The Killing Season Uncut (17 page)

One person who had performed some of that role, not as an enforcer but at least as a go-between, was Mark Arbib. In March he emailed Rudd's chief of staff to warn him about backbench discontent: ‘Btw It would be worth Kevin doing a round of dinners with mps from each class. There is backbench unrest but manageable'. Alister Jordan told Arbib they were already arranging dinners with backbenchers but he was happy to do more.

There were thirty-eight new MPs and senators in a Caucus of 115. Many of them had a relationship with Kevin Rudd in
opposition, particularly those in marginal seats. But after Labor won government, the relationships changed.

Victorian MP Alan Griffin didn't think this was a problem.

SF: People complained a lot about not being able to see Kevin Rudd, that they weren't able to get the attention that they thought they were due. Is that fair?

Alan Griffin (AG): I don't think it is fair. I know that with Paul Keating I had two conversations with [him] and I was a member of his government for the term '93 through to '96. One was in the first week of the '93 election campaign and the other time was about three months after the '96 election. And I don't have a problem with that because prime ministers should be running the country, and if they're spending too much time talking to junior backbenchers then frankly they're not doing their job.

Mark Arbib occupied an unusual position in Rudd's circle. He had only been in the Senate since July 2008 but as a former secretary of NSW Labor, he was part of the government's political strategy group that included Rudd, Swan and Gillard. Media adviser Sean Kelly said Arbib was a regular presence.

Mark was in and out of the office all the time. On any significant matter, Kevin would want to know what Mark thought. That wasn't an uncommon phrase at all, ‘What does Mark think about this?' Mark Arbib was an incredibly important figure. He had an enormous amount [of] power in the New South Wales Right and New South Wales politics in general, and of course he was also viewed as having a very impressive political antenna.

Arbib helped Rudd prepare for the health debate against Tony Abbott at the National Press Club in Canberra in March and congratulated him in an email afterwards: ‘U slaughtered him—mojo really back'.

There's no doubt that Arbib was still talking to Rudd, but according to Julia Gillard, as 2010 went on, their relationship was strained.

Mark had been in this uncomfortable position with Kevin where he was never afraid to speak truth to power. One of Kevin's standard reactions to that was to put Mark, as we used to refer to it, in the freezer. I'd sit there with Mark or I'd sit there with Karl Bitar or even sit there with Wayne and there'd be a standing joke: ‘Who's in the freezer this week? Oh, Mark's back in the freezer'. So yes, I absolutely understood that that was an increasingly troubled relationship.

As Rudd's standing in the polls dropped, Julia Gillard's was rising. Victorian ALP state secretary Nicholas Reece commissioned the polling in his state.

She was Deputy Leader at that point and that's a different situation to being the leader, but I'd never seen a political figure with such high approval ratings as Julia Gillard was enjoying in Victoria in those early months of 2010. And I certainly conveyed that to her, more for our amusement than anything else.

Greg Combet watched her popularity evolve inside the Caucus.

She had huge work areas and very large reforms in education and industrial relations and she performed them beyond people's expectations actually. She was tremendous in Question Time, I think our strongest performer at that time, and so her stocks were riding high. And it's little wonder that when confidence fell in Kevin Rudd, people start thinking who's next, that the gaze goes to Julia Gillard.

That line appeared in the series, but in the interview Combet went on.

She was our outstanding performer at the time, but was she ready for the prime ministership?

As early as March 2010, journalists were asking questions about the Labor leadership. The media fascination with leadership tension was not new, nor was it unique to Australia. Years ago in the UK, I watched close up as the grandees of the Conservative Party moved on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Just before the first challenge, I went to a cocktail party at Number 12 Downing Street, two doors down from the British PM's residence and home to the government's Chief Whip. Barely understanding the tension I could feel, I watched Thatcher move through the small, hostile crowd at the party with such force I wondered her enemies didn't all resign on the spot. The British media wrote about every permutation in that period, as they did about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, as we did about Hawke–Keating and Howard–Costello. But something changed under Rudd–Gillard. Certainly the media cycle was faster, demanding much more coverage, and our political terms are shorter than those in the UK, making our politics generally more volatile. But it took collusion between Labor politicians and the media to turn leadership coverage into a full-blown pathology.

In 2010 that phenomenon was in its early stages. It didn't matter how many times Gillard laughed it off, the questions kept coming.

 

While making
The Killing Season
, I spent a lot of time trying to see the events of 2010 through Gillard's eyes. She didn't make it easy. Her answers at times were maddeningly opaque. It may have been an unrealistic ambition, but I'd wanted her to be more personal, less political. It was too late for that: she was locked into the minimal narrative set out in her book and in the speeches she gave after leaving politics. The language she chose was ambiguous, leaving too many questions unanswered. After two interviews, the exact
evolution of her decision to challenge remained a mystery. I am left thinking she wants it that way.

I found one early description in an interview with Liz Jackson for
Four Corners
in February 2011.

These were tremendously pressurised and difficult times, and I'm not going to canvas how I felt in individual parts of it. But it certainly was a, you know, very, very tough time for me, a very tough decision to make, and I came to it very, very slowly.

It made sense. I read out the quote to Gillard during our interview in Adelaide.

I didn't, well that's, I don't know where I've said that but I didn't in my own mind cast around about the leadership over many many months. That's not how it happened.

I gave the context for her quote and read it out again.

Well I'm surprised by that because that's not really how I feel about it or how I think I would ever have summarised it.

The description ‘I came to it very, very slowly' seemed unremarkable but she denied it nonetheless.

SF: When did you first begin to think that taking over from Kevin, replacing him, could be a solution?

JG: There's not a moment that I started thinking the solution to this is changing leader. I did have some Caucus colleagues talk to me in hedged, almost code language about, well, haven't we got to the stage where we need to think about the leadership, and I'd always stop those discussions and get straight out of them as soon as possible.

When she talked about Kevin Rudd, her argument was clear.

JG: I was increasingly across those months, February going into March, March going into April, April into the Budget season of May, doing everything that I could to take things off his shoulders by increasingly interacting with his staff and getting things done directly that way.

…

SF: So he still wasn't coping?

JG: No, he wasn't coping.

I put Julia Gillard's description to Kevin Rudd.

SF: ‘By 2010 I was doing everything I possibly could to take things off his shoulders.'

KR: By 2011 Julia was doing everything she could to rewrite history.

 

In Paul Kelly's book
Triumph and Demise
, MP Tony Burke outed himself as one of the first people to raise the leadership with Gillard after the decision to delay the CPRS was leaked.

The cameras for the Tony Burke interview were set up in the basement Marble Bar of Sydney's Hilton Hotel, which Burke remembered as an old haunt. He was more forthcoming than we expected. His interview had an intimate quality: not confessional but candid.

Burke said he had been unhappy with Rudd for a while. He complained that after the 2007 election he was no longer able to call Rudd directly, as he had in opposition. He was also disappointed to
be made Agriculture Minister, a policy area he had no connection with. By 2010, his grievances had deepened.

I thought the policy calls we were making had started to be wrong, I thought our capacity to communicate had all but evaporated, and I thought we were probably headed to a defeat. You put those three together, for me that was enough to talk about what you ordinarily wouldn't want to.

Rudd said he was unaware of Burke's discontent.

In fact, Tony Burke had always been expressing his support and loyalty to myself, and I had not long previously promoted him and expanded his portfolios to include Population Policy.

Burke said he and Gillard had ‘never been close', but one evening in late April he went down to her office with a bottle of wine. Scenes we filmed with Tony Burke in Parliament House told the story.

It was a great warm and funny conversation. I left it to the very end. I wanted to make sure neither of us were in a leadership change challenge conversation, but I did want Julia to know that I believed at some point she'd be Prime Minister and I also wanted her to be able to deny that I'd said anything. So I just left the final comment, ‘There's one issue tonight we haven't spoken about. If you ever want to raise it with me, don't hesitate', and left it at that.

Gillard had not mentioned the meeting in her book. I asked for her recollection.

SF: So how did you respond when he raised the issue of leadership? It's a big moment.

JG: Yeah. It is a big …

Gillard stopped abruptly, as if saying even that was a mistake. She retraced her steps in the story.

We agreed that we'd catch up. Tony basically pledged personally support to me, whatever the future might bring, but it was clear to me that in his version of the future, that would be stepping up for the leadership of the Labor Party. And once again, that was a sort of discussion a bit carried out in metaphors rather than very straight talking, and I was keen not to see it progress to a further, more explicit stage.

Gillard said they had a discussion. In Burke's recollection, he made his declaration and left.

SF: What was her response?

TB: She just nodded, smiled, said thank you and left it at that.

I asked Gillard what she thought once Burke had gone.

I thought that personally he was incredibly bonded to me and supportive of me and that was wonderful to feel, that you had that kind of friend. I also thought, did it have real meaning in a leadership sense for me and Kevin. I didn't think it had real meaning.

Rudd may have judged the meaning differently given Burke was a member of his Cabinet, but Gillard didn't tell him about Burke's visit.

The least thing I thought we needed when I was trying to get Kevin as supported as possible was him jumping around putting people in the freezer because they'd come and spoken to me in a conversation that I'd blocked and stopped … it wouldn't have been a useful thing to convey that to Kevin because, you know, it's like wrestling with smoke.

Tony Burke said he was also discussing the leadership with his factional colleague from the New South Wales Right, Mark Arbib.

Mark and I had spoken about it a lot. Neither of us had had a conversation where Julia had given any indication she'd be willing to … Mark was very wary because there was a view that we didn't have a candidate … We also knew if we spoke to anyone about it who didn't agree and it went straight back to Kevin, then the consequences would simply mean our capacity to influence anything would disappear.

Since Mark Arbib's photo was first put on the wall in our office, I had been pursuing him for an interview. He was funny and willing to hear my argument—he just wouldn't go on camera. We met a few times amidst the rococo splendour of the Bambini Trust café in the Sydney CBD, a place where many deals have been struck; it was also close to the Packer headquarters. He drank tea while I drank endless cups of coffee. I miss smoking with talent. I've never been much of a smoker, but it establishes a connection and defuses tense situations. Most of the cigarettes I've smoked have been with soldiers, cops and criminals.

I got close to a breakthrough once with Arbib, reporting some of Rudd's most egregious charges against him. I could see it got under his skin. ‘How would it work if we did an interview?' he asked. I started doing cartwheels, high-fiving myself (on the inside). Arbib got on a plane to the US that night, and I told myself later that he had succumbed to the philosophical mood of a long flight that took the edge off Rudd's insults. The truth is probably more prosaic. Either way, he came back to me and said he had thought better of it.

 

Head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Terry Moran, observed that Rudd was in retreat after the CPRS leak.

The Prime Minister had restricted the number of people that he was talking to. He wasn't really talking to anybody out of the public service. He wasn't talking to many Ministers. He seemed to be just talking to a small number of people in his private office, and that's not a happy approach to running a government … But I saw that as merely a temporary passage while he tried to recalibrate his political strategy.

Gillard said she had to assume many of the Prime Minister's duties.

It is not normal for a Deputy Prime Minister to end up running a Prime Minister's diary. It's not normal for a Deputy Prime Minister to be trying to manage [it] so that quality speeches are given which have in them the messages that the National Secretariat has been working through. It's not normal for the Deputy Prime Minister to be the one stamping out the campaign ground because it's simply not being done by the Prime Minister.