonight we haven’t spoken about. If you ever want to raise it with me, don’t hesitate’, and left it at that.
Gillard had not mentioned the meeting in her book. I asked for her recollection.
SF: So how did you respond when he raised the issue of leadership? It’s a big moment.
JG: Yeah. It is a big …
Gillard stopped abruptly, as if saying even that was a mistake. She retraced her steps in the story.
We agreed that we’d catch up. Tony basically pledged personally support to me, whatever the future might bring, but it was clear to me that in his version of the future, that would be stepping up for the leadership of the Labor Party. And once again, that was a sort of discussion a bit carried out in metaphors rather than very straight talking, and I was keen not to see it progress to a further, more explicit stage.
Gillard said they had a discussion. In Burke’s recollection, he made his declaration and left.
SF: What was her response?
TB: She just nodded, smiled, said thank you and left it at that.
I asked Gillard what she thought once Burke had gone.
I thought that personally he was incredibly bonded to me and supportive of me and that was wonderful to feel, that you had that kind of friend. I also thought, did it have real meaning in a leadership sense for me and Kevin. I didn’t think it had real meaning.
Rudd may have judged the meaning differently given Burke was a member of his Cabinet, but Gillard didn’t tell him about Burke’s visit.
The least thing I thought we needed when I was trying to get Kevin as supported as possible was him jumping around putting people in the freezer because they’d come and spoken to me in a conversation that I’d blocked and stopped … it wouldn’t have been a useful thing to convey that to Kevin because, you know, it’s like wrestling with smoke.
Tony Burke said he was also discussing the leadership with his factional colleague from the New South Wales Right, Mark Arbib.
Mark and I had spoken about it a lot. Neither of us had had a conversation where Julia had given any indication she’d be willing to … Mark was very wary because there was a view that we didn’t have a candidate … We also knew if we spoke to anyone about it who didn’t agree and it went straight back to Kevin, then the consequences would simply mean our capacity to influence anything would disappear.
Since Mark Arbib’s photo was first put on the wall in our office, I had been pursuing him for an interview. He was funny and willing to hear my argument—he just wouldn’t go on camera. We met a few times amidst the rococo splendour of the Bambini Trust café in the Sydney CBD, a place where many deals have been struck; it was also close to the Packer headquarters. He drank tea while I drank endless cups of coffee. I miss smoking with talent. I’ve never been much of a smoker, but it establishes a connection and defuses tense situations. Most of the cigarettes I’ve smoked have been with soldiers, cops and criminals.
I got close to a breakthrough once with Arbib, reporting some of Rudd’s most egregious charges against him. I could see it got under his skin. ‘How would it work if we did an interview?’ he asked. I started doing cartwheels, high-fiving myself (on the inside). Arbib got on a plane to the US that night, and I told myself later that he had succumbed to the philosophical mood of a long flight that took the edge off Rudd’s insults. The truth is probably more prosaic. Either way, he came back to me and said he had thought better of it.
Head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Terry Moran, observed that Rudd was in retreat after the CPRS leak.
The Prime Minister had restricted the number of people that he was talking to. He wasn’t really talking to anybody out of the public service. He wasn’t talking to many Ministers. He seemed to be just talking to a small number of people in his private office, and that’s not a happy approach to running a government … But I saw that as merely a temporary passage while he tried to recalibrate his political strategy.
Gillard said she had to assume many of the Prime Minister’s duties.
It is not normal for a Deputy Prime Minister to end up running a Prime Minister’s diary. It’s not normal for a Deputy Prime Minister to be trying to manage [it] so that quality speeches are given which have in them the messages that the National Secretariat has been working through. It’s not normal for the Deputy Prime Minister to be the one stamping out the campaign ground because it’s simply not being done by the Prime Minister.
In our interview, Rudd became irritated by the accounts of his behaviour, and with me for putting them to him. He rejected Julia Gillard’s description.
I think that’s a gross, gross overstatement. If I was delivering a speech relevant to her portfolio, fine. But it’s the grossest of over-claims to suggest that speeches were being written or that Julia had become my diary secretary.
In Rudd’s version there were only two critical issues raised by Gillard in the first half of 2010.
I remember Julia saying we need to do better with the coordination of ministerial visits to our target seats, our marginal seats around the country. I said, ‘Fine, you got the time to handle this?’ And she said, ‘Yes’. The second was she was concerned about policy preparation for the election which was due by the end of that year. So I said, ‘Fine, you’re the Deputy Prime Minister, you become the co-ordinator of policy for the next election. I’m delighted by that. I trust you’.
Rudd’s fundamental complaint about the challenge was that there was no warning, no notice.
Julia Gillard on no occasion said to me, ‘Kevin, here are the four things that are going wrong with the government, here are the four alternative approaches you must take, and if you don’t, I will have to resign as Deputy Prime Minister and then challenge you for the leadership’. That’s the honourable approach. The bottom line is, the coup was conducted in secret. That’s not open and transparent dealings. That’s the hard, ugly factional business of Tammany Hall and the New South Wales Right. And I would’ve thought as my loyal Deputy, Julia would’ve behaved differently. She didn’t.
Wayne Swan’s chief of staff, Jim Chalmers, said that as the government battled on multiple fronts, the pressure took its toll.
There were periods in 2010 where the tension within the government was palpable because of this perfect storm of policy and political problems all occurring at the same time: health, asylum seekers, climate change, mining tax. A lot of the ministers had been through a GFC, a difficult climate debate and other debates. Even though the government was only twoand-a-half years old, it had been like ten or twenty years worth of stress heaped upon it.
Tensions at the top of the government were felt on the backbench. Polling became the focus of Caucus anxiety. Nicholas Reece said in his state it showed Labor going backwards.
Victorian ALP polling was showing if an election was held during that period, the party would most certainly lose seats like Deakin and Corangamite. So hard conversations did begin about what the Prime Minister needed to do to turn that result around.
But Reece said the Prime Minister wasn’t prepared to hear the advice of party operatives.
Those difficult conversations weren’t able to be had because the Prime Minister had shut people out or kept cancelling meetings. The situation had reached an impasse.
At the time, Janelle Saffin was a first-term federal parliamentarian but not new to Labor politics, having served for almost eight years as a Labor member of the New South Wales Upper House. She rememb
ers conversations with Bill Shorten and Gary Gray about their election prospects. She wasn’t convinced by their arguments.
Bill’s main concerns were what polling was showing in some of the seats in Victoria: the marginal seats. If we went to an election now we might lose some of those seats … Gary Gray’s perspective was that there was a problem with polling with some seats … That extended through to, if we lost these so-many seats, we could lose government. I just didn’t see that so I didn’t buy into that sort of a conversation.
Saffin lost her seat at the 2013 election, but by the time The Killing Season was being made she hoped to contest the next election. Like others interviewed for the series, Saffin struggled with her remarks about the party leader. On camera, her story about Shorten was so halting we argued about whether we should keep it. I insisted. It was bad enough Shorten refused to be interviewed; we couldn’t let his colleagues erase him from the narrative.
Saffin went on to say that in 2010 she told the Prime Minister’s office about the discussions in Caucus.
I passed on to Kevin’s office that people were nervous; backbenchers were nervous and they were talking about polling. They needed to hear that.
Even the remote threat of losing an election so soon after regaining power spooked Mark Bishop and his Senate colleagues.
It led to a single-minded focus on Newspoll and Nielsen and Fairfax: I think with hindsight, a focus that was out of all proportion. You’d read the polls and discuss the polls and go back to the polls and discuss what was happening in this state and the preferred rating here ad nauseam, and that little, closed, narrow, disproportionate focus then led to more-serious discussions.
Sam Dastyari, general secretary of the New South Wales branch of the ALP, saw the internal party research in that state.
There were electoral challenges. The numbers were certainly tightening. There was a sense things were getting erratic, that we were doing too much, but here’s what no-one to this day has still been able to explain: Why didn’t they go see him? Why didn’t a delegation of senior Cabinet ministers go meet with the Prime Minister and say, ‘Hey, we want some things to change’?
The role of Cabinet in this story is a curious one: sidelined by the Gang of Four, and then by the factional heavyweights who orchestrated the change. None of the Cabinet ministers we interviewed for the series—except for Gillard—told us that in the weeks and months preceding the leadership challenge, they had spoken to Rudd about his management style or asked him to change the behaviour that was causing problems.
Chris Evans accepted they share the responsibility for what happened.
There’s a lot of regret, I think, from most of us that we didn’t assert ourselves enough in supporting Kevin. One of the advantages of a Cabinet is that they say no when the prime minister is going down the wrong track. And that didn’t operate the way it should’ve, and so, yes, we’ve all got to take responsibility.
The timidity which had taken hold in the Cabinet was evident to people close to the Prime Minister, including Terry Moran, who attended its meetings.
He [Rudd] sometimes had a very fixed view, but often he was trying to extract views from his colleagues at Cabinet meetings so there could be a discussion, and I found it odd, having sat in other Cabinets in other circumstances, that his colleagues weren’t as forthcoming with views as I had expected them to be.
There were only two ministers in Rudd’s Cabinet who had held that position in a previous government. Senator John Faulkner had been a minister under Keating, and Simon Crean had been a minister in both the Hawke and Keating governments.
The opportunity to implement an agenda for change, this is something that should’ve been embraced collectively. We should’ve got the process much better from the start, and as members of the Cabinet we should’ve quite frankly insisted on it more.
The views on Kevin Rudd’s management of Cabinet were so different as to be irreconcilable. Gillard said it was chaotic.
The Cabinet processes weren’t functioning. There was around particularly the big issues a sense of chaos and inability to bring a group together and get a decision made. And then for ministers there was a by-product of the chasing, hour after hour, indeed minute by minute, [of] the media cycle and some of the eccentric demands that could be put on them as a result of that.
Stephen Conroy was equally harsh.
By the time you got past Copenhagen it was utterly dysfunctional. There is nobody who could pretend to you otherwise, no matter how much they want to gild the lily.
Yet according to Anthony Albanese, Leader of the House, there was nothing out of the ordinary in the way Cabinet was run.
From time to time over specific issues, people would say there should’ve been a better process around that. But it occurred over the life of the entire Labor government and it’s occurred since 1996, since I’ve been a member of the Caucus.
Chris Bowen, like other senior ministers, had no complaints about the way the Prime Minister managed the Cabinet process.
I can only speak from my experience … It wasn’t dysfunctional … People weren’t raising concerns around the table. When I needed something on the Cabinet agenda, it got on the Cabinet agenda. When I needed a decision out of the Prime Minister’s office, I got a decision out of the Prime Minister’s office.
Greg Combet’s view was that Rudd’s management of Cabinet had a political dimension.
It’s true that had he managed the relationship with Cabinet, taken people with him, he would have avoided the political crisis that ensued. It gave the opportunity for others to engage in skulduggery … If Kevin had managed the politics of the government and his colleagues, he would not have lost the prime ministership. Julia and others could not have had the support to bring about the change.
As was the tradition, on the day Wayne Swan delivered his third Budget, the full ministry met in the Cabinet room. Resources Minister Martin Ferguson recalled that Gillard attempted to assuage any concerns the ministry might have had about the upcoming election.
MF: Julia’s comments were along the lines [of] obviously the honeymoon’s over. Every time you make tough political decisions you lose some section of the community, which is true. We’ll get through this.
SF: And no indication that she thought the government was so dysfunctional that it couldn’t continue?
MF: No. Never. If that was her view, then she should have told the full Cabinet.
At the end of Budget week in Canberra, Rudd and Swan flew home to Brisbane together. Rudd said the conversation they had en route was principally about the mining tax, and whether the AWU was solid in their support for Rudd and the government against the miners.
KR: I remember being on this flight with Mr Swan to Brisbane and I looked up to him and said, ‘You know, this is going to get pretty willing. It’s going to get pretty difficult. I assume, Wayne, that you and Bill [Ludwig, of the AWU] are strong and solid with this all the way through’. To which he said, ‘Yes’.
SF: Did you mean the mining tax or did you mean you as leader?
KR: I meant sustaining the tax and certainly withstanding any political pressure on me as leader coming from the factions and elsewhere.
SF: So you meant both things?
KR: Yeah, yeah, and he was very direct in his answer.
Wayne Swan also remembered the conversation. He assured Rudd he had his support, but it wasn’t a wholehearted endorsement of his leadership.
He said, ‘Are you with me?’, and I said, ‘Yes I am’ … I said to him I didn’t think that it would work, I had reservations about a [leadership] change and that I was sticking with him. He would not have asked me that question if he himself had not been hearing rumblings about his behaviour.
That night, Mark Arbib was interviewed by Leigh Sales on the ABC’s Lateline program.
Leigh Sales (LS): Mark Arbib, you’ve been around politics a long time. When does a party know that it’s time to change leader?
Mark Arbib (MA
): Well, can I tell you Leigh, we have an outstanding leader.
LS: But you don’t have to talk about that specifically. I just mean you were involved when Kevin Rudd took over from Kim Beazley. What are the signs that there needs to be a change?
MA: Well, the signs are not there now, 100 per cent not there now. Despite [the fact] we are going through rough waters, now is the time when you stick together and you focus on the basics and that is what we are doing …
Late one night in May, Anthony Albanese made an appointment to see the Prime Minister, away from Parliament House at The Lodge.
It was reasonably late, ten-thirty at night. I wanted to say to him that there were rumours around about disquiet in the Caucus, that he needed to be conscious of that … I was not giving him a warning that he was about to be knocked off because I didn’t think that was going to happen. He needed to engage more with the Caucus in what I thought was the lead-up to the election … Members of the right-wing faction were where some of the dissent was coming from.
Rudd didn’t remember the conversation, but he did recall Albanese’s anxieties about the factional leaders and Gillard’s relationship with the New South Wales Right.
Albo said he was becoming concerned by some of Julia’s actions and what she was saying. [He was] also beginning to be concerned about the extent to which she had formed a very deep relationship with Arbib and Bitar over the previous several months. And he posed to me the question of, ‘Where could this go?’
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