The Killing Season Uncut

by Sarah Ferguson

  Tony said to me that his view was I had two choices: I should either run for the leadership or I would need to take myself to the backbench.

  Burke offered to test Gillard’s support in the Caucus.

  I’d said to Julia, at the end of that conversation, ‘Do you want me to start making some phone calls, discreetly’ and she said, ‘Yes’.

  I asked Gillard why she chose Tony Burke for the task.

  JG: I did that because we had a relationship of trust.

  SF: Does that mean that you trusted Tony Burke more than David Feeney, Arbib and Shorten?

  JG: I was very close to Mark. Obviously I’ve known Bill and David Feeney a lifetime. But in terms of the people that I wanted to talk to in that moment, I wanted to talk to Tony Burke.

  Gillard chose not to call any of her senior Cabinet colleagues.

  JG: I did talk to a number of colleagues, of course, during those very compressed hours. It was not possible to talk to everyone.

  SF: But you could’ve spoken to the Cabinet and you chose not to. Why was that?

  …

  JG: Look, I made a selection about who I’d talk to, yes.

  The most obvious omission was Wayne Swan. Despite the strong relationship they had formed in government, she did not ask him for his advice.

  JG: I’m not sure that there’s a good answer to that actually. I didn’t speak to Wayne and obviously with the benefit of hindsight, I most certainly should have.

  SF: Were you concerned that Wayne Swan was going to say don’t do it?

  JG: No, no, that’s not the explanation.

  On the other side of Parliament House, in the Senate chamber, the day began as usual with prayers. South Australian Senator Don Farrell listened to the Lord’s Prayer before returning to his office.

  Deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen.

  Farrell said when he was back in his office, David Feeney burst through his door.

  He shuts the door and says, ‘Look, we’ve got to replace Kevin. We’re going to lose the election, and we need to support Julia Gillard … Let’s go and chat to Mark Arbib about it’. Mark was very strongly of the view that Kevin was unelectable as Prime Minister at the next election, and that without a change we were going to lose government.

  Brendan O’Connor also went to see her.

  I knew that this was not something that she had seriously engaged in because, without trying to have tickets on myself, I would’ve been engaged earlier if she had been seriously considering challenging Kevin. Things clearly were changing as a result of the article. It might’ve been a combination of other matters, but certainly that seemed to be the trigger at least for that morning, for her to start to think seriously about challenging Kevin.

  He recalled one piece of advice that he gave Gillard that morning.

  I said to her she would most likely have to get the Caucus back together because there is no way that a sitting Labor prime minister who’s returned us from opposition, within a day could lose the confidence of the Caucus. Well, I was entirely wrong. By midnight she had 80 per cent of the support.

  At Gillard’s request, Gerry Kitchener went to see Victorian Senator Kim Carr.

  GK: She asked me to speak to a couple of her supporters so I went and spoke to Kim Carr up in his office and then he, out of his own volition, organised a meeting after Question Time, which Julia agreed to attend.

  SF: How did Kim Carr respond when you went to see him?

  GK: He was, I wouldn’t say shocked but a trifle surprised.

  The business of government continued in the Prime Minister’s office, but Rudd’s press secretary, Lachlan Harris, noticed that communications with the Deputy PM and the Treasurer’s offices had ceased.

  That’s a very bad sign. You know the distance between the offices is 50 metres. You can look into each other’s windows. If you can’t raise each other, that’s a conscious act of [a] kind of separation, and that’s when we knew something was really, really wrong.

  According to Mark Bishop, meetings were going on through the morning and into the afternoon. Numbers were being counted.

  Mark Bishop (MB): I was always surprised that there were so many people hovering around Don’s [Farrell] office, that other people didn’t pick up on the significance. And then around about Question Time, I came to the view, this is done.

  …

  SF: Why did you come to the conclusion then?

  MB: Because a very large group of people had been involved in a very delicate operation and no-one had leaked. And secondly, I just did a count of the numbers and came to the view that there was a majority to change the leadership.

  Gillard had asked Tony Burke to make the calls to gauge her support.

  As people started to be called—and it was Mark [Arbib] and others who were making the calls, not me—we kept working on the basis that you only had to tell one person who didn’t think it was a good idea, Kevin would know, and it might be all off. So I put my office into lockdown.

  The report Gillard received from Burke was unequivocal.

  Tony Burke certainly took soundings and his view back to me was that I would be very solidly supported if I put myself forward for leader.

  Burke expected news of the phone calls to break.

  We got to Question Time and it hadn’t broken, and then we got out of Question Time and I said to Mark [Arbib], ‘It still hasn’t broken; are you not calling people?’ He said, ‘No, the calls are happening. We’re not going crazy’. But it was still holding, so everyone who they had spoken to was onboard.

  Question Time starts at 2 p.m. There’s a brief lull in the rhythm of the parliamentary day as MPs and Senators go to their respective chambers for an hour of political theatrics.

  Sam Dastyari answered a phone call just before Question Time on 23 June.

  I get a call from Mark [Arbib]. And he goes, ‘Mate, I think they’re going to move on him’, and I was just kind of floored. He goes, ‘Mate, it’s going to have to happen. The Victorians are onboard. You know we can’t lose an election. We can’t throw things out. We can’t allow this to happen’.

  Not long into Question Time, Dastyari said he took another call, this time from New South Wales Senator Ursula Stephens.

  She goes to me, ‘Mark just came up to me in Question Time and said, “We’re going to have to do something about Kevin.” Dasher, are we moving on Kevin?’ And I said, ‘Ursula, I don’t know’. And she goes, ‘I’m not in on this. You realise that you’re talking about removing an elected, sitting Prime Minister of Australia. You realise what the consequences are, Sam? I’ve seen this before. When they start talking about it, they start talking themselves into it. This is going to end badly’.

  Arbib was making the case that the upcoming election was lost with Rudd as leader, yet the Newspoll published two days earlier had shown the government leading the Coalition on the two-party-preferred measure. When Malcolm Turnbull challenged sitting Prime Minister Tony Abbott in September 2015, the Coalition had been behind Labor for thirty consecutive polls.

  Rudd media adviser Sean Kelly went up to the Press Gallery. It appeared to be business as usual.

  After Question Time I walked through the Press Gallery. Halfway through I got a call from Lachlan Harris. Lachlan said, ‘Just go back to the senior journalists and see if any of them are talking about leadership’. So I did. Not a word. None of them had any idea. Everything was completely dead. So I went back down.

  Question Time was the calm before the storm.

  Julia Gillard’s discussions with the factional leaders continued. Greg Combet described them as the ‘urgers’, those who were whispering in her ear.

  She would have had a group of people saying to her, like the urgers, ‘Yeah yeah yeah, you know, you’re the one, you’re the one, you’re the one, you know he’s finished, he’s finished, it’s you, it’s you’. And that’s how they talk, some of them. So she’d have had that going on. She’s a
mbitious, and probably got a sizeable ego too, like the rest of us. An opportunity’s presenting itself. Plus all the frustrations that are there. And you know maybe she might have handled it differently if she’d been a bit more experienced.

  Later that afternoon, Gerry Kitchener accompanied Gillard to a meeting in Kim Carr’s office.

  Kim had been delayed in Question Time, and so he came afterwards and then Bill Shorten arrived and David Feeney. And at that point Mark Arbib got up and was looking down the quadrangle down towards the Prime Minister’s office and he became quite agitated that the Prime Minister’s office could actually see the meeting. He madly started pulling the curtains across in the office.

  Some of the most powerful men in the Labor Party were there (and they were all men). Together they held the numbers that would determine Gillard’s fate. Farrell described how the meeting unfolded.

  She [Gillard] sat at the top of the table quite regally … We each gave an assessment of where we thought the numbers lied [sic] in the event that there was to be a challenge. We started to explain where we thought the party was at, the dire straits that we were in … I was perhaps a little bit more forceful in the sense that I thought things were about as desperate as they could get … She sat and listened and she nodded when people were saying things. And at the end of it she said, ‘Look, okay, I hear what you’re saying’. She certainly gave no commitment to challenge, but she did give a commitment to go and talk to Kevin about the issue.

  Towards the end of the first day of interviews with Gillard for The Killing Season, I asked her about that meeting. She answered the questions with more candour than she had shown earlier.

  JG: My recollection of that meeting was that it was a very strong ‘If you run you will be supported’ message. And they were obviously hoping that that information would encourage me to do it.

  SF: Were they also saying you have to do it now? All those people, Bill Shorten, Feeney, Kim Carr, were out on a limb by this stage pushing the change. Was that also part of their message?

  JG: Yes, very very clearly. One of the reasons I’d been pushing back on leadership discussions is they do have their own dynamic and their own life. The people who were talking to me were very knowing about what having those conversations meant for all of us. As was I.

  SF: So their jobs were all at stake at this point?

  JG: Yes, people’s positions in the party could be at stake.

  After the meeting concluded, Kitchener walked Gillard back through the corridors and halls of Parliament House to the ministerial wing. Like Caesar wondering by night on the banks of the Rubicon, Gillard was deep in thought. Kitchener asked her what had happened.

  She said, ‘I think that these guys don’t necessarily know what they’re doing’, and I took that to mean that she was concerned that they hadn’t had experience at these types of challenges before. They were both new to the federal Parliament, in Arbib and Shorten. They’d never been through a federal leadership challenge before, so I think she was genuinely concerned that what they were saying may not necessarily be true, and in the context of what was going on, I think that any victory by her in a leadership ballot that wasn’t overwhelming, would’ve been an absolute disaster.

  The Treasurer returned to his office after Question Time. He told Jim Chalmers he was going to throw his support behind Gillard.

  He indicated to us that he would be supporting Julia Gillard in the ballot if there was one. He explained it to us at some length, that he thought that the worst thing for the party would be a close result that didn’t resolve anything, and so he indicated to us that he’d be trying to ensure that it was a decisive result for Gillard.

  After the meetings on the Senate side, some of the senators wanted to see the Treasurer. They called Chalmers to arrange the meeting.

  It was very clear that Wayne had not considered at that point that he might end up the Deputy Prime Minister. So I said he had some colleagues who wanted to come and see him about that. They talked to him about that. He indicated that he’d be a candidate for Deputy Prime Minister if the position became vacant … David Feeney and Don Farrell, Mark Bishop and Steve Hutchins were part of the delegation. I know this because I had a piece of paper for a long time when they called where I’d written out their names.

  Chalmers was wise to note down the names of the senators who came to see Swan. About a day charged with emotion, unsurprisingly there were many contradictions between people’s accounts. It was hard to determine what was at play, mendacity or memory.

  Queensland had turned out for Labor at the 2007 election, so whatever happened in Canberra would have implications for electorates across that state. Swan recalled that a group of Queensland Caucus members came to see him, backing a change.

  In the course of the afternoon, the Queenslanders came down and we had a discussion about it and it was clear to me that it was pretty much, you know, no return when they came down.

  Early on Wednesday evening, the national secretary of the AWU, Paul Howes, took a call from Arbib.

  I had two conversations with him [Arbib]. The first was one I was driving and during that conversation I’d asked him to show me the polling. So I got home, I had the second conversation. He said, ‘You’ve got to make a call’. In the union you don’t do that on your own, so I needed to talk to our leadership.

  Howes was criticised in the press for this scene in the series, which showed him talking on his mobile phone while steering a car, but the shots had actually been filmed several years earlier for an episode of the ABC’s Australian Story, before laws were introduced making it illegal to handle a phone while driving. The bigger issue here was the relationship between the union and the parliamentary party.

  Lindsay Tanner explained it like this.

  There are individual members of Parliament who identify with a particular union, [who] in some cases rely on that union for preselection support, in some cases are former officials of that union. So there is a tribal phenomenon that is a reality of politics … This won’t be the case all the time, but when you get those really big internal battles like the leadership, people tend to cluster in groups.

  Throughout its history, the AWU had supported the leader in challenges, including backing Beazley against Rudd. A decision to swing their support behind Gillard would be a major departure from that tradition.

  Following the call with Arbib, Howes drove back to the city to talk to former AWU boss Bill Ludwig, a powerful figure in the labour movement with no love for fellow Queenslander Kevin Rudd.

  Labor strategist Bruce Hawker described the moment when Rudd’s office found out about a possible challenge.

  The chief of staff, Alister, came in and said that he was starting to pick up calls from people saying that a count was going on inside the party. About four o’clock I went out of Kevin’s office to go and have coffee and as I was walking [Communications Minister] Stephen Conroy and Mark [Arbib] came by and Mark could see I was looking very grim-faced and he said, ‘Cheer up, Bruce, it’ll be okay’, and Stephen Conroy smiling like a Cheshire cat. And I said, ‘This is going to end badly. None of us are going to look good out of this’.

  Despite what they had learned, it seemed that no-one in Rudd’s office, including Rudd, reacted. If the Prime Minister was in denial, that was shattered by Lachlan Harris’s visit to the Press Gallery early that evening.

  I walked into the ABC Bureau. Mark Simkin caught my attention. I walked over to see Mark and he said to me he had an extremely significant story and it was very, very important that I be watching the 7 p.m. news, and he was going to go live with it at the top of the bulletin. The way he said it to me, the tone of voice, the look in his eye, left me in no doubt that we were in a full-blown leadership challenge from that moment.

  Tony Burke had expected news of the challenge to break at any moment: ABC journalist Chris Uhlmann had got the story and shared it with his colleague Mark Simkin.

  The five o’clock news happened: hadn’t bro
ken. The two other commercial stations at six o’clock: still didn’t break. And then I was sitting in the chamber and my phone was going crazy and when I came out, it was Mark Simkin and he says, ‘Can you talk?’, and I said, ‘Well I can answer yes or no but I’m in a corridor’, and Mark said, ‘Okay, I want to read to you what I intend to open the seven o’clock news with’. And he had the whole thing and he read me the entire introduction. And there’s a pause and I said, ‘Well, you haven’t asked me a question yet’, and Mark said, ‘Well, if I read that out, will I be misleading the viewers?’, and I said, ‘No’.

  Around 6.30 p.m. there was a function for Tasmanian Senator Nick Sherry, at which Rudd was giving a speech. (There was no archive of the event, so we used footage of a morning tea from another day and changed the light to early evening.) Simon Crean was there.

  That’s when the corridors started boiling. That’s when the story appeared on the ABC. I knew nothing of it.

  Tony Burke recalled the moment.

  At that point it wouldn’t matter where you were standing within Parliament House, you could hear phones going off, you could hear text messages being sent. You had a school bell of mobile phones suddenly breaking out the whole way through the building.