The Killing Season Uncut (11 page)

Rudd explained the government's task.

It's like we were doing three jobs at once: unprecedented global diplomacy concerning the crisis; the huge domestic decisions which had to be taken to prevent us from rolling into a recession or a depression; and three, the stuff we'd committed to prior to the election, which the Australian public still expected us to deliver on …

The most ambitious commitment was an emissions trading scheme. According to the Treasurer's deputy chief of staff, Jim Chalmers, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) was their priority after responding to the GFC.

There were days where we'd meet for six or eight hours about economic policy and the GFC, and they'd wheel out all our thousands of pages of briefing about the GFC and they'd wheel in thousands of pages of briefing about carbon pollution. And then we would just continue on a meeting where some of the economic guys would leave and in would come Penny [Wong] and her team.

For
The Killing Season
, our archivist looked in vain for shots of trolleys loaded with documents. A brief shot of a trolley carrying a few hundred pages being wheeled into Treasurer Wayne Swan's office was the closest we got.

Greg Combet explained the government's challenge.

It's enormously complex. We had to send a public service team into the bowels of companies like BHP Billiton, and not just the whole company but go down to the steelworks
in Port Kembla, work with the company on identifying how much greenhouse gas was produced. I counted about fifty-eight different industrial processes at one point that we were dealing with. The Europeans tried this in their emissions trading scheme and failed. We couldn't fail.

Senator Penny Wong, Climate Change Minister in the first Rudd government, would not agree to an interview for the series. I rang, texted and emailed her; I hand-delivered a letter to her Canberra office; I asked her close colleagues to intervene—all to no avail. I watched her have a heated discussion with Tanya Plibersek at the launch of Julia Gillard's book. Wong's decision to support Kevin Rudd in 2013 was a difficult one for her and I assumed she didn't want to reflect on it, but I regretted her absence from the climate change story.

The government's strategy was to strike a bipartisan agreement on its climate legislation with Malcolm Turnbull's opposition, instead of relying on the Greens and others in the Senate. After the Grech incident, the task became more difficult. Within the Coalition, Turnbull's authority was diminished, and the climate sceptics were resurgent. Travelling with the National Party's Barnaby Joyce for the ABC's
Four Corners
program in 2009, I watched from the stands of a campdraft in rural Queensland as Joyce whipped up opposition to the ETS, telling his constituents it was a massive new tax aimed at solving a problem, climate change, that didn't exist.

Turnbull urged a deal with Labor, staking his leadership on reaching an agreement. Despite needing Turnbull's support, the government continued to wedge him.

Greg Combet was responsible for prosecuting the government's case.

I was in the House of Reps, which is where the battle's being fought. We're trying to get a deal with Turnbull but there was an impetus from Kevin Rudd's office, from his staff in particular,
to attack Turnbull at the same time as we're negotiating with him, which was just plain dumb, inexperienced, juvenile advice to be giving. That was our chance to get that reform done, and to make Turnbull more vulnerable to the loonies in his own party, that was not smart.

Others, like then Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner, said that in politics you have to take every opportunity to damage your opponent.

I can remember years ago Paul Keating talking about the theory that if you get a crippled or a weak Opposition Leader, you should leave them in place, not knock them off. And Paul's position then was absolutely correct—you knock them over one at a time and you can never assume anything in politics. Today's crippled loser can be tomorrow's hero!

Rudd's press secretary, Lachlan Harris, would have preferred Rudd to face Turnbull at an election, but in keeping with Keating's philosophy there was only one way to deal with the embattled Opposition Leader.

You don't have the luxury in politics of not getting rid of someone who's in front of you. There's only one speed in politics when it comes to your opponents, and that is you take every gun you've got and you fire every bullet at them, and you don't stop shooting until they're gone, and there's no alternative basically. And anyone who's worked seriously in politics will tell you that.

The international effort in the lead-up to the climate change conference was directed to securing a legally binding agreement. It was ambitious and there was plenty of resistance, but Rudd persisted with his efforts. Economic adviser Andrew Charlton worked closely with Rudd in his preparations for Copenhagen.

The Prime Minister would attend weekly video conferences that occurred at midnight in Parliament House with the Prime Minister of Denmark and a number of other leaders … That is a very powerful role for a leader to play because United Nations officials can make a lot of progress but leader-to-leader conversations talking about the details are quite rare … As countries started to announce unilateral commitments to reduce their carbon emissions, there was a very strong current of activity and momentum towards action on global climate change.

The government pushed on, trying to secure an agreement with the Coalition. Greg Combet respected Rudd's aspirations.

He was committed to action on climate change and he knew rightly that if he were able to go to the Copenhagen conference in 2009 having legislated an emissions trading scheme, introducing a carbon price into a fossil-fuel-intensive economy, that it would be significant. And it would have been. And it was quite right for an Australian Prime Minister to have the aspiration to go to that conference with that piece of legislation.

Lachlan Harris recognised the risk in what Rudd was trying to do.

We had a very complex piece of policy which we were trying to sell domestically … and it was difficult. It involved increasing prices on basic stuff like food and electricity bills, and we connected the necessity for that policy to an international conference that we didn't control. We connected it too directly and that was the oversight.

On the eve of the Senate's second vote on the CPRS legislation, the conservative forces in the Liberal Party prevailed and Turnbull lost a leadership ballot by one vote to Tony Abbott.
Rudd was overseas on the day of the Liberal leadership challenge but his staff watched the event unfold on television. Media adviser Sean Kelly was with Rudd's chief of staff Alister Jordan and Senator Mark Arbib.

We were workshopping lines on the three possible leadership candidates, Turnbull, Abbott and Hockey, and we never thought we'd need the Abbott lines. And then Abbott got announced as the Leader and we were thrilled. We were over the moon. We were grinning from ear to ear.

 

The climate change conference took place in December in Copenhagen. Inside the conference centre, it was chaotic. Press secretary Fiona Sugden was in Rudd's entourage.

There were no facilities. You could barely move. Once you were inside the conference venue you really couldn't get out, and I remember falling asleep under a table at 3 a.m. in the morning one day because you couldn't leave once you were there.

The media was cut off from the negotiators, leaving journalists scrabbling for footage to file news stories. After a worldwide search we found a few sequences of Kevin Rudd striding through the conference venue lobby and pacing behind the glass window of a meeting room, filmed from a distance. On the audio track you can hear the producer begging Rudd to walk in front of the window one more time to give them another shot.

The political dynamics of the conference were immediately apparent to Rudd.

There was an orchestrated campaign from the floor of the conference, not just by China and India at the time, but also
by friends of China and India: countries such as Venezuela, countries such as Bolivia and others, who were effectively acting in concert with those two countries to prevent an outcome.

There was one piece of trivia I was prepared to indulge: did Kevin Rudd call the Chinese ‘ratfuckers'?

KR: I'd frankly not been to sleep for a couple of days. I cannot recall verbatim what I said. I don't think anyone was there from my staff taking detailed notes of an off-the-record briefing.

SF: Does it sound like you?

KR: Well, I'm a person given often to fairly direct speech.

In the received narrative, Copenhagen was a failure. The subtleties of international diplomacy didn't translate well to the evening news. But while no binding agreement emerged from the conference, there was an accord. Australia's Special Envoy on Climate Change, Howard Bamsey, was part of the delegation in Copenhagen.

I don't think it's possible to say that any one person was absolutely critical to the Copenhagen outcome. President Obama was very important, Premier Wen Jiabao was very important … but I don't think most people would contest that Kevin Rudd played a very strong role.

Bo Lidegaard, senior adviser to the chair of the conference, described how negotiations continued after President Obama and Premier Wen had left.

That is actually when the actual summit took place, because you had thirty, thirty-five leaders in a small room starting to actually negotiate the text between them. And the atmosphere
there was very, very tense in the sense that it's unusual to have world leaders sitting, hacking on the actual sentences.

British leader Gordon Brown was also at that marathon meeting.

We were meeting almost continuously for hours … I think he [Rudd] played a very powerful role. And although we didn't get the full treaty, the fact that we got a Copenhagen Declaration, which has now led to the next stage that will be worked through, is in no small measure due to him.

But by the time UN chief Ban Ki-moon stood up to announce the agreement, Rudd knew the media caravan had already moved on.

By that stage it was un-newsworthy because the colour and movement of the other events had dictated in the mind of global public opinion that this had failed.

Fiona Sugden remembered the final day in Copenhagen.

I remember the press conference we did at the end was just, everybody was so tired, I mean the journalists themselves had barely slept for like two or three days and people were falling asleep. Penny Wong was nearly falling asleep herself. It was very unpleasant, is the only way really to describe it.

Gordon Brown gave his account of Rudd's performance on the international stage across the GFC and the climate change negotiations.

[He is] someone who understands more than perhaps anyone does that when you have a crisis, you've got to think of the solutions and seize the importance of international cooperation. If anyone were to look back on the events of 2009 it's the
strong belief that was sent by Australia round the world that global problems need global solutions and you cannot do that without a degree of cooperation, that we'd never properly had before, even after 1945. Now, that will be Kevin Rudd's message to the world at all times. But he showed that it could be put into practice in 2009.

 

But all politics is local, as they say. Thousands of kilometres away from Copenhagen, in the southern Sydney suburb of Hurstville, Senator Mark Arbib was watching a focus group with ALP national secretary Karl Bitar and strategist Bruce Hawker. Hawker described what happened.

The moderator of the group steered the conversation around to a price on carbon. The strong reaction from the group, both men and women but particularly men, was that this was a tax that was going to have dubious impact on global warming, at best, and at worst was going to have a big impact on their hip pockets.

According to Hawker, the message was coming through loud and clear.

It tended to confirm in everybody's mind that something had to be done to start to walk back a little bit away from the CPRS, or the carbon tax … Abbott's campaign was starting to cut with the electorate. At the conclusion of those groups we had a phone call through to Kevin in Copenhagen.

Hawker was in the room when Arbib and Bitar called Kevin Rudd. Notwithstanding the huge dislocation of time and surroundings, he said Rudd listened to what they were saying about the challenges ahead.

I understand he took the advice that was being proffered, which was you really now need to start looking at ways of withdrawing, not in a panic, but giving yourself some room to manoeuvre into a much more considered position that's more in keeping with public opinion on the issue. He took that advice in a very intellectual way. There was no raging or railing or anything like that.

Rudd said he didn't recall the conversation and claimed not to be guided by the findings of focus groups.

Focus groups, shmokus groups. I mean they come, they go. They're a snapshot at a particular time. If I'd done focus groups on should I apologise to Indigenous people, they would've gone booooo! You know, particularly in western Sydney. So frankly that didn't worry me so much.

He did remember that while he was in Copenhagen, Bitar and Arbib gave some advice to his chief of staff, who relayed it to him.

Bitar and Arbib said use the difficulties that you've run into in Copenhagen as an excuse to drop the emissions trading scheme, carbon pollution reduction scheme, altogether. That was their advice. I rejected their advice.

 

Kevin Rudd returned from Copenhagen at the beginning of the summer holidays. Treasury secretary Ken Henry recalled the response of his colleagues.

We thought in the public service, you know, he'd come ridiculously close to pulling something off that seemed just impossible really. Many of us thought that was something of which he should've been really, really proud. Instead, he was quite despondent.