The Killing Season Uncut (26 page)

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.

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

A
S 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 Labor 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.

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 very 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.