The Killing Season Uncut

by Sarah Ferguson

  I put Howes’ view to Gillard. In her answer we heard the title of the third episode: the long shadow.

  I understand that analysis. I’m just not sure what the alternative in the moment was, I don’t see it. Bt it is certainly true that as Prime Minister I always had this long shadow from the way in which I became Prime Minister, and active steps were taken basically every day of my prime ministership to have that shadow become darker and darker and not lighter and lighter.

  So much of Gillard’s story is about defending her decision that I was fascinated by this glimpse into the possibility of regret. Every one of her colleagues agreed she was Rudd’s natural successor. What would her story have looked like if she had waited? Her response was hesitant.

  I think about it a lot and I, well, just thinking about it is not quite right. I don’t think about it a lot now. I’ve thought about this but, you know, the reality would’ve been a 2010 election when either I couldn’t have continued as Deputy Prime Minister or throughout the whole of the campaign Kevin would’ve looked at me with suspicion. Would we have won? Open question. I don’t think anybody who puts this alternate reality says there’s a time when Kevin would cheerfully have said, ‘Oh Julia, you have the leadership now’. So there would still have been Kevin in the prime ministership not coping, the suspicions and the stresses and strains that came from that. That was not going to be an easy set of propositions or days either. So I think people are really wistfully hoping for something that was never going to be.

  According to Immigration Minister Chris Evans, the forces unleashed by the challenge put the events that followed beyond their control.

  It was like a Greek tragedy. We were watching this unfold, knowing that the major characters would be killed, knowing that this would all end terribly, and with no way out. It felt like you were observing the theatre and were unable to influence it.

  Rudd’s future was still unresolved. He was already committed to staying in Parliament, a decision Gillard resented. Rudd’s confidant on the night of the challenge, Anthony Albanese, understood why.

  Would it have been better for Julia if Kevin had not run in 2010? Yes. That is clearly the case, because his presence was a reminder of what had happened.

  Rudd wanted Gillard to appoint him Foreign Minister straight away, or failing that, after the election. He claimed the offer was made then retracted in conversations with her in the days following the challenge.

  KR: The tone from Julia was very harsh and she said she’d consulted with Wayne [Swan] and that she’d consulted with Stephen [Smith]. Neither of them supported this proposal and it was far better that I left the Parliament.

  SF: What did you say?

  KR: I said, ‘Julia, you’re the leader; you’re the Prime Minister. You can wish for a number of things, but whether I continue as the Member for Griffith is a matter for me, not for you’.

  Gillard didn’t recall those conversations. She said the decision not to put Rudd in the Cabinet immediately was a kindness.

  I thought he needed recovery time consistent with my view that there would be some relief. I thought it was best for him to have some clear time and ability to pack up from The Lodge and Kirribilli as slowly as he wanted to, to get the next stage of his life into gear.

  Kevin Rudd left The Lodge without the one consolation prize he wanted.

  What did Gillard and her backers think would happen next? Greg Combet said the lack of foresight was astonishing.

  I later learnt that the assumption was that Kevin Rudd would just pull up stumps and leave Parliament. Well that just betrays a complete lack of understanding about Kevin Rudd. You know, it’s not surprising to me that he stayed and fought it out and conducted a campaign of retribution … that ultimately destroyed our government.

  Rudd’s former chief of staff, David Epstein, who left the Prime Minister’s office in 2008, put it in brutal terms.

  The people involved in deposing Kevin Rudd in 2010, those in the Parliament and round the periphery, didn’t realise the magnitude of what they’ve done. They didn’t realise his political resilience. He was like the Toltoy: you can knock him down and he’ll keep on bouncing back. I remember making this point to Paul Howes. I said he’s like a vampire: if you’re going to kill a vampire, you’ve got to stab him in the heart and you’ve got to make sure damn well that the silver stake has gone right through it.

  (Epstein was mixing his vampires and werewolves, but you get the point.)

  Kevin Rudd retreated to his home in Queensland. It was a difficult time, he said, describing it as ‘a long dark night of the soul’.

  I’m human. These things are not just clinical, they’re also personal, and in my own case a very public thing as well, and I’m a very private person.

  According to Treasury Secretary Ken Henry the government ran more smoothly when Gillard became Prime Minister. Gillard focused on making early progress in the areas that had damaged the Rudd government. In her first press conference, she committed to fixing the mining tax and delivering a surplus by 2013. Two weeks later she laid out a new policy on asylum seekers: offshore processing in East Timor. But the so-called East Timor solution would collapse in ignominious failure within weeks and the surplus failed to materialise.

  The mining tax was a short-term win and a long-term failure, but in July 2010, a speedy resolution to the long and politically damaging dispute looked good for the new government. The change at the top acted as a circuit-breaker in the negotiations with the mining industry. Resources Minister Martin Ferguson said Gillard’s agenda was clear.

  Get a deal, and Julia’s a deal maker. Get it off the agenda. That was her attitude. Just get it settled, get it off the agenda.

  The concessions the government gave the mining industry made the new Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT) look like a quick political fix. In February 2013, when Treasurer Wayne Swan announced revenue of only $126 million, well below the estimates, it seemed like the critics had been vindicated.

  On 15 July 2010, three weeks after the challenge, Julia Gillard made her first major public address as Prime Minister at the National Press Club in Canberra. Among the tables of journalists in the audience she noticed veteran political journalist Laurie Oakes.

  I knew as soon as Laurie was there that there was something up.

  Oakes stood up and asked a series of questions, a summary of Rudd’s claims about the night of the challenge, including his central charge that Gillard had reneged on the deal they had struck in his office. Gillard kept rigidly still on the podium, listening, the only movement a flicker in her eyes.

  Behind that fixed posture, obviously incredibly angry because it was clearly a leak from Kevin to Laurie designed to destroy this event. It was so bad for me because it was directly on character questions about how I had become Prime Minister.

  I put the question to Kevin Rudd.

  SF: Did you give Laurie Oakes that account?

  KR: It’s entirely possible. Julia Gillard marches in and launches a leadership coup and then suddenly there’s supposed to be some veil of total secrecy surrounding a conversation with me?

  Gillard told the audience she had gone into the discussion with Rudd on the basis that it was confidential.

  JG: I drew a line. I was going to defend that line. And in answer to the Laurie Oakes question I defended that line.

  SF: The narrative that Laurie was laying out is that you reneged on the deal. It is complicated because your own version remains ambiguous. Kevin understands one thing, you understand something completely different.

  JG: It’s the nature of being human.

  SF: Why not spell it out at the time?

  JG: I’d taken a decision at the time that on all of these questions I was not going to unpack before the eyes of the public all of the things, the chaos that had built up.

  SF: But you didn’t have to unpack all of the chaos.

  JG: No. I absolutely disagree with that. I was very conscious that if you put even your toe on this ve
ry sticky piece of paper, then you would be caught on it.

  More simply, it suited Gillard not to discuss it. It suited Rudd for the details to be known.

  It’s not a Cabinet deliberation. It’s of direct relevance to people’s evaluation of those events. I think it was important to ensure that that was into the public domain.

  Gillard said the leak was designed to define her character in the public’s mind.

  JG: We’re talking about something played out deliberately and destructively as an election campaign is being called … There were contending narratives. One could have been, and in my view should have been, the truth: ‘Kevin, a man of remarkable abilities who wasn’t coping as Prime Minister, had been replaced by someone who was now going to do the job’, versus ‘Kevin, the wonderful Prime Minister, dragged down by the faceless men and stabbed in the back by the woman [who] had become Prime Minister’. This was a deliberate attempt to make one of those narratives predominant.

  SF: Have you ever considered the issue at stake here is what took place in the room, rather than the way that it was managed afterwards?

  JG: The issue of what took place in the room matters for history; I understand that. What matters for the Australian people and what mattered for the Australian Labor Party is having the best government possible with the best values possible. For me, that’s a Labor government, so what matters is what puts Labor in the best electoral position.

  SF: Values are about honesty, aren’t they? The question of what took place that night is at issue.

  JG: I think what the Australian people look for in their government is things that matter to their lives—jobs, health, education, national security, an environment that will be there for their children. These are the things that matter.

  Gillard’s argument offers only one perspective, as if its simple logic should have been enough. But there was no precedent for the sudden removal of a first-time Prime Minister. Her supporters, including Paul Howes, recognised their failure to consider the voters.

  That was such a poor move on the part of the party not to recognise that maybe the electorate might be a bit cynical about what’s occurred here. I think because all of us were inside and trapped in the echo chamber that is the labour movement, it just seemed so logical and natural that that would occur that no-one actually stepped back and looked at the perspective of how the electorate might view this.

  The switch to Julia Gillard did give Labor a bounce in the polls. Almost a month after she became Prime Minister, Newspoll showed the ALP ahead of the Coalition on preferences, 55 to 45, up 3 points since the poll published in the week of the change. As preferred PM, Gillard led Tony Abbott by 57 to 27; Rudd had led Abbott 46 to 37.

  At the same time, the internal polling Labor conducted after the challenge revealed mixed responses to the new leader. When asked to give one-word responses to Gillard, those polled used words like ‘strong’, ‘female’ and ‘determined’, but also ‘backstabber’, ‘untrustworthy’ and ‘traitor’.

  ALP market researcher Tony Mitchelmore, who had been part of the Kevin 07 campaign team, said it was fanciful for Labor to think they could start afresh with a new Prime Minister and a clean slate.

  It was really unrealistic to think that you wouldn’t upset people, that people wouldn’t be shocked, that it wouldn’t destabilise Labor, that you could just press the reset button and start again with Gillard.

  He said the public didn’t dislike Rudd, even though he had disappointed them.

  It never felt like the right decision, even though people were questioning Kevin’s competence and there were lots of things that’d gone wrong … I never felt that he’d lost that emotional connection with people. They were still on his side, they still thought he was in it for the right reasons. It goes back to the way that people were really swept up in that whole 07 election and how they bought into it.

  Mitchelmore made the point about the former Prime Minister that had been lost on the factional operatives who’d pushed for the change.

  The relationship that politicians have with the public is all about an emotional connection … people can read people emotionally and a lot of sympathy just immediately went his way after he was deposed.

  Although one of Gillard’s more measured supporters, Simon Crean said her failure to explain the leadership challenge was compounded by other early missteps.

  The failure to explain the fact that a party had dumped the person they’d last voted for and were asking you to vote for someone else, someone who in my view demonstrated by her actions that she doubted her own legitimacy, because she wouldn’t move into The Lodge … She kept saying, ‘I want you to give me that authority’.

  On 17 July Julia Gillard called the federal election, promising to move forward. The campaign itself was lacklustre. Gillard turned to Tony Blair’s campaign co-ordinator, former British MP Alan Milburn.

  Julia rang me up after about three or four days, asking me to go out [to Australia], because the campaign was going really badly. My assessment of the campaign was that we’d made every mistake that was possible. Because she had decided to get rid of Kevin, it was difficult to talk about the success of 2007, 2010. My first piece of advice was you’ve got to stop all this. You’ve got to talk about what Labor has done in office. You’ve got to talk principally about the economy.

  In Queensland, the media followed Rudd’s every move as he campaigned in his own seat of Griffith. Patrick Gorman went to work for him after he lost the prime ministership. He described the attention Rudd attracted.

  It goes nuts. Any journalist he’s spoken to in the last fifteen years is on the phone. They’re calling him, they’re calling me, they’re calling the office, and there is no way to meet that appetite. People want Kevin’s stories, they want his views on everything.

  Gillard criticised Rudd for drawing attention to himself and away from her, including media coverage of his gall bladder surgery during the campaign.

  He had been also very unwell during the campaign but had made sure that even him going to hospital attracted maximum media attention.

  Rudd said he did no more than defend his own seat.

  I said I would not be campaigning outside my electorate. The problem was, as I was out and about in my own electorate, the media would track you down. The allegation from Julia Gillard and the Gillardistas over the campaign is that everything was going hunky-dory except for Kevin. If Kevin would just roll over and die, everything would be fine.

  Labor’s five-week campaign is best remembered for its mistakes: cash for clunkers, the rebate scheme for trading in old cars for new, energy-efficient models; the citizens’ assembly; the ‘real Julia’ faux pas; and leaks. The first leak of the campaign was against Rudd, a report that as Prime Minister he had sent his chief of staff to deputise at national security meetings. The next leak reverberated across the campaign and the party.

  Ten days in, Laurie Oakes reported on Channel Nine that when she was Deputy Prime Minister, Gillard had opposed paid parental leave and argued against the size of the proposed pension increase in Cabinet discussions. The leak targeted Gillard as a woman without children with the implicit accusation she didn’t care about mothers or the elderly.

  Wayne Swan took a call from Oakes before the story broke.

  My view was there could only be one highly credible source that he could have spoken to and that was Kevin … Paid parental leave and fixing up the base rate of the aged pension went to the very core of our Labor values, so here was someone suggesting that on two critical issues … we’ve got a Prime Minister who was against them.

  Gillard heard about it just before flying to a campaign event in Adelaide.

  When I absorbed the news I thought this was the election-losing moment. Basically the election could not be won from here, that was my internal thought.

  She and the campaign team worked out their response on the plane. Media adviser Sean Kelly was part of the discussion.

  Should we deny it? Sh
ould we admit it? Julia came to the conclusion that she had to tell the truth … I have no doubt that If Julia hadn’t given the performance of her life that morning, the campaign would have been over.

  Former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr was on the panel that conducted an internal review after the 2010 campaign. Their report examined the impact of the leaks.

  These were bombs lobbed into the Labor camp and it’s very hard for a Prime Minister to deal with negative story after negative story. And I don’t know where the leaks came from, but obviously the people who planned the leadership change should have calculated that people in the Rudd camp would very likely seek some vengeance. There’d be people, even if they were staff members, not ministers, and not Rudd himself, who’d be aggrieved at the loss of their jobs and their power.

  As the minister responsible for pensions and paid parental leave, Jenny Macklin had been in the Cabinet meetings. She was also one of the most reasonable voices in the Rudd and Gillard governments.

  SF: Who was responsible for the leaks?

  Jenny Macklin (JM): Well, I’ve always thought it was Kevin Rudd.

  SF: Why so sure?

  JM: It couldn’t have been anybody else.

  Kevin Rudd denied he was the source of the leak.

  SF: Were you responsible for providing that information to the journalists?

  KR: Absolutely not.