The Killing Season Uncut

by Sarah Ferguson

  Tony Windsor recalls overhearing conversations about Julia Gillard.

  There were people in the Parliament, in general discussion, but within earshot, that would quite often make derogatory comments about Prime Minister Gillard. Her attire, her body shape. I’ve never seen a circumstance where an individual man, woman or dog was treated like Julia Gillard was, particularly in the press, but also by members of Parliament. There was a constructed campaign to disassemble this particular person.

  The issue of sexism became entwined with the tawdry twin sagas of Craig Thomson and Peter Slipper.

  In November 2011, Labor Speaker Harry Jenkins resigned the office and the Coalition’s Peter Slipper was appointed as his replacement. Anthony Albanese said elevating Slipper to the speakership gave the government ‘flexibility’, improving the voting margin from one to three. Slipper became embroiled in sexual harassment proceedings brought by a former staffer. The case was later abandoned, but not before its lurid details became part of a parliamentary numbers game. At the same time, backbencher and former union official Craig Thomson was under investigation for misuse of union funds, including using a union credit card to pay for prostitutes.

  In April 2012 Slipper stepped aside while the case went to court, and Gillard suspended Thomson from the ALP. As the Slipper saga played out, Gillard had to endure one of the lowest attacks in Australian political history.

  In a particularly moving piece of archive from September of that year, Julia Gillard emerged from the APEC summit in Russia, having just learnt of her father’s death. Her eyes swollen with tears, she walked quickly towards a waiting car. Who could fail to be moved by her grief in that moment or her obvious regard for her father?

  Shortly after her return to Australia, broadcaster Alan Jones was recorded at a Liberal Party function mocking her father’s death. Trade Minister Craig Emerson had been with the Prime Minister in Russia.

  When you get a radio host such as Alan Jones saying that her father died of shame, I just can’t describe the horror of that, and I don’t understand how people can think that way and have that in their hearts. There … was so much hatred for her being a female Labor Prime Minister.

  Julia Gillard felt there was no boundary that couldn’t be crossed.

  I had to steel myself throughout my prime ministership, but particularly in this period of time. It did seem to me like tomorrow you could wake up to anything if this is how far we’ve gone. There just are no rules anymore.

  Health Minister Tanya Plibersek said the party was too slow to respond.

  I think because we left it, the sexism got worse over time, and perhaps if we’d called it earlier, the people who were so quick to engage in it might have had pause for thought.

  In October 2012, the release of lewd text messages in Slipper’s court case caused a furore. Tony Abbott moved a motion of no confidence in the Speaker. He repeated the infamous phrase used by Alan Jones.

  And every day the Prime Minister stands in this Parliament to defend this Speaker will be another day of shame for this Parliament and another day of shame for a government which should have already died of shame.

  Gillard said she was ready to ‘give it back hard’. Her speech, which became known as ‘the misogyny speech’, was one of the defining moments of her parliamentary career.

  I rise to oppose the motion moved by the Leader of the Opposition. And in so doing I say to the Leader of the Opposition, I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not. And the government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever … If he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror. That’s what he needs.

  In the Prime Minister’s office, Sean Kelly watched Gillard’s speech with his colleagues.

  Oftentimes people watch Question Time out of the corner of their eye. That day everybody stopped to watch the speech.

  At the end, people applauded. It was an amazing moment of enormously high morale in an office where low morale had become the governing principle.

  Asked what he remembered of Parliament that day, Rudd said this.

  Peter Slipper had been Julia’s choice of Speaker. It didn’t take a Rhodes scholar to work out where the Liberal Party would go with that. So I think in terms of flawed political judgement, this was not the smartest call.

  He went on to praise the speech.

  I thought it was a brilliant speech, and the reason I thought it was a brilliant speech was that she effectively named the then Leader of the Opposition for what ultimately was his view of women. I congratulate her.

  The speech was watched around the world, but at home with the voters, the impact didn’t last long. ALP market researcher Tony Mitchelmore said the response was as much about their dislike of Abbott.

  It did resonate for about a month there. There was more-positive feedback, especially from women. People cheered her on again and said, ‘That’s the feisty, witty, intelligent Gillard that I remember’. You’ve got to remember that Tony Abbott was never popular, so while she wasn’t popular during that period, when I’d talk to people about Tony Abbott, it was equally negative.

  The polls seemed to reflect Mitchelmore’s observations. In a late October Newspoll, Labor’s primary vote was up 3 points to 36, and they were equal with the Coalition on the two-party-preferred measure. But it didn’t last. As Parliament resumed the following February, Labor trailed the Coalition 44 to 56. It was the start of an election year and the polls were pointing to a landslide defeat.

  Gillard was not prepared to relinquish the leadership.

  I would have said it to almost anybody who had the conversation with me, that it was inconceivable to me in terms of the long-term future of Labor’s cultural norms and internal values, that the kind of anti-Labor work that Kevin had been involved in, the destabilisation, the leaking, would be rewarded by the leadership.

  Kevin Rudd’s position hadn’t changed. He was waiting to be drafted.

  My position to media folks who ask me, and my position to the Caucus colleagues was a consistent one: where’s the overwhelming majority? Haven’t got one? See you later.

  Anthony Albanese could see no resolution to the impasse.

  He wanted it to happen, but he also was saying that he wouldn’t challenge. I was of the view at that point in time that it was two immoveable objects, that Kevin wouldn’t challenge and Julia wouldn’t resign, so there wouldn’t be a change.

  CHAPTER 14

  NO-ONE ESCAPES BLAME

  The Parliament wasn’t big enough, the Caucus wasn’t big enough, for both Julia and Kevin.

  Anthony Albanese

  ON THE AFTERNOON of Wednesday 26 June 2013, Bill Shorten’s spokesman told the Canberra Press Gallery the MP had no comment to make about the Labor leadership. At 6.30 p.m., a doleful-looking Bill Shorten walked towards the press throng and announced he was backing Kevin Rudd for the leadership of the Australian Labor Party. ‘The future of the Labor Party is at risk. Kevin Rudd is the best chance the Labor Party has of winning the election’, Shorten said joylessly.

  Shorten’s brief remarks signalled the end of Julia Gillard’s prime ministership. In 2010, in concert with other factional leaders, he had cut down Kevin Rudd and propelled Gillard into the top job. Almost three years to the day, he reversed his decision.

  Gillard said Shorten came to see her on the eve of the final sitting weeks before the long winter break.

  I had a conversation with Bill in Melbourne before the last parliamentary fortnight, where he indicated to me he thought things were pretty dire. He didn’t say to me, ‘And I have moved my support’, but the fact that he would even come and indicate that he thought not only electorally but internally for me things were dire, caused me to conclude that clearly he was thinking of moving.

  As always, Gillard’s criticism of Shorten was muted.

  I understood he was going to make a different d
ecision. Yes, in the moment you’re disappointed.

  There was no harsh criticism of Shorten from Rudd either. He identified Shorten as one of the key organisers of the 2010 challenge, but without the bitterness he directed at Mark Arbib. Staffer Patrick Gorman said the former PM had a higher opinion of Shorten.

  I think he knew that Bill did have potential to be an incredibly good Labor leader and so I think he’d always given Bill a little bit more leeway.

  We made a final attempt to get Shorten to agree to an interview. He declined formally, by letter.

  My views on this period are well known … Previously, I have acknowledged the error I made in not articulating my reason for voting for Julia Gillard in 2010. However, I did not repeat that mistake in 2013 and made very clear my position and the rationale behind my decision to vote for Kevin Rudd in a very public statement. Therefore my efforts are focused on the future, not the battles we have left behind us.

  What Shorten didn’t count in his refusal was the cost of silence. In truth, his views are only partially known. The questions about what motivated him in 2010, and therefore what he stands for, remain.

  Martin Ferguson suggested Shorten had learnt from the challenge against Rudd.

  I think in hindsight he now regrets it … You know politics is not about having the numbers. Politics is about knowing when to use them. You’re a better politician if you never use the numbers. You work out what’s right for the party and you step back. That’s the sign of a certain maturity which I think Julia and the faceless men showed they lacked that evening in June 2010.

  The last act of The Killing Season was driven by the momentum leading to Rudd’s return to the prime ministership. Government Whip Joel Fitzgibbon had given Gillard an ultimatum after the 2012 leadership ballot.

  I just said to her, ‘Julia, I voted for you, I encouraged others to vote for you, but things are tough and I believe you’ve got about six months to turn it round’ … It’s not easy telling a Prime Minister that if they don’t lift their game or improve their standings, that they might be a goner.

  The six months expired without a change in the government’s position. Fitzgibbon shifted his allegiance to Rudd and became one of his most prominent supporters.

  I made it known to Julia that she’d lost me, that I thought a change was necessary, and I actively lobbied the Caucus for it to happen. I expressed my view to people that I thought we were heading for a train crash and we had no choice but to consider changing the leader.

  Fitzgibbon explained how he worked with the press to build support for Rudd.

  I wasn’t leaking to the press, I was talking to the press. I never hid my views. There would be plenty of people that would say that I was too open in expressing my views, and that’s a very valid criticism, but I did what I thought was necessary and right at the time. The amount of briefing is directly proportional to the difficulty a party finds itself in, and the party was in a lot of difficulty and there were a lot of people prepared to talk.

  Foreign Minister Bob Carr’s depiction of the press in Parliament House owed more to the Court of the Medici than Canberra.

  It’s a whispering gallery, it’s a whispering gallery. They can hear you on the other side of the wall. They can hear you thinking. And on the most modest evidence there’s a wealth of speculation, and people who know you well can anticipate how you’re thinking anyway.

  In early 2013, New South Wales ALP general secretary Sam Dastyari met Julia Gillard at Kirribilli House to deliver bad news about the government’s polling.

  The numbers were diabolical in New South Wales and especially in Sydney. We hadn’t lost the migrant communities—they’d abandoned us. The bedrock of the Labor vote in Sydney has and will always be these big, diverse migrant communities and they were running [away at] a hundred miles an hour. So we[‘d] gotten to this point where we risked being down to just two seats in Sydney: the seat of Sydney, Tanya Plibersek’s innercity seat, and the seat of Grayndler. But in the bedrock, western Sydney seats, seats held by Chris Hayes, Ed Husic, Chris Bowen, Jason Clair, Tony Burke, we were dead as a duck.

  I asked Gillard a difficult question about the disastrous polling numbers.

  SF: Why were you so unpopular, particularly with men?

  JG: You’ll get a million answers to this. I think blue-collar men in particular feared the impact of the carbon tax on their jobs. They probably looked at that image of a woman and put together a whole lot of things that they didn’t like and reacted to it. I think for women there were still some who were feeling a sense of connection to the first woman doing the job. But yes, it was difficult days, difficult environment.

  Chris Bowen couldn’t recall a particular moment when he thought Kevin Rudd should be Prime Minister again. It was more of an evolution.

  You don’t wake up one day and say, ‘I know what I’ll do. Let’s make Kevin Rudd Prime Minister’. You hope for the best, you try and make the current arrangements work. I can’t put a finger on a particular day. It’s something which emerges over time, where you grow increasingly concerned about what’s happening and increasingly convinced that maybe a drastic decision is necessary.

  According to Sam Dastyari, MPs in Victoria were still backing Gillard.

  There was a sense amongst the New South Wales Labor MPs [of] how bad it was. But the Victorian Labor MPs were holding completely firm with Julia Gillard. They were sticking with her. And the numbers as a result were never there.

  In March, the Financial Review reported that the Coalition had been ahead in all twenty-seven Nielsen polls taken during the forty-third Parliament. Within weeks, the Labor Caucus was lining up for yet another vote on the leadership, after Simon Crean called for a spill. It was premature and badly managed. Contrary to Crean’s expectations, Rudd didn’t nominate.

  In a press conference, Rudd said he was honouring his commitment not to stand for the leadership again. He said he needed an overwhelming majority of his colleagues to draft him back into the position.

  My position was absolutely clear. No overwhelming majority, no action from Kevin. Why? Because there’s no point. You inherit a divided Caucus—pointless.

  The chaos in Parliament House diverted attention from the business of the day, an apology to the victims of forced adoptions and their families. AWU leader Paul Howes had been an adviser for the event and was in the audience as Gillard made her speech.

  For me it was a very important day, and for hundreds of thousands of mothers, fathers and children it was a day that we’d been waiting for all of our lives. And to have it waylaid with a crazy-arse kind of brain fart just shat me to no end, to put it politely. The capacity of that party to lose complete perspective of everything else [that] is going on in the world and focus on itself is demonstrated by actions like that.

  Julia Gillard was returned unopposed. She sacked her former mentor.

  I believed he had behaved not only wrongly but absurdly. He’s too smart a person to be wandering around Parliament House with TV cameras, muttering and stuttering. I mean I just thought this was an absurd performance.

  Gillard said the pantomime in Parliament that day was when the voters lost faith in Labor.

  There had been the farce of the challenge that wasn’t a challenge. It made the party look like a joke, it made the government look like a joke. And in my view when Australians completely hardened their hearts against the Labor government, it was in and around that moment when we just looked clown-like.

  Victorian MP Alan Griffin recalled how he was feeling at the end of the day.

  Strung out, and exhausted and quite despairing, because I honestly thought at that stage that was probably it and that we would go to the election in the circumstances of Julia as leader, and it would be a very bad result.

  Chris Bowen was with Rudd and other supporters at the Hyatt Hotel in Canberra that night.

  SF: Did you think it was over?

  CB: Yes, absolutely. I felt that that we’d tried. I felt with every b
one in my body that the best thing for the Labor Party and for Australia would be Kevin’s return, but that we’d given it a good and honourable go but we hadn’t made it. I had the view that the most likely result would be a cataclysmic result for the Labor Party at the election.

  Seven Rudd backers resigned, including three ministers: Bowen, Martin Ferguson and Kim Carr.

  In the aftermath of the failed challenge, Gillard sent a message to Rudd via Anthony Albanese, offering him an overseas post if he would announce his retirement. Rudd wasn’t interested.

  I just regarded it as laughable. I would never take it. I found it quite bizarre and pretty insulting really.

  Gillard had tried to get rid of Rudd but failed. With little time and dwindling political capital, she fought to secure her legacy in education and disability.

  Across a life time I’d come to meet Sophie Dean and so many other children with disabilities who were doing amazing things with their lives. I knew that we were going to make a huge difference for girls like her and for so many others that I had met … I’m also a realist and I could hear the forces amassing, even though Kevin Rudd had given a hand-on-the-heart promise after the challenge that wasn’t a challenge that there would be no circumstances in which he came back to the leadership … I was very very keen to make sure that I got our big reforms done before those forces could reach a critical point.