In other parliaments like that of the UK, the notion that a former leader would stay on is not unusual. The question of how he conducted himself comes later, but why should Rudd—or Gillard, or Tony Abbott—depart so early with so much experience?
In the Caucus room, Julia Gillard spoke, thanking Caucus and Kevin Rudd, and praising her predecessor for his service.
Brendan O’Connor remembered the atmosphere in the room.
It was very emotional. It’s awful to see someone so upset, and whatever concerns I’d had with Kevin as leader, I felt very sympathetic to him.
Rudd said he chose not to spare the Caucus his views about the challenge. His anger was directed at Mark Arbib.
One of the things I said though, as I looked in the eyes of Mark Arbib and held his stare throughout that part of my speech, was the cancer of factionalism and factional thuggery and the faceless men has now been brought to this Caucus room from the New South Wales Right in Sydney.
Senator Michael Forshaw was the party’s returning officer. He said it was a short meeting.
I call for nominations. Julia Gillard nominates—she’s the only nomination—and I declare her elected. Then I left the meeting shortly after to go out and make the announcement to the media.
Former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr said the instigators of the challenge should have been thinking about what came next.
A leadership change isn’t over when the returning officer comes out of the party room or when the victor gives his or her speech to the media. The aftershocks of a leadership change really should have been calculated.
His prime ministership over, Kevin Rudd had one more speech to deliver.
On the back of a scraggly piece of paper, I then started to construct some notes for what I would then say to the assembled media throng in the Prime Minister’s courtyard.
Julia Gillard watched Rudd’s press conference.
I was thinking, well, it was you know heartbreaking, absolutely lump in your throat material, particularly watching the faces of his children and my eyes were consistently drawn to his youngest son, to Marcus. Dreadful to watch, as one human being to another.
Rudd responded to that quote.
I’m glad Julia has said that she felt for Marcus standing behind my shoulder. She could’ve done something about that by honouring the agreement we had reached in the room the night before.
In the Prime Minister’s courtyard, Rudd listed his achievements in office, his eyes filling with tears, overcome as he recalled the members of the stolen generations standing in the same courtyard three years earlier for the Apology. Not long after that moment, Rudd had enjoyed one of the highest approval ratings ever in Australian politics. How far he had fallen.
Gillard’s staff were also watching Rudd’s press conference, including adviser Tom Bentley.
The effect of him standing at the lectern openly weeping and going on for much longer than anybody might’ve expected was to create an alternative set of images and messages to the ones which the government was articulating with Wayne and Julia becoming Deputy Prime Minister and Prime Minister.
SF: Were they not real tears?
TB: I can’t answer that question.
Gillard suggested Rudd would have felt relieved to no longer be Prime Minister.
I thought his reaction and conduct on that day was in some ways all of a piece with having found the circumstance so hard, having been so miserable in the prime ministership, and then there was this new wave of misery very visibly breaking in front of people. I still hoped that after the shock, the immediacy of the hurt, that over time he would actually feel some of the relief that would come with having the burdens of office off his shoulders.
I put the comments to Rudd.
SF: Did you feel relieved?
KR: Not at all, but I imagine that’s the sort of thing an assassin does say.
The idea that Kevin Rudd would feel any relief was absurd. In her interview, I thought Gillard had gone far enough, but she kept going.
Given Kevin was miserable in the prime ministership and something that he was finding personally so heavy on him, I thought that there would be more of that relief than say I felt later on because I wasn’t miserable in the job of Prime Minister.
Rudd rejected Gillard’s description.
Well, again, this is Julia the psychoanalyst at work and I haven’t seen her academic qualifications in this field. Perhaps they’ve been kept from the public record. Anyone who knew me well, including my staff and my family, knew that I relished the position and that I was doing what I could to advance the country’s interest through this period.
Gillard focused on how to explain the leadership change to the public.
I expected there to be a sense of shock around it, absolutely. But I thought by offering good government, good policies, a platform that people could believe in, a sense of purpose for the nation and for the government I led, that we could work our way through that initial sense of shock.
I asked whether she had thought the voters would be angry.
JG: Well, it’s happened before so it’s not that leadership changes in office are unknown. You know Paul Keating, Bob Hawke, and certainly at state levels there have been a number.
SF: It hadn’t happened to a first-term Prime Minister obviously. That was the difference.
JG: I’m not sure the Australian public count up political terms.
Gillard fronted a packed press conference in the Blue Room at Parliament House. Her explanation was vague and tentative. Although it alluded to some of the problems she faced with Rudd and her fear that the government might lose the election, she offered nothing concrete.
I believe in a government that rewards those who work the hardest, not those who complain the loudest. I believe in a government that rewards those who, day in and day out, work in our factories and on our farms, in our mines and in our mills, in our classrooms and in our hospitals, that rewards that hard work, decency and effort. The people who play by the rules, set their alarms early, get their kids off to school, stand by their neighbours and love their country. And I also believe that leadership is about the authority that grows from mutual respect shared by colleagues, from teamwork and from hard work, teamwork and spirit …
I asked my colleagues to make a leadership change. A change because I believed that a good government was losing its way …
Ultimately, Kevin and I disagreed about the direction of the government. I believed we needed to do better.
Where Rudd had promised solutions to moral challenges and helped engineer a global response to an international crisis, Gillard brought the Australian public back to earth with talk of alarm clocks and hard work. Hers was an appeal to the ordinary, the safe and the familiar, as if the nation needed to be reeled in from the adventure it had been on.
But it seemed like a critical misjudgement of time and place, of the event and the response. Gillard had just unseated a first-term prime minister who was popular with the voters. Her description of what had happened didn’t match the enormity of it.
Former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr would eventually join Gillard’s government as Foreign Minister. He wondered if it could be explained.
It is very difficult to settle on lines to explain to the public why the Prime Minister you had leading your government has now been executed, the body dragged off the stage and a new leader entering stage left. I don’t know what lines get you through that. There’d been no scandal, there’d been no publicly available indictment, there’d been no big difference on policy. It appeared gratuitous and she [Gillard] was left groping for an explanation, but again this confirms how unfair the party was to fling her into the prime ministership in awful circumstances.
Rudd’s speechwriter, Tim Dixon, saw the failure to tell the story.
There’s a new Prime Minister and that Prime Minister is behaving as if there isn’t the carcass of another one with blood all over the floor. It actually felt wrong at the time.
The emotional tone, the emotional resonance felt wrong. You had to call out that moment but we did none of that. We pretended as if this was just something that happened, a good government had lost its way.
Dixon said Gillard didn’t take the public into her confidence, and in the void, hard judgements were made.
I think it felt like there was something missing in the way that people heard her because they were trying to fill in that story, and if you don’t fill it in people have a way of answering it for themselves. And I think for especially the nation’s first female Prime Minister, coming to office in the way she did, the program in people’s memory was she’s just power hungry.
Standing beside Gillard in the room, Wayne Swan knew their explanation wasn’t good enough.
I think if there was one mistake that was made from the very beginning [it] is that we didn’t, in great detail, explain how and why these events took place … I think we acted for the best of reasons, out of deference to Kevin and to his family, his state of mind. We didn’t think that would be appropriate [on] the day that he was going through so much anguish, that we would go out there and dance on top of him, and we didn’t. But I think that was a mistake.
Joel Fitzgibbon’s comments highlighted a problem that confronted Julia Gillard from the earliest days of her prime ministership.
People often talk about the fact that she never really explained to the Australian people why it was so necessary to execute her first-time Prime Minister. But when you think about it, she never really explained to the Caucus either.
We had reached the second day of our interview with Gillard in Adelaide. It was a strange day at the studios. ABC managing director Mark Scott was there from Sydney to announce closures in parts of the operation. The Adelaide-based sound recordist was made redundant during the interview. Gillard was very sympathetic.
We hadn’t yet seen the archive of Question Time on Gillard’s first day as PM. The chamber was electric with tension as Gillard entered; the silence through her speech was thick. When we saw it, we asked a reluctant Gillard to return for a follow-up interview in Sydney. Bruce Wolpe warned us delicately that she had a different haircut that wouldn’t match the picture in Adelaide. He was right: we were only able to use the audio.
When I walked in, the eerie nature of the silence in the chamber really struck me. Question Time itself, it’s often very, very loud, with a lot of interjections and a lot of yelling. This was a day of an eerie kind of silence.
On the backbench behind Gillard, Kevin Rudd looked on as she took her position at the dispatch box, unable to conceal his emotions.
Intense pain. Jaws clenched … That’s when I heard two things said. A good government had lost its way. Well, that sort of leaves to one side the fact that the Deputy Prime Minister and the Treasurer were pretty intimate parts of that government, including the Cabinet committee that we’d worked so closely together in. The second thing which I found extraordinary was, quote, it was necessary in the national interest, unquote. What the hell did that mean? In the national interest, I don’t think so. In the personal interest of power and ambition, I think we’re much nearer the mark there.
The business of governing had to go on, but for Rudd’s closest staff, Andrew Charlton, Lachlan Harris and Alister Jordan, their time working for the government was over. Charlton recalled how it finished up.
The Prime Minister’s senior staff did a short handover to Julia Gillard’s staff, provided her with briefing materials for Parliament. Then we went to the pub.
According to Gillard’s chief of staff, Amanda Lampe, the conversation about Rudd’s future had begun.
Julia and I had a preliminary conversation about Kevin and whether I should actually talk to Alister about what were his intentions and whether he would consider staying in Cabinet or not.
Rudd insisted that an offer was made.
Her chief of staff rang my office on the day of the coup and said, ‘We want to know whether Kevin wants to serve in the Cabinet’ … And in response to that, John Faulkner was asked by me to return and to say, ‘Yes, he wishes to serve in the Cabinet and he would like to be Foreign Minister’.
Gillard said she didn’t want Rudd in the Cabinet then.
It’s not the right thing in my view to then say, ‘Well, you’ve lost the leadership today. What about tomorrow we swear you in and you’ve got this ocean of work to do?’ That wouldn’t have been good for him. And it wouldn’t have been for the government. So two motivations.
Kevin Rudd and his staff ended the day at The Lodge. Lachlan Harris recalled part of Rudd’s speech from that night, amid the commiserations and reminiscences.
I remember a lot of very emotional people there, very sad, and Kevin stood up and he said, ‘We’ll be back’, that’s how he opened his speech. At the time no-one really focused on it, but over the next couple of years I remember looking back on that and thinking he’d recovered. The night before, I’d finally seen him out of energy. Twenty-four hours later, he was back on six cylinders and working to get back into the Prime Minister’s office. And I don’t mean undermining Gillard. I mean he had a determination to return on that first night. After that it was a party basically.
ALP strategist Bruce Hawker was there too.
I felt that night that none of us would ever be the same again. I knew that it would mean for us inevitably that we’d be at some stage picking sides and that that would lead to great unhappiness.
In his interview for The Killing Season, one of the protagonists of the leadership change, New South Wales MP Tony Burke, explained the rationale behind their actions.
There was a sense that a difficult decision needed to be taken and we’d done it, and the vast majority of our colleagues had agreed with it, and now we could govern the way we believed a Labor government should. And [there was] also a belief that in doing that, we’d be able to have our best communicator at the front again … [There was] also a view that we’d avoided what we thought was the mistake of any previous leadership challenge over the previous twenty years, where a contender had given a death of a thousand cuts to a leader, had been backgrounding against them, had done a whole lot of things to tarnish the party before they came in. Julia was the last to come onto the team, and for that to have been the circumstances meant we felt we’d avoided all the damage to the party that comes with a long and ugly leadership challenge.
Burke’s explanation was wrong on all counts. In many of the interviews for the series, people talked about the need for a decisive result once the challenge was underway. That is not the same thing as the majority agreeing with the challenge. Gillard didn’t turn out to be Labor’s best communicator. And the questions about Julia’s involvement never ceased.
On 24 June 2010, the damage many in the Labor Party thought they had avoided had just begun.
CHAPTER 12
THE LONG SHADOW
You don’t normally get free air, and you certainly don’t get free air when you put an axe through a prime minister.
Alan Griffin
AS THE NARRATIVE in the first two episodes of The Killing Season flowed towards the leadership challenge, so events in the third episode flowed from it. Gillard’s narrative about the inevitability of the challenge was replaced by another equally fixed narrative from Rudd: he was not the cause of her downfall; her demise began on the night she challenged him for the leadership and every mistake she made after that compounded her problems, with the electorate and the party.
It was a tragedy, wound up tightly like a spring, and the players’ sense of it was evident in their language, richer than at any other moment in the story.
Leader of the House Anthony Albanese had already described the challenge as the original sin. Greg Combet identified its central flaw.
The way in which that change was enacted smacked of this self-serving factionalism in Labor. There was no democratic touchstone for her that legitimised her leadership. It was done in the dead of night and it was a calamity for the Lab
or Party and it infected our entire subsequent period in government. So you wouldn’t say it was well exercised, would you?
Images of night were everywhere. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott described the challenge at the time as a midnight knock on the door, a political move under cover of darkness. Chris Bowen put it simply.
For most challenges, it’s seen a long way coming. When Paul Keating became Prime Minister it was no surprise to the Australian people. The big problem [here] was that people went to bed with one Prime Minister and woke up with another and didn’t like that at all.
Union leader Paul Howes went on to become one of Gillard’s most rusted-on supporters. He thought the decision to remove Rudd was right but the manner of its execution was wrong.
The nation wakes up and thinks there’s been a coup d’état … The role that I and others played in elevating her to the leadership damaged her legitimacy in the eyes of the public … It’s a political tragedy that Julia was damned from her first day in office.
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