In his interview, recalling the rallies brought Craig Emerson to tears.
I felt like vomiting when I saw the signs. ‘Ditch the witch’ is bad enough but ‘Bob Brown’s bitch’ is so deeply and utterly offensive to any woman in this country, let alone the Prime Minister of Australia, and to have eleven members of the Coalition standing up on that truck with that sign behind them, at least two of whom were women, calling the Prime Minister a bitch and they don’t see what this issue is. I just wonder if we’ve made any progress in this country in the last half-century.
Paul Howes shared Emerson’s point of view and was equally passionate in his account. Howes became a close friend of Julia Gillard and his interview was one of the most emotional of the series. He came to the ABC with a minder from KPMG, the professional services firm where he worked, presumably to keep him on track if he wandered off the political path. I wondered what she made of Howes’ poignant, tearful recollections of the period.
We developed a closeness. The more you get to know her, the harder it is not to love her. It’s the opposite of Kevin. I used to get really upset that a woman who was perceived publicly as a cold, mean-hearted bitch was in fact the nicest person in that building.
Greg Combet said Gillard’s fortitude was extraordinary.
Our support as a government started to come off from that point onwards, so I felt it very acutely. And I was really crushed by the political burden of that, more so than Julia. I mean it’s not that she doesn’t feel those things profoundly, but she’s a very tough woman and extremely capable person and she just shouldered that and ploughed on.
Her fortitude could do nothing to stop the picture forming in the voters’ minds. Tony Mitchelmore described what he saw in focus groups.
As soon as she would come up, the group would kind of come to life and people would come out with this stuff about her and it was always nasty. It quite often ended in the word ‘bitch’ … The picture that they’d painted in their own minds of her being kind of cold and backstabbing and untrustworthy was not the picture of what a woman should be. And so that made it permissible to talk about her in those terms.
Mitchelmore had the uncomfortable job of telling Gillard what was coming through in the research.
There was only one time where I felt like she gave something away, where I’d presented nasty stuff that people were saying and she said, ‘Look, it’s fine. There’s only two things that really bother me. One is going to funerals’—at that stage she was going to a lot of soldiers’ funerals. And she said, ‘The other thing that messes with my head is Kevin Rudd’.
In early April, in the middle of the storm over the carbon tax, Kevin Rudd made his first public statements about internal disagreements over climate policy in his government. On the ABC’s Q&A program, he told the audience there were ‘some folk’ in his Cabinet who wanted to get rid of the ETS altogether. He didn’t name Gillard and Swan but the implication was clear. The discussions in early 2010 were about postponing the ETS; there was no evidence Gillard had argued to kill the policy.
Kevin Rudd’s chief critique of his colleagues is over their disloyalty to him as Prime Minister. Rudd was then a member of Gillard’s Cabinet. What was this if it wasn’t disloyal?
Gillard said there was nothing she could do.
One of the consequences, of course, of minority government when there was bad behaviour, and Kevin consistently danced right out on that line of bad behaviour, always having some plausible deniability about why he’d said or done things, but the truth was using the foreign ministry position to stake out leadership claims, I couldn’t do that much to discipline him because the nature of minority government is everybody’s got their hand on the grenade and anybody can pull the pin.
CHAPTER 13
NO BOUNDARIES
In politics there are some problems so big you can’t go round them, you’ve got to go through them.
John McTernan
IN THE LAST days of summer in 2015, I took my seat opposite Kevin Rudd in the Gore Hill studio in Sydney for the final session of our interview. I looked across at him. He was anxious, fidgeting with the cushion he used for his back, taking his glasses on and off. I scrawled in my notebook and passed the page over to series producer Deb Masters: ‘He’s in the zone—let’s go’. The crew took their places. Rudd sipped his water and smoothed down his jacket.
SF: Are you enjoying the experience of doing these interviews?
KR: Not particularly.
SF: Why not?
KR: Well, these are very traumatic periods. What do you think?
SF: What happens when you go back over it and relive it?
KR: Well, I’m a human being, just like you. I sleep, I dream, and as a result a lot of these things come back in more vivid ways than either of us would like.
The emptiness of the studio seemed to press in. I continued.
SF: What is it that comes back to you that you don’t like?
KR: I’m not about to engage in self-reflective psychoanalysis. So I won’t answer that question.
In long interviews you judge the mood: when to insist, when to pull back. I asked another simple question.
SF: Was it always the case that you wanted that job back?
KR: No. I was very happy being Foreign Minister.
This was Rudd’s fixed narrative, the mirror image of Gillard’s: that she had never considered replacing Rudd. Why couldn’t Rudd say, ‘Of course I wanted to be vindicated’? The viewers would understand.
KR: Well, that says a lot about people watching and the way people receive the narrative.
SF: Really? It’s impossible to believe that you didn’t want to be vindicated?
KR: But I didn’t see it as vindication. Everyone’s leapt to a conclusion. They don’t understand me.
Rudd’s story was that he waited, passively, to have the Labor leadership handed back to him.
I did not see it as being either probable or frankly, as time marched on, possible that there would be a return to the prime ministership. And the reason was, as I said to many, many of my continuing supporters, ‘Unless one day you can establish to me there’s an overwhelming view within the Caucus that there must be a change in order to save the party from political oblivion, I’m not about to move, thank you very much’.
Rudd’s friend, ALP strategist Bruce Hawker, saw it differently.
SF: How deep was his drive to be vindicated?
Bruce Hawker (BH): Almost immeasurable. It was a sense in him not only of injustice but also unfinished business, and boosted I got to say by a public which kept reinforcing the point that he made, and that was that the manner of his removal was deeply unfair.
West Australian Senator Mark Bishop supported Gillard’s challenge but understood Rudd’s drive to return.
You don’t get to be the prime minister or the leader of the party, and this applies to Mr Howard and to Miss Gillard and to Mr Rudd and possibly to Mr Shorten, without having in your own DNA an overdeveloped sense of your own worth. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that he moved to protect his name and position himself to retake his leadership.
Adviser Patrick Gorman thinks the comeback began early.
I think probably around January of 2011 he started to think that this government was not going to have a healthy three-year term, and so therefore it was no longer about just serving well as Foreign Minister and then looking for the next gig outside of Parliament. I definitely think that he ebbed and flowed. He went for days where he would think, ‘Why on earth would you want to be any closer or any further tied into this business than I currently am?’ So I don’t think it was linear. But I think the first time that he really thought there was a potential that this government was going to need an alternate leader was in the early part of 2011.
In the months following Gillard’s concession on the carbon tax, the anti–carbon tax rallies continued with their rancorous message, in unison with Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and sections of the media.
Anthony Albanese had the job of managing legislation through the House.
The nature of the hung parliament meant that during that entire period it was unstable in terms of the media and in terms of the perceptions. It was like living in two worlds because at the same time the government and the Parliament were actually functioning pretty well. We got things done: 595 pieces of legislation were carried by that Parliament.
Despite the government’s legislative progress—the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), education reforms and carbon pricing—Rudd was always present: in Gillard’s view, not passively, as he claimed.
What Kevin was doing was calibrating his media performances to distract attention from things that I was doing as Prime Minister. So it was very, very common for me to have a big announcement and for Kevin to enter that media cycle to take attention away. Second, he was going out to do media, to show how popular he was with people: contrived opportunities to show people beseeching him for selfies and surrounding him in crowds and that kind of stuff. He would be backgrounding off the record to make sure that the government looked like it was divided.
Independent MP Tony Windsor said Rudd was a hindrance.
It was almost as if he was the second Opposition Leader. In a hung Parliament it’s hard enough for anybody to deal with one, but when you’ve got two Opposition Leaders fighting against you, no doubt Gillard felt that pressure.
In Kevin Rudd’s narrative, Julia Gillard was the cause of her own problems.
It’s pretty tiresome when you see one series of mistakes by that government after another, for her staff to then turn around and say, ‘It’s Kevin’s fault. It’s Kevin’s fault’. Why is it Kevin’s fault? Because Kevin’s breathing. I think it’s time people actually asked themselves this question: what objectively did Julia get right and get wrong on her own merits in that period of government?
So how do you unpack (to borrow Gillard’s word) the relative contributions of Rudd and Gillard to her difficulties in government?
British political adviser John McTernan became Gillard’s director of communications in November 2011. He brought an outsider’s perspective but also a reputation for aggressive media management honed in Tony Blair’s New Labour, a political operation that became synonymous with spin. McTernan identified the fundamental problem with Gillard’s explanation of how she came to power.
Listen, in politics you can get through almost everything, but you’ve got to start with full disclosure. Full disclosure doesn’t get you out of a problem, but a lack of disclosure keeps you trapped in a problem that you can probably never escape from.
According to McTernan, Gillard’s decision not to talk about the reasons for the challenge was the wrong one.
The public’s view of the Labor Party was a sense there was a guilty secret, that Julia was some kind of regicide. But the truth is that Kevin Rudd was not Duncan in Macbeth. He was the madwoman in the attic.
Tony Burke had reminded us that as Deputy Prime Minister, Gillard was regarded as the government’s best communicator. Maybe the voters’ hearts were already hardened against her, but Gillard’s ability to connect with them fell away on the national stage. Rudd speechwriter Tim Dixon explained why.
Julia couldn’t walk into a room and command the room. She couldn’t project herself into the television screens of the nation in a way that Kevin could. Kevin had this preternatural sense of how to do that, and Julia just didn’t. I think she always struggled with creating that connection with a country that wasn’t sure why she was there in the first place. It wouldn’t have happened if she’d come to office in a different way.
Early in her prime ministership, the Queensland floods drew the unavoidable comparison between Gillard and the warm and emotional Premier Anna Bligh, who was praised for her leadership in the crisis. Media adviser Sean Kelly said the Prime Minister was already second-guessing herself.
I remember in early 2011 we had a conversation about Julia’s press conference style. She was very aware of the problem at that point. There was widespread criticism of her appearing wooden during the floods, of her appearing inauthentic. One of the things she said to me was that she could feel that she had slowed down her delivery, that she had begun to self-censor in the fear of making a mistake.
Gillard thought Kevin Rudd was partly responsible.
People say I should have been a better communicator. I’m happy to take that on the chin. In the context when you’ve got the Leader of the Opposition out every day saying, ‘She’s a liar, a backstabber’, and you’ve got people internally, including Kevin, saying, ‘Yes, she’s a liar and a backstabber and she doesn’t believe in carbon pricing and she only did the deal ‘cause she had to’, it creates this pincer movement in which it’s hard to find enough space, enough clear air, to put across what you want to say to the Australian nation.
One of the final editorial decisions we made was to include the beautiful photograph of Gillard taken by Sophie Deane, a young girl with Down syndrome who Gillard had met campaigning for the NDIS. The photo captured the warmth not seen by the voters.
Wayne Swan explained why that warmth couldn’t cut through.
It was a combination of a difficult political environment, part of it self-inflicted through disunity, from Kevin in particular, but not exclusively so. Part of it I think may have been her own reaction or protective mechanism towards the volume of abuse that was being poured upon her. Part of it may well have been the sheer volume of work. I think it was all of those things wrapped up in one.
Gillard’s attempts to fix the policies that had dogged the Rudd government came unstuck. Gillard had been sharply critical of Rudd’s failure as Prime Minister to look for solutions to the growing number of boat arrivals. Influenced by Mark Arbib, she saw electoral potency in the issue. As Immigration Minister, Chris Evans said Gillard was prepared to take a tougher stance than Rudd.
Kevin had resisted some of the more draconian options, and it’s fair to say I think that Julia was probably more hardline in terms of her support for responses to people smuggling than say Kevin or myself.
But with Gillard as Prime Minister, the asylum seeker issue got worse, not better, for the government. The number of boats continued to rise: 6555 asylum seekers reached Australian waters in 2010, more than twice as many as the previous year. Kevin Rudd had no sympathy for his successor’s difficulties.
Julia had a frontal encounter with reality! And that is, it’s pretty complex out there. I think the sheer complexity confronted her and hit her between the eyeballs. It’s hard stuff out there.
In May 2011, Gillard announced an agreement with the Malaysian government, forged by Evans’ successor, Chris Bowen. Asylum seekers arriving by boat would no longer remain in Australia but would be sent directly to Malaysia, a transit country for asylum seekers on their way to Australia. Bowen called it a ‘virtual’ turning back of boats, without risky confrontations at sea.
Before the first group of asylum seekers left Australia for Malaysia, the deal was struck down in the High Court. Bowen offered his resignation.
I said, ‘Prime Minister, this is a diabolical political situation for the government. I’m happy to give you my resignation and I will take responsibility for the High Court loss’. To her credit she said that would be fundamentally unfair and she would not accept my resignation if I offered it.
Gillard acknowledged the failure but compared her efforts favourably with Rudd’s.
I ended up striving continuously for new policies here. My criticisms of Kevin were not only that he watched this political problem rise, he exacerbated it with the decision of Oceanic Viking; he didn’t go on a methodical search for a solution.
In late 2011, Gillard gave her first speech as Prime Minister to the ALP National Conference. She listed the achievements of former Labor leaders Whitlam, Hawke and Keating but didn’t mention Kevin Rudd. She insisted it wasn’t deliberate.
There wasn’t a reference to Kevin. I’m prepared to put my hand
up well and truly for this error but there was no intention to be dismissive of Kevin, not at all.
Sean Kelly’s recollection is different.
There was a lot of work put into Julia’s speech. There was some debate about whether or not Kevin should be mentioned in the list of prime ministers and I remember Julia not being particularly keen on the idea.
Kevin Rudd was in the audience.
‘Angry’ overstates it. I was a bit hurt, because it’s a gathering of the party faithful. But more than that, I just thought it was politically dumb.
British political adviser John McTernan’s recollection of Rudd’s response at the conference reflected his contempt for the former Prime Minister.
It’s the most ridiculous piece of manufactured victimhood I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s there in the story of the Labor Party projected in the conference hall. The notion that he would do this to himself, make himself look weak, and hissy, stampy, Rumpelstiltskiny, stomp around, maybe that was an error.
Intentional or not, the omission of Rudd from the pantheon became the story of the conference, drowning out all other business. Sean Kelly said the consequences were felt immediately.
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