The Killing Season Uncut (12 page)

Rudd acknowledged his disappointment.

It's human nature. You're not an automaton. You're a real, live, feeling human being, deeply committed to climate change, and you've thrown your everything at it, and of course it's only partly worked. That's life. But I'm also a deeply resilient person, deeply resilient.

Julia Gillard's observation of Rudd was pointed. She doubted his resilience.

I was increasingly concerned that Kevin wasn't in any way picking himself up off the mat where he'd ended up after Copenhagen. So yes, natural to be bitterly disappointed, but politics is a tough business and after you've taken the punch in the gut you've got to get back up. He didn't look to me like he was getting back up and so I was very concerned about his frame of mind, [his] capacity to go and fight an election.

In the wake of Copenhagen, the Prime Minister faced a critical decision on whether to call a double dissolution election to push the government's climate policy through the stalemate in the Senate. Wayne Swan remembered his first meeting with the Prime Minister a few days after Copenhagen.

I saw him at the meeting we had in the government offices on the twenty-third [of December] and he was not happy, he was tired, he wasn't communicating well, and he wasn't really focusing on where we should go. I think the failure of Copenhagen had a pretty dramatic impact on him.

Lachlan Harris recalled the debate about whether to go to an early election.

It was an idea that everyone agreed on but no-one wanted to put their name behind except [Senator] John Faulkner. He was
the only person as far as I can remember who genuinely put his name behind and argued strongly for a double dissolution election.

Jim Chalmers was tasked to work on campaign contingency plans over Christmas.

In late December and early January, the Prime Minister was of two minds about an early election … It became very clear to us though, very quickly, that the Prime Minister was not likely to call an early election in that period. It didn't seem to me that he was fully in harness for it.

Harris said the demanding year had taken its toll on the Prime Minister.

Lachlan Harris (LH): Rudd had been working very hard for a very long time and he'd been doing a lot of stuff outside of Australia, which means outside of the normal time zones. And was that starting to affect the people around him and affect Rudd? We have to accept it was.

SF: And how did it manifest itself?

LH: We were not hungry enough to go immediately to a double d[issolution election] after Copenhagen failed.

In retrospect, Labor's decision not to seize the opportunity for an early election looks like the wrong one. New South Wales Senator Sam Dastyari certainly saw it as a mistake.

We should've gone to the polls. We would've won; we would've won big. We would've won with Kevin and perhaps Kevin would still be Prime Minister today … We had Abbott's measure. We would've nailed him to a post if we'd gone to an election at the start of 2010.

The Prime Minister and his colleagues retreated for Christmas, Rudd taking up residence at Kirribilli House. It was here, in the new year, that one of the key scenes of
The Killing Season
took place: a meeting between Rudd and Gillard.

Four years later, Margie Abbott, wife of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, welcomed our crew to Kirribilli to film the sequence. Following producer Deb Master's template, this would not be a literal reconstruction but a series of vignettes that suggested the events being described. We found a piece of archive of Kevin welcoming Julia at the front door of Kirribilli on another occasion: the scene was set.

Gillard described the meeting.

It's a beautiful vista. It was a lovely day. I sat on the verandah with Kevin and the staff there brought little things to eat and cups of coffee.

Rudd's memory was the same.

There's a patio outside which reminds me a little bit of Queensland, so my natural instinct when you've got guests is take them out there and give them a cup of tea so they can enjoy the view, and then get down to the business.

That's the point at which their recollections diverge. I had read Gillard's account of this meeting in Paul Kelly's
Triumph and Demise
, but the version in her own book was much less controversial. My concern was that on camera she would retreat from what she had told Kelly. I had a strategy for that but as it turned out, I didn't need it.

Rudd recalled an abrupt start to their conversation.

She was into it straightaway when she said that she would not, under any circumstances, support a double dissolution on climate change.

Gillard remembered things differently.

I looked at Kevin and thought he has not refreshed over this Christmas–new year period. He doesn't look rested. Every bit of me read him as reluctant to go to an early election, not physically [or] psychologically in the zone to go and fight an election campaign. I was actually just personally one to one very worried about him.

She went further in her assessment of Rudd's mental state.

JG: I'm not a medically qualified person so I can't, you know, diagnose anything. But just as one human being to another, my sense of him at that point was that he was spent in a physical and a psychological sense. He was very anxious and just not able to deal with issues in a methodical way. I thought he was, you know, sad, under pressure.

SF: The words you use, they sound like a layman's description of a breakdown.

JG: I have used all sorts of words around this and rightly been chided by people who say, ‘Well, you're not a mental health professional'. I'm not. But I was seriously worried about his psychological state. I thought he wasn't coping and he wasn't showing any signs of finding a way back to coping.

This was the first time in our interview Gillard said that Rudd wasn't coping. She went on to use the word many more times; it had become the justification for the leadership change.

SF: If you're concerned about his mental state you must've been concerned also about his capacity to be Prime Minister.

JG: Look, at that point, if you'd asked him to make a huge decision as Prime Minister on that day, yes, I would've been concerned about his capacity.

It was an extraordinary claim: that Rudd's mental health was so compromised he couldn't function properly as Prime Minister. I read out what Gillard had said to Rudd.

If that was [a] serious view on Julia's part at the time, then she would've had an obligation to go to the National Security Committee of the Cabinet and put it forward, or to put it forward properly to the Cabinet. If that was her genuine concern at the time, which it was not. It didn't form any element, direct or indirect, in our conversation. It's absolute bollocks.

When I pressed the same point with Gillard, didn't she have a responsibility to tell someone if she was concerned about Rudd's mental state, she backtracked slightly but did not withdraw the original statement.

Oh look, if there had been an urgent decision, you know one urgent decision to be made, I think Kevin could've made that decision. What I'm really talking about more is bracing and being ready for the full weight of being Prime Minister, which is not can you do this one thing today? It's can you juggle a hundred balls whilst you go about a spirit-crushing diary day after day after day. I didn't think he was in the zone for that.

Why did Gillard wait more than four years to raise this point? Why didn't she say anything at the time?

I kept my discussions with my colleagues about the political issues rather than my personal assessments of Kevin. Politics is a business where too much loose talk can cause all sorts of problems, so I didn't feel that it was appropriate for me to be talking about my view of his psychological state.

Unsurprisingly, Rudd said Gillard's claims were about justifying her later actions.

It's simply a post-facto construction of yet another reason or justification for the coup in June of 2010, which any person familiar with Shakespeare will know was basically driven by personal political ambition.

We tested Gillard's assessment with her senior colleagues. There was an acknowledgement that Rudd was tired and his mood low after Copenhagen, but no-one supported her view that Rudd was incapacitated or mentally diminished.

Leader of the House Anthony Albanese said it didn't fit with his recollection.

Kevin got on with the business of government into 2010 … It's up to people to make their own judgements, but no-one was saying that at the time.

It was a view shared by Agriculture Minister Tony Burke.

Tony Burke (TB): It doesn't make sense. I saw no evidence of that.

SF: How was he during the Cabinet?

TB: Not that different to how he had been for a long time.

Gillard's portrayal of Rudd became central to my negotiations for an interview with Chris Bowen. His wish to refute Gillard's claim about Rudd's incapacity was one of the reasons for him changing his mind about not participating.

I have heard that theory proffered very lately. I didn't hear it at the time. He was disappointed. I would not put it in the category of being depressed or in any way dysfunctional. I had no evidence, no suspicion, no feeling that that was the case at all … He came back tired [from Copenhagen] but as to a change in behaviour, I saw no evidence of that at all.

Resources Minister Martin Ferguson gave a stinging response to Gillard's description.

Reflecting on the so-called mental health of a former Labor leader, as far as I'm concerned, is an act of political treachery.

This was something that developed quite slowly really. I'm going to avoid using a particular phrase that comes to mind but one of those slow-moving catastrophes.

Ken Henry

A
S THE INTERVIEWS
progressed towards the critical months of mid 2010, truth became more elusive. For one thing, Kevin Rudd was unwilling to concede any fault, even those he had already publicly acknowledged.

SF: You said you were, I quote, guilty to the charge of poor organisation. You'd be making sure your day was better regulated, that you weren't trying to do too much, that you delegated more …

KR: By the way, when's that from?

He engaged in a battle of semantics over whether he had technically challenged for the leadership in 2012. When I brought him back to the original question, he still wouldn't give a straight answer.

KR: You know something? Every political leader, if they're honest about it, there's stuff they can always do better. I think even Paul [Keating] would admit that. Hawkey I'm not so sure, 'cause Hawkey always walked on water. Even John Howard, I've noticed in recent times, has had a minor mea culpa about a few things.

SF: What was your biggest failing?

KR: In terms of day-to-day stuff, if you as the leader are focused on the four or five big things that a government is addressing, and it's core narrative, then to ensure that you're in the business of active delegation to the rest of your team.

SF: You think you have a problem with delegating?

KR: No, you just said that …

SF: I think you were suggesting that before …

KR: No, you said that yourself. [Laughs]

SF: I'm only going on what you said, that you were guilty to the charge of poor organisation.

KR: Well, ah, on the question, um, off the record …

There were a few exasperating exchanges like that one.

By now we had begun our second set of interviews. After Boston, Rudd had offered two further days of interviews in Brisbane finishing on Christmas Eve 2014. We said yes because we didn't have a choice, but I predicted we'd all end up stranded in Brisbane, pulling crackers in the Novotel on Christmas morning, having missed the last flight to Sydney. Fortunately, Rudd rescheduled for early January 2015.

The night before we resumed, we agreed on a meeting to lay out the material I wanted to cover. (I had done the same thing with Gillard, but in her case via email to Bruce Wolpe.) We met at the Hotel Intercontinental in Sydney and sat in the courtyard bar, pretentiously named The Cortile. This time I felt I could order a gin and tonic. Rudd lent forward and whispered in French, ‘The man behind is listening in to our conversation. Let's move'. We relocated to a quieter corner of the bar. The exchange was more relaxed than the first meeting. We didn't talk much about the interview; again, I thought he was checking me out, to see if my intentions for the series had changed.

We met the following day at the old ABC studios at Gore Hill. Most of Sydney was still on holiday and the industrial zone around the site was deserted. Two men from the props department were painting new staging for the
Q&A
set. They were old-school types, taking smokos leaning up against a wall, complaining about the breakdown in industrial conditions. They weren't interested in us.

The lighting rig had been set up to match Boston exactly. When I took my seat opposite Rudd, he made a joke about my jacket, the same one I'd worn for the first interviews: ‘I see you've got your
Star Trek
jacket on'. Not every female reporter would appreciate the feedback, but he had a point so I didn't mind.

In the makeup chair half an hour earlier, Rudd had described with great tenderness a scene from his childhood. The makeup artist, Chris Sall, is a gentle man who listens well. This was Rudd in a vulnerable mood, sitting in the otherwise empty makeup room swathed in a purple cape as Chris applied powder to his cheeks. Rudd talked about horseriding as a kid in Queensland, and how he liked to ride as an adult in the Snowy Mountains, but he would never let the media film him on a horse because he knew they would ridicule him. It was true of course.

How do you balance that Rudd with the other one, the one described as a bully who mistreated staff and colleagues? Jenny Macklin's answer to a similar question was: ‘People are complex'. I would add that few are more complex than Kevin Rudd.