The Killing Season Uncut (16 page)

Lachlan Harris remembered watching the announcement. He acknowledged they weren't ready for what would follow.

It didn't bubble up as an issue of great significance. That's how you know that we weren't prepared. It wasn't kind of like ‘Today's mining tax day everyone, cancel the next two weeks' kind of thing. No, that wasn't how it worked.

Ken Henry agreed.

I think frankly everybody, everybody was surprised by the campaign against that tax. Nobody, perhaps nobody should've been surprised, but everybody was surprised.

Economic adviser Andrew Charlton travelled to Perth just after the announcement. He recalled being taken aback by the public reaction to the tax.

As we landed in Perth I was listening to the talkback radio, and the tone of the response was like nothing I'd ever heard before.

Nine days later in the federal Budget, the forecast revenue from the mining tax was included in the forward estimates.

The mining industry's campaign against the tax intensified. Lachlan Harris remembered watching their first advertisement on television.

I was sitting next to Sean Kelly and I saw an ad come on air, onto TV, and it was the anti-mining tax ad. And I looked over at Sean and I said, ‘Mate, Neil Lawrence made that ad', the man who had made the Kevin 07 ads, ‘and we are in a lot of trouble'.

The mining industry hired creative director Neil Lawrence and focus group researcher Tony Mitchelmore, one half of the much-lauded Kevin 07 campaign team, to craft and sell the industry's message to the public. Lawrence and Mitchelmore were available to work for the industry because the ALP had stopped using them, a decision taken by Karl Bitar after he had taken over as the party's national secretary. Lawrence remembered a perfunctory communication from Bitar.

I had a text from him saying, ‘I have decided to review all suppliers to the Labor Party. Please let me know by return email if you would like to be considered as a candidate'. My email was something along the lines of ‘I don't think so'. I never spoke to Karl Bitar about it and haven't seen him since. I did speak to Mark Arbib in Parliament. I said, ‘What happened?' He said, ‘Look, Karl just didn't think he could control you'.

Lawrence concluded the government's argument in support of its proposal was flawed.

I think they thought it was a pretty easy political win, you know? This is our country, these resources belong to us, Australians need to get a fair share. It sounds very sellable, but there were some underlying problems with their argument.

Martin Ferguson also remembered seeing the ads.

I think the mining industry ads were second to none. They absolutely killed us: ordinary people talking about the importance of the industry.

In suburban focus groups, Mitchelmore heard how mining was propping up the economy and Rudd was ruining the country.

The two big narratives out there at the time were this two-speed thing: the only thing keeping the country going is
mining, the rest of the economy is tanking, we need China, we need mining. The other big narrative out there at the time was everything that Kevin Rudd is touching doesn't seem to be going well. They didn't see it as a legitimate move. They saw it more as a political move: that debt was a real problem and he was using this mining tax to save his neck.

Ken Henry rejected the argument that the mining industry saved Australia during the GFC.

[It] shelved investment projects, and it reduced its workforce … Had every sector in the Australian economy behaved that way, then by May 2009 Australia would have been sitting on an unemployment rate of more than 19 per cent.

The mining industry put $22 million into its campaign against the tax, and the attack was unrelenting. Swan's deputy chief of staff, Jim Chalmers, likened it to warfare.

There were shells exploding around us every day. It felt like there was, you know, blood and guts everywhere in this debate. It was just one of those really willing ones where the survival of the government was at stake, in the same way that it was in some of the other issues. But that period was just so intense that it took a toll on everyone.

The Prime Minister shifted from spruiking health reform to energetically campaigning for the mining tax. Behind the scenes, Gillard said, it was another story.

[An] obviously seasoned politician in front of the TV cameras could, you know, turn it on, but his demeanour behind closed doors was absolutely miserable, irritated. You know, nothing in life was going his way, was the sense. Everything was a sort of eye-rolling, why is everything so hard, why is no-one helping
me, why do I have to do everything. Just miserable. In big decisions you would get to a discussion point where you would think that the next natural thing would be to say okay, let's do X or let's do Y. Whenever you got to that point, he would find a reason to go and get more work done to delay the making of the decision. So if I was going to summarise it, personally miserable, politically paralysed.

I put her description to Rudd.

That is utterly false. Number one, I had delivered health and hospital reform through my own efforts, supported by Nicola Roxon. Number two, we were in the trenches on the question of tax reform delivered by Wayne Swan. Number three, on the rest of the government's agenda, including its international policy agenda, we were proceeding full speed ahead.

The mining tax exposed the fault lines running through the Rudd government. Relationships were fracturing and public approval was waning. Jim Chalmers saw how the mining industry used the government's predicament to their advantage.

They were better funded, they had a willing media behind them. We did not have a shed full of political capital to spend on a difficult reform, which was a big problem. We weren't riding high like we were earlier on in the life of that first term of the government. We were very close to an election. There was a whole lot of tension around some of our other reforms simultaneously. And so we were comprehensively beaten by the industry in the argument about a mining tax. We just didn't have the sorts of weapons that they had at our disposal.

 

After we'd dealt with the mining tax in Rudd's interview, we agreed to take a break, and Rudd went into the green room for a fresh cup
of his trademark tea. The tension eased. I leant back in my chair, the crew and producer Deb Masters and I by ourselves for the first time that day. We all started talking at once. After a few minutes I looked over at Rudd's empty chair and the table next to it. There was an iPhone on the table, placed there by a staffer to record the interview. The recording was still going. I grabbed the phone and stabbed at the off button while the others looked on, frozen.

This is not a story about one person. This is not a set of events around one person. It's not even a set of events around two people, around me and Kevin. I think it's a broader canvas about the life and functioning of a Labor government.

Julia Gillard

T
HE LABOR LEADERSHIP
challenge of 2010 was unorthodox, driven from outside the centre of power and without a willing candidate. The agitators, while powerful figures in the Labor Party, were novices to Canberra; not even Julia Gillard fully trusted their abilities on the day of the challenge. The only senior player, by his own account, was Agriculture Minister Tony Burke.

Gillard was no Keating to Rudd's Hawke. She didn't stalk him for the leadership. Not long before the challenge, Kevin Rudd's chief of staff, Alister Jordan, told Assistant Treasurer Chris Bowen she was ‘the epitome of loyal'. So what made her ask Rudd for a ballot in his office on the night of 23 June?

Kevin Rudd was a popular Prime Minister whose Caucus colleagues deserted him in less than twenty-four hours. What was
it about Rudd that saw him isolated on the night of the challenge, no powerbroker marshalling support for the battle ahead? AWU leader Paul Howes called it the ‘$64 million question'.

How can someone that was so effective in networking, so effective in building strong personal relationships, do away with them so quickly? If it was a work of fiction, if this was an episode of
House of Cards
or
The West Wing
, you wouldn't believe it.

The contemporaneous media and the books of the period laid out their versions of the challenge. For
The Killing Season
, our task was to get as many firsthand accounts as possible on camera. By the time we finished filming, we had 144 hours of interviews with fifty-five people. A narrative emerged of Rudd's unravelling and Gillard's ascendancy, but no single truth.

As Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner observed, ‘the truth is always conditional in politics'.

There are certain things that are on the public record that are not disputed, so you can fairly safely say those things are true. Then there are other things that there are differing interpretations of, where it's probably not possible to get a conclusive position. And there are other things that we'll probably never know.

 

There were two months between the leak of the decision to delay the ETS and the removal of Rudd. What happened in that time?

In April 2010, Kevin Rudd knew how it felt to be on the wrong side of a public opinion poll. His personal popularity had taken a hit, and the backward slide was always going to be problematic for a Prime Minister who had used his public support to take the leadership of the party.

Senator Michael Forshaw, convenor of the New South Wales Right, said Rudd's security depended on the voters' support.

After the election I think he was very popular, but you know I've always thought that that popularity was very much based on his electoral success. The Caucus didn't love Kevin Rudd like they loved Kim Beazley or Bob Hawke or even Paul Keating.

Rudd set himself apart from his colleagues early on, according to West Australian Senator Chris Evans.

I think Kevin became quickly isolated as Prime Minister and that was obviously his own doing. I think he didn't have strong relationships with enough people who had sway in Caucus, and he didn't look to build those relationships. He got there on his own personality and effort and I think he thought that would sustain him.

When I re-read the interview transcripts, I was surprised by how much good material Evans had provided. I wondered whether in writing the series, I had associated him too much with the criticism of Rudd over the
Oceanic Viking
and missed his most valuable quality: fairness.

The disquiet in Caucus in early 2010 caused some Labor backbenchers to hold meetings to discuss the government's prospects. Piecing together the narrative of their discontent was tricky: some wouldn't talk, and those that did hid as much as they revealed.

South Australian Senator Don Farrell was one of the instigators. ‘We started having meetings, eventually with quite a broad range of people, about the problems that the party was facing.' Farrell listed some of the attendees. ‘There was a range of people: David Feeney, Bill Shorten, Steve Hutchins, Mark Bishop, amongst others, Gary Gray.'

David Feeney, Steve Hutchins and Gary Gray wouldn't speak on camera. Victorian Senator David Feeney was one of the key players in the challenge, along with Bill Shorten and Mark Arbib; he gave a research interview early in the production but then withdrew his co-operation. Mark Bishop was also difficult to pin down. He said yes, then cancelled and disappeared from view, despite our attempts
to get him back. Towards the end of filming, he called to say he had heard that Wayne Swan had done something like ten hours of interviews, and now he wanted to have his say. It wasn't true that Swan had been interviewed for so long, but it didn't matter. We wanted Bishop's account.

They start as all meetings do: innocently … The view that emerged was that the government was perilously close to losing [its] ability to be elected or re-elected.

Victorian Senator Stephen Conroy said no-one paid much attention to the backbenchers at the time.

Well, people were frustrated they hadn't been promoted … This is a normal political dynamic. It's just a few unhappy people. They haven't been promoted to a parl sec or they haven't been promoted to the ministry.

I asked Don Farrell why they didn't take their concerns to the Prime Minister.

Don Farrell (DF): All of us had formed a view about Kevin's ability to receive bad news and to be given advice, and he just wasn't in the mood to listen to any advice that we might give him. So in a sense you had to work around him.

SF: Is that fair though, just to make that assumption and not test it?

DF: Yeah, look, I think it is fair.

Chris Evans didn't pay much attention to the malcontents either.

Chris Evans (CE): I didn't see them as being particularly influential or necessarily representative of the broader Caucus. I didn't rate the danger as highly as I should've.

SF: You say they weren't influential. How did they manage to wield so much influence so soon after that point?

CE: That's a very interesting question that I don't really have a satisfactory answer for.

Stephen Conroy observed that they were helped by the geography of Parliament House.

One of the great design flaws of Parliament House, and if you talk to the people who designed it, they would say the one change they would make would be not to create a ministerial wing. I worked in the Old Parliament House. Nothing could happen without everybody knowing. The physical separation of the ministerial wing from the rest of the parliamentary team leaves you isolated, and if you're exceptionally busy it can leave you very isolated.

Whether it was geography or secrecy, very few people had any idea those meetings were taking place.

Evans said that Rudd had no equivalent of the hard men who had managed Caucus for previous Labor prime ministers.

He just didn't have that sort of organisational support or power base … certainly he didn't have lieutenants who managed the Caucus for him.