The Killing Season Uncut (19 page)

Soon after this exchange in Rudd's interview, we broke for lunch. This was the day Rudd stayed in the green room, unwilling to continue, claiming the interview was like being in a witness box. It was true that the questioning had become relentless, but that was also because Rudd's answers were not telling the whole story. When we sat down again, I turned that thought into a question.

SF: You demand a level of honesty from Julia Gillard. Are you holding yourself to the same standard?

KR: Absolutely. I can't claim to be perfect in my recollection of everything. No-one can. But I can tell you what I honestly conclude to have been the truth. Resorting to crazy forms of hyperbole and the wilder accusations which were made, says perhaps more about those using the extravagant language than those against whom they are using that language.

It was Rudd's argument throughout the interview that it was Gillard, not him, who was dishonest.

I think Julia has always had a bit of a problem with the truth. I think she has a problem with sincerity. Julia is such a disciplined political player that she has almost in her mind a scripted answer to any question which you ever put to her.

I put Rudd's quote to Gillard.

Kevin's entitled to his views, and obviously his views about me have been shaped by a very hot political cauldron. I understand that.

Whether or not Gillard was insincere is unclear, but she was certainly evasive.

SF: Let me ask you a simple question. Who raised it with you first in a serious way?

JG: I'm not trying to be evasive about it, but I didn't have a series of conversations where people marched in and said, ‘You should run for Leader'. That wasn't happening. What was happening was people would come in and talk to me about how dire our political position was, a lot of which I would agree with. There would be sort of raised eyebrows, hints about what they were trying to lead that discussion to. So yes, there was a lot of shadow boxing in it.

Shadow boxing, hints, code, metaphors and wrestling with smoke. For a blunt person whose language can be visceral when she wants, Gillard's descriptions seemed to be covered by a mist. Her staffer Gerry Kitchener cut through it.

She listened to what people were saying and obviously she was in a position to rule it out categorically and she didn't, and so
events moved forward as a consequence of that. But I think that's sort of different to saying she was agitating, 'cause she wasn't agitating at all. Other people were agitating. But she didn't say no.

 

ALP strategist Bruce Hawker was brought into Rudd's office to lend an experienced hand, but also to try and repair the relationship between Rudd and Mark Arbib.

I felt actually in my heart of hearts that the opportunity to really get the team back together was fading and fading fast.

Hawker said in the months before the challenge, Arbib was getting frustrated about being locked out of decision-making.

He was also aggrieved that somebody who was a good campaigner should have the door closed on him. When the coup took place, the people who were most intimately involved in it were actually very good campaigners, people like Shorten, Feeney, Arbib, Bitar, they felt that they were being locked out and that was part of the driving force I think behind the decision to get rid of Rudd.

Nicholas Reece saw the same frustration.

People like Mark Arbib, Bill Shorten, David Feeney and others, people who could carry blocs of votes with them, who by this stage were feeling extremely frustrated with the direction of the government.

In a Newspoll survey taken in late May, Rudd's satisfaction rating dropped a further 3 points to 36 per cent. The ALP's primary vote slipped 2 points to 35, but on the two-party-preferred measure they led the Coalition by 51 to 49.

Mark Bishop said replacing Rudd had already become a discussion topic in Senate meetings.

I don't remember who first raised it. I do have the view that a number of people had been working towards a change, but they were patient and thoughtful men and so they allowed the ball that was rolled down the hill to slowly gain momentum, and it did.

I asked Don Farrell if Bill Shorten was a frequent visitor to the meetings.

DF: He would come along to some of them, yes. Look, him and a whole lot of other people were terribly pessimistic about our prospects, and I think rightly so. My own view was that [we] were in deep trouble and that we had to do something.

Farrell claimed that, in the atomised world of Parliament House, he did not know that fellow Senator Mark Arbib shared the attendees' views.

Sam Dastyari felt panic grip the party.

To understand Canberra you have to understand the Parliament House bubble. You're in a different universe, that world inside of MPs just talking to each other and talking to bits of the Press Gallery, and they're all locked in together in a small confined space for night after night, week after week, session after session: [it] warps your perspective. And in that very closed world, suddenly there started to be this emergence of this idea: there is a solution to all this, and the solution's Julia. The solution is get rid of Kevin. And it went from that genesis of an idea to a reality in so few days that the whole thing still frightens all of us.

The agitators had turned inward, away from the public. They read the polls but forgot to ask themselves what the voters would make of a leadership change.

The Labor Caucus returned to Canberra for the last sitting weeks before the long winter break. The killing season had arrived.

Kevin Rudd's speechwriter, Tim Dixon, noticed the change in the atmosphere.

I remember remarking as I walked through the corridor of the Prime Minister's office, I can smell something and it's like smelling burning plastic, and this is exactly the smell a couple of weeks before Kim Beazley lost his leadership. The chief of staff starts closing his door more often; people start huddling into their mobile phones and talking in softer tones. You just sense this environment of fear and mistrust and that the walls [are] slowly coming in around you.

Mark Bishop said the Senate meetings became more intense.

People knew that we were leaving Canberra at the end of June, we were unlikely to return, and that if a decision was going to be made it had to be made in that last week or fortnight.

Gillard's speechwriter, John Whelan, began working on a victory speech.

I'd thought that if this was going to happen, then it would be one of the more significant moments since Federation. On the Friday before [the challenge] I drove down to Canberra early and locked myself in the office for the weekend and started doing some more serious thought around that particular speech again, with a genuine belief that it was incredibly unlikely that anything would happen.

Gerry Kitchener and Gillard's chief of staff Amanda Lampe both saw the speech before the challenge, passing it between them in a manila folder on a plane to Canberra, but Gillard has always claimed she had no knowledge of it. To reinforce the point, in
our interview she told the story of another speechwriter, Michael Cooney, who wrote a concession speech before the first leadership challenge in 2013 without her knowledge, in case she needed it.

When it came to selecting the photos for her book,
My Story
, along with the pictures of Obama and Clinton and other key moments in her life, Gillard included a photo of the back of Cooney's head, the speechwriter sitting at his computer. I wondered whether it was there to make the point.

 

Less than two weeks before the challenge Bill Shorten went to see Julia Gillard. According to a contemporaneous account of that meeting, Shorten raised the leadership with her. Gillard said she couldn't remember the meeting clearly.

JG: Tony Burke, I can recall a conversation with him. Mark Arbib, obviously a number of conversations because we were keeping in close touch about the government's political position. Bill Shorten, I don't actually recall that conversation with him …

SF: You don't recall a conversation with Bill Shorten about the leadership?

JG: I would have talked politics with Bill but I don't recall a crunchy conversation like that, no.

I asked Gillard six more times about her response when Shorten and others raised the leadership with her. She never contradicted the question.

SF: All those people that came to see you over this period of time to talk about leadership. Mark Arbib, Bill Shorten, Tony Burke, explicitly raising the issue, did you tell them they were wasting their time?

JG: My demeanour obviously was that they shouldn't have this conversation with me and I wasn't interested in having it. I didn't want there to be huge sets of words of mine out there that could be repeated …

SF: It's not a huge set of words to say, ‘I'm not going to take the prime ministership from Kevin Rudd. Stop now'.

JG: Oh, I think they would've read that from my conduct. There was no part of my conduct or discussions with them which would have led them to walk away from me thinking she's a candidate for Prime Minister.

Gillard had developed a close relationship with Mark Arbib. I asked what she said when Arbib raised the leadership.

JG: My reaction to Mark would have been the same as my reaction generally, possibly a bit sharper. He would have been blunt to me and I would have been blunt back to him.

SF: Do you remember the conversation?

JG: I don't remember it word for word but I'm confident that my reaction to Mark, like my reaction to others, would have been, ‘We're not going here'.

The argument being pushed by Arbib and his colleagues in New South Wales, and by Bill Shorten and his colleagues in Victoria, was they needed to act because they faced electoral defeat.

Gillard had the same view.

My view was that we were going to lose. Kevin wasn't in the shape to fight a campaign. He'd fight a dreadful campaign. Tony Abbott I didn't think was, you know, a genius, but I thought he would roll out a serviceable negative campaign every day and we'd come out second best in that contest. We weren't going to come out of that winning.

It was a hard case for her to make. The victory over Abbott in the health debate convinced Rudd's colleagues that he hadn't lost his touch. Chris Evans still had confidence in his campaigning abilities.

I thought Kevin Rudd would've led us to a victory at the next election. I thought we would still win, and I did not accept the view that we had to remove Kevin to prevent a disaster.

Simon Crean, Tanya Plibersek and Craig Emerson were all confident of their electoral prospects. Anthony Albanese was too.

I was a member of the National Executive. I had access to polling. There was nothing that I saw at any stage in that period of our first term of government that would indicate to me anything other than not just a victory, but I think the potential for a significant victory in 2010. Political apparatchiks from time to time, and I'm one of them, pretend that there's this science and secret things that we know that other people don't. I'll give you the big hint. There has never been polling that differs that much, internal party [polling], from the public published polling. On the day of the leadership change, the polling showed us ahead on a two-party-preferred basis. And that was not taking into account the proven capacity of Kevin Rudd to campaign as he did in 2007, the value of incumbency, and the fact that we had a good story to tell. Very simple.

Even veteran Liberal leader John Howard thought Labor was going to win. Martin Ferguson said Howard told him so after the leadership change, at an event at the Bradman Museum in the New South Wales town of Bowral.

He said, ‘You lost your nerve. You had one bad poll. You were always going to win the 2010 election. You lost your nerve'. And I said, ‘I know it'.

Within weeks of work beginning on
The Killing Season
, Ferguson announced his retirement from federal Parliament. What struck us watching his valedictory speech in the House was Tony Abbott's generous and teary reply alongside Julia Gillard's straightforward farewell.

Ferguson and Gillard had history. Gillard had been regarded as a member of the ‘Ferguson Left' in Victoria. He said he helped launch her parliamentary career.

I think it's fair to say that I was instrumental in creating the opportunity for her to get into Parliament.

But by the time the mining tax debacle occurred, their relationship had deteriorated.

On the Sunday before the last week of Parliament, Julia Gillard invited Martin Ferguson to share a flight with her to Canberra.

Periodically I, as Deputy Prime Minister, was entitled to a VIP aircraft. If I ever got that out of Melbourne on a weekend and I knew people were going to Canberra, I'd ring round and offer to haul people up to Canberra.

Ferguson said the offer from the Deputy Prime Minister was unusual.

Out of the blue there's this phone call from the staff, very persistent: ‘Julia's got a government plane going Sunday morning. Would you go on it?' [It was] very clear to me all the way to Canberra she was about one thing that Sunday, about a change of leader. [She] kept prodding me about polling, asking me where the mining tax was up to.

Gillard dismissed Ferguson's claim.

SF: Martin Ferguson says you tried to inveigle him into your plot to take over the leadership on that flight. Did you?

JG: That's completely untrue.

SF: Did you discuss anything to do with the leadership of the party on that flight?

JG: No. And you know, the relationship between me and Martin Ferguson was not close at that time, highly estranged, and so it's just ludicrous to suggest that I would be swapping confidences with Martin Ferguson. So no, most certainly not.

Ferguson said Gillard had misread him.

She misjudged my relationship with Kevin. She still thought, without good reason, that I'd automatically be part of a group to settle the score with Kevin over a fight I had with him. Well, that's not the way I operate.