The Killing Season Uncut (22 page)

Some of the most powerful men in the Labor Party were there (and they were all men). Together they held the numbers that would determine Gillard's fate. Farrell described how the meeting unfolded.

She [Gillard] sat at the top of the table quite regally … We each gave an assessment of where we thought the numbers lied [sic] in the event that there was to be a challenge. We started to explain where we thought the party was at, the dire straits that we were in … I was perhaps a little bit more forceful in the sense that I thought things were about as desperate as they could get … She sat and listened and she nodded when people
were saying things. And at the end of it she said, ‘Look, okay, I hear what you're saying'. She certainly gave no commitment to challenge, but she did give a commitment to go and talk to Kevin about the issue.

Towards the end of the first day of interviews with Gillard for
The Killing Season
, I asked her about that meeting. She answered the questions with more candour than she had shown earlier.

JG: My recollection of that meeting was that it was a very strong ‘If you run you will be supported' message. And they were obviously hoping that that information would encourage me to do it.

SF: Were they also saying you have to do it now? All those people, Bill Shorten, Feeney, Kim Carr, were out on a limb by this stage pushing the change. Was that also part of their message?

JG: Yes, very very clearly. One of the reasons I'd been pushing back on leadership discussions is they do have their own dynamic and their own life. The people who were talking to me were very knowing about what having those conversations meant for all of us. As was I.

SF: So their jobs were all at stake at this point?

JG: Yes, people's positions in the party could be at stake.

After the meeting concluded, Kitchener walked Gillard back through the corridors and halls of Parliament House to the ministerial wing. Like Caesar wondering by night on the banks of the Rubicon, Gillard was deep in thought. Kitchener asked her what had happened.

She said, ‘I think that these guys don't necessarily know what they're doing', and I took that to mean that she was concerned
that they hadn't had experience at these types of challenges before. They were both new to the federal Parliament, in Arbib and Shorten. They'd never been through a federal leadership challenge before, so I think she was genuinely concerned that what they were saying may not necessarily be true, and in the context of what was going on, I think that any victory by her in a leadership ballot that wasn't overwhelming, would've been an absolute disaster.

 

The Treasurer returned to his office after Question Time. He told Jim Chalmers he was going to throw his support behind Gillard.

He indicated to us that he would be supporting Julia Gillard in the ballot if there was one. He explained it to us at some length, that he thought that the worst thing for the party would be a close result that didn't resolve anything, and so he indicated to us that he'd be trying to ensure that it was a decisive result for Gillard.

After the meetings on the Senate side, some of the senators wanted to see the Treasurer. They called Chalmers to arrange the meeting.

It was very clear that Wayne had not considered at that point that he might end up the Deputy Prime Minister. So I said he had some colleagues who wanted to come and see him about that. They talked to him about that. He indicated that he'd be a candidate for Deputy Prime Minister if the position became vacant … David Feeney and Don Farrell, Mark Bishop and Steve Hutchins were part of the delegation. I know this because I had a piece of paper for a long time when they called where I'd written out their names.

Chalmers was wise to note down the names of the senators who came to see Swan. About a day charged with emotion,
unsurprisingly there were many contradictions between people's accounts. It was hard to determine what was at play, mendacity or memory.

Queensland had turned out for Labor at the 2007 election, so whatever happened in Canberra would have implications for electorates across that state. Swan recalled that a group of Queensland Caucus members came to see him, backing a change.

In the course of the afternoon, the Queenslanders came down and we had a discussion about it and it was clear to me that it was pretty much, you know, no return when they came down.

Early on Wednesday evening, the national secretary of the AWU, Paul Howes, took a call from Arbib.

I had two conversations with him [Arbib]. The first was one I was driving and during that conversation I'd asked him to show me the polling. So I got home, I had the second conversation. He said, ‘You've got to make a call'. In the union you don't do that on your own, so I needed to talk to our leadership.

Howes was criticised in the press for this scene in the series, which showed him talking on his mobile phone while steering a car, but the shots had actually been filmed several years earlier for an episode of the ABC's
Australian Story
, before laws were introduced making it illegal to handle a phone while driving. The bigger issue here was the relationship between the union and the parliamentary party.

Lindsay Tanner explained it like this.

There are individual members of Parliament who identify with a particular union, [who] in some cases rely on that union for preselection support, in some cases are former officials of that union. So there is a tribal phenomenon that is a reality of politics … This won't be the case all the time, but when you get
those really big internal battles like the leadership, people tend to cluster in groups.

Throughout its history, the AWU had supported the leader in challenges, including backing Beazley against Rudd. A decision to swing their support behind Gillard would be a major departure from that tradition.

Following the call with Arbib, Howes drove back to the city to talk to former AWU boss Bill Ludwig, a powerful figure in the labour movement with no love for fellow Queenslander Kevin Rudd.

 

Labor strategist Bruce Hawker described the moment when Rudd's office found out about a possible challenge.

The chief of staff, Alister, came in and said that he was starting to pick up calls from people saying that a count was going on inside the party. About four o'clock I went out of Kevin's office to go and have coffee and as I was walking [Communications Minister] Stephen Conroy and Mark [Arbib] came by and Mark could see I was looking very grim-faced and he said, ‘Cheer up, Bruce, it'll be okay', and Stephen Conroy smiling like a Cheshire cat. And I said, ‘This is going to end badly. None of us are going to look good out of this'.

Despite what they had learned, it seemed that no-one in Rudd's office, including Rudd, reacted. If the Prime Minister was in denial, that was shattered by Lachlan Harris's visit to the Press Gallery early that evening.

I walked into the ABC Bureau. Mark Simkin caught my attention. I walked over to see Mark and he said to me he had an extremely significant story and it was very, very important that I be watching the 7 p.m. news, and he was going to go live
with it at the top of the bulletin. The way he said it to me, the tone of voice, the look in his eye, left me in no doubt that we were in a full-blown leadership challenge from that moment.

Tony Burke had expected news of the challenge to break at any moment: ABC journalist Chris Uhlmann had got the story and shared it with his colleague Mark Simkin.

The five o'clock news happened: hadn't broken. The two other commercial stations at six o'clock: still didn't break. And then I was sitting in the chamber and my phone was going crazy and when I came out, it was Mark Simkin and he says, ‘Can you talk?', and I said, ‘Well I can answer yes or no but I'm in a corridor', and Mark said, ‘Okay, I want to read to you what I intend to open the seven o'clock news with'. And he had the whole thing and he read me the entire introduction. And there's a pause and I said, ‘Well, you haven't asked me a question yet', and Mark said, ‘Well, if I read that out, will I be misleading the viewers?', and I said, ‘No'.

Around 6.30 p.m. there was a function for Tasmanian Senator Nick Sherry, at which Rudd was giving a speech. (There was no archive of the event, so we used footage of a morning tea from another day and changed the light to early evening.) Simon Crean was there.

That's when the corridors started boiling. That's when the story appeared on the ABC. I knew nothing of it.

Tony Burke recalled the moment.

At that point it wouldn't matter where you were standing within Parliament House, you could hear phones going off, you could hear text messages being sent. You had a school bell of mobile phones suddenly breaking out the whole way through the building.

Rudd's press secretary, Fiona Sugden, ran down to Sherry's function.

I caught Rudd's eye across the room and I think that he knew and he walked over to me. I was like, ‘We've got to get out of here right now'. And just as we walked through the doors to go back into the Prime Minister's press office, I could see members of the Press Gallery, the camera crews running down the hallways to try and capture an image of Kevin walking back into his office.

 

In her office, Gillard prepared to meet with Rudd and John Faulkner, whom Rudd had requested be present at the meeting. Faulkner will not go on the record about what happened in the room. I asked Gillard and Rudd if they would release him from his commitment to keep the details of the meeting confidential. Rudd said he wanted Faulkner to speak; Gillard answered by correctly asserting that he would refuse.

I asked Gillard when she made up her mind to challenge Rudd.

Not until very close to going to Kevin's office to see him. I was feeling, it's really almost impossible to catch it in a word. I was feeling not at all settled, very at sea, just not sure what I should do next. So I did take some time to myself before I went round to see Kevin.

Rudd, meanwhile, was waiting for her arrival, acutely aware of time passing.

There is a long time which elapses, and therefore here is the immediate practical political dilemma. You did not know at this stage whether she's launching a challenge or not, so where's Julia?

For Gillard the moment had arrived.

SF: Walking to Kevin Rudd's office you had Bill Shorten and Mark Arbib and David Feeney, politicians with a lot of experience but not the top tier of government behind you, you must have felt isolated?

JG: There's no team that you can have around you that takes away the loneliness of that moment. It comes down to you and I take responsibility for my actions. I've never tried to suggest that I was inveigled or persuaded or anything like that by others. You couldn't make a bigger decision than I was required to make that day and you couldn't have felt more lonely in the moment than I did.

…

I walked round to Kevin's office thinking overwhelmingly this discussion was going to end with me asking him for a leadership ballot, that I couldn't see another way forward.

We had a single fleeting shot of Gillard on her way to Rudd's office. It is obscured by two men walking dully along in front of her, like the moment of Icarus' fall in Auden's poem, oblivious to the extraordinary events behind them. For the only time in the series, we had to slow the picture down.

There was very little material filmed on the day of the challenge and hours of story to tell. The challenge took the Press Gallery by surprise and by the time they had scrambled into action, parliamentary security was able to keep them corralled away from the Prime Minister's office. From the point when Gillard entered Rudd's office, there were no images at all. Tony Abbott allowed our crew to film in the Prime Minister's courtyard at night; I think we used every shot.

 

Gillard described the scene in the room.

We were seated in the Prime Minister's office, which is furnished with very big 1980s semicircular burnt-orange chairs. We were sitting on these very big chairs, the three of us, and in the room it felt still and incredibly tense: cut-the-air-with-a-knife tense.

The one thing that neither Rudd nor Gillard disputed was that it was a long conversation. Rudd said he sought to understand Gillard's behaviour.

And so when she finally came to the point of saying because of where we are on the mining tax and because of where we are on asylum seekers policy, that she didn't believe that under my leadership we could win the next election, I said, ‘We're on 52 per cent in the polls. Have you looked at where political parties have been at this point of the political cycle in their first terms in previous governments? We're in a better position than Howard, we're in a better position than Keating, comparable position to Hawke'.

Julia Gillard said the conversation was about more than that.

My set of concerns was about the functionality of the government. So broader than just, oh gee, there's been some not so nice polls, much broader than that.

She said she let the conversation go on too long.

JG: That wasn't really the right thing by Kevin and I don't think it was the right thing by the Labor Party.

SF: Did you feel guilty?

JG: Oh yes, you do in the same way I felt very guilty when Kevin and I challenged Kim Beazley. That came with a sense of emotional sadness, hardness, and this came with even more.

Rudd rejected the comparison with Beazley.

Kim Beazley was Leader of the Opposition. Kim Beazley had already contested a number of elections, that's the second point. Thirdly, we were ahead in the opinion polls and the election was entirely winnable. Julia often glosses over the context of all of this. The bottom line was deep Shakespearean ambition at play and with no real idea, I think, as to how the Australian public would react. Ambition, ambition, naked ambition.

In Rudd's lengthy but detailed recollection of how the meeting proceeded, he said he put a suggestion to Gillard, one that would give him more time.