The Killing Season Uncut (24 page)

In that press conference Rudd was defiant.

It has become apparent to me in the course of the last period of time, last several weeks, that a number of factional leaders within the Labor Party no longer support my leadership. That is why it is imperative that this matter be resolved. I therefore will be contesting the leadership of the party and therefore the government tomorrow at that ballot.

He made a pitch for support, committing to the mining tax and distinguishing himself from Gillard on asylum seekers and emissions trading.

I conclude where I began. I was elected by the people of Australia to do a job. I was not elected by the factional leaders of Australia, of the Australian Labor Party. to do a job.

Rudd's staff, including Sean Kelly, watched the press conference on the television in their office.

When he finished this amazing speech, one of the best speeches I'd ever seen Kevin give, the whole staff applauded spontaneously.

And then Kevin walked back into [the] office. He came round, greeted us, gave us two thumbs up, everyone applauded him again. It was actually an incredibly lovely moment.

Gerry Kitchener said that in Gillard's office, she and her supporters started making calls.

Julia was put into her boardroom where she was given a list of names that she started calling, and then the MPs started coming in and so Shorten, Feeney, Arbib and Don Farrell sort of formed a right-wing cabal down in the far office and they locked themselves in there and started calling people. I think it's fair to say that whatever Bill's faults may or may not be, he knows how to work the numbers and he was bringing people til late in the night.

Scores of people began turning up in the office. Staffer John Wheelan was shocked by the way some of them behaved.

It was a very, very dramatic moment. I mean essentially a group of people were electing someone contrary to the wishes of the Australian people. It doesn't get more serious than that. I thought people were a little bit too celebratory. Sure, to celebrate Gillard's ascension, terrific, but you know, contextualise that: a bloke who'd served the party for a long time and dragged himself from abject poverty, over many years, to become the Prime Minister was about to be removed. I thought [that] required some solemnity.

Tony Burke said backbenchers called to pledge support without waiting to be asked.

So powerbrokers, the usual, mystic theory is they hit the phones, they tell people what they need to do, where they need to vote, and people miraculously follow suit. People were ringing in saying, ‘I don't know if this is true, but if it is I'm in it, I'm
with you'. I've never seen anything like it. Even at the height of factional power, if the powerbrokers all get together, at best they can sometimes deliver a deal that gets to half the Caucus. They can never deliver the sort of momentum that happened that night.

Victorian ALP secretary Nicholas Reece described the way the votes moved.

You saw large blocs of votes coming across to Julia Gillard. So the New South Wales Right would move, those members of the Caucus who had connections to the AWU would move across.

Immigration Minister Chris Evans was astonished by the speed of it all.

When the stampede occurred among House of Representatives members, I was shocked. I didn't understand that feeling. I'm still not sure how or why the stampede occurred the way it did.

Sky News became one of the main sources of information for the Caucus. Union leader Paul Howes said he heard something he wanted to correct.

Sky News is reporting that the AWU is supporting Kevin Rudd. There was misreporting about the AWU's position and there was a view that if we came out in such a strong way, that it's all over red rover.

Howes agreed to an interview on the ABC's
Lateline
.

The leadership of our union took the decision this afternoon that we should throw our support behind Julia Gillard for the leadership of the Party. Now there were many people in the party, I've got to confess that I was one of them, wondering whether there should be a change. Now obviously that was
within the organisational party and it filtered through into the parliamentary party.

Gillard said she didn't know about the interview.

I didn't know Paul was going to be all over the TV until he had been all over the TV.

Howes remembered the call.

I spoke to Julia just before I went on
Lateline
… I think we were formally telling her that she had the AWU's support.

Paul Howes has regretted the decision ever since.

Paul Howes (PH): I made absolutely the wrong call by going on
Lateline
. I created a public legitimacy to the campaign that Labor is controlled by faceless men and it was naive and stupid of me to do it.

SF: Is there any way in which you now think that Bill Shorten, Mark Arbib, David Feeney, whoever, that they used you and your influence to get an outcome?

PH: Well that's politics. Politics is the art of people using other people's influence to get outcomes, so of course people did. But it's neither here nor there. The union formed a view and we articulated it.

 

Lachlan Harris described Rudd's mood.

He was very philosophical that night. There was no aggression. There was no frustration, and I think it's because the tide had gone out so quickly.

There was a call Rudd still had to make.

I call Mr Swan. He said, ‘I'm backing Julia'. I said, ‘Why haven't you picked up the telephone to me? Why haven't you spoken to me? Why haven't you come round? I don't think we have anything further to say, do we?' And that was the last conversation I had with Mr Swan.

Swan confirmed their conversation was direct.

I hadn't actually picked up the phone to tell him, although I intended to do so, but because the events in the office went on and on and on, so by the time we spoke was when he phoned me, and I told him that I viewed his position as being untenable, that he would not win a ballot, he would be comprehensively beaten, and [it] was a pretty blunt conversation. He didn't obviously take that kindly and we hung up.

Jim Chalmers was with Swan when he spoke to Rudd.

The Treasurer's mood after speaking with Kevin Rudd that night was very sombre. I think the decision that he had taken that day weighed very heavily on him.

Fiona Sugden saw Rudd after that phone call.

I remember that I went into the room after he'd had the conversation with Wayne Swan and he just said, ‘Wayne's not going to support me' and ‘Wayne's going to be the Deputy Prime Minister' and he just was broken. I think he was shocked.

For Rudd, it was personal.

There is something very final about a total act of betrayal.

Mark Arbib had retired to his office; a long day was nearly over. Gerry Kitchener recalled being invited to join him.

He was just, you know, really wired. This is one-thirty in the morning and he's just led a group of people to knock off the Prime Minister … He was taking a few phone calls and I was sort of wondering why he was bothering having a beer with me, but he then pulled out a ministerial list and started going through his thoughts about Julia's next ministry. Obviously he wanted to have this relayed to Julia. He had a rant about Kevin Rudd and how he couldn't be allowed in the ministry.

According to Kitchener, Arbib also had some comments about his accomplices.

He then came across David Feeney and although he'd been working with him that day to topple the Prime Minister he just launched into a bit of a rave about, well, he actually said he's fucking mental … Then he came down to Bill Shorten's name and he said that you couldn't trust Bill Shorten, that he would do Julia in, that the one thing she couldn't do was ever give him industrial relations cause he'd use it to solidify the union base to knock her off.

 

In
The Killing Season
interviews, Kevin Rudd blamed the structural organisation of the Labor Party for his downfall. For him, the factional alliance of the New South Wales Right, the Victorian Right and the Queensland Right was fatal to his leadership. Immersed in the pain of the retelling, there was no acknowledgement of his own role, the way he dealt with colleagues or his management style, and little acceptance that the government's political failures might have been avoided.

The construction of the parliamentary party of the Australian Labor Party is dominated by factions and factional leaders. Once [you have] a core number of factional leaders representing the New South Wales Right and the Victorian Right and, with Wayne Swan's defection in order to pick up his thirty pieces of silver as the Deputy Prime Minister, the Queensland Right, you then effectively have virtually half of the Caucus. At that point it becomes very difficult to move … Once the rest of the Caucus is shown that three large factional groupings have come together for different reasons, you then are virtually at 50 per cent, and so by that stage it's virtually game over.

There were the other explanations offered: more objective, not distorted by time and injury. Lachlan Harris said Rudd, his staff and the party were all contributors to the Prime Minister's demise.

Kevin and the personal staff around Kevin, we have to reflect on the fact that when push came to shove, we didn't have enough friends. I have a clear memory walking into Alister's office just after the challenge had been called and there just wasn't that many people there. There wasn't that many people hitting the phones and we've got to accept responsibility for that. But on the other side, you know that herd mentality that led all of these very senior, very experienced Cabinet ministers now and backbenchers, all of whom I think genuinely believed they were acting in the best interest of the party, to make such a silly decision. We have to reflect as a whole party beyond the Gillard and Rudd question—how did it come to that?

For Greg Combet there was fault on all sides, but on that night in June 2010, the bitter truth was laid bare. Kevin Rudd, Australia's twenty-sixth Prime Minister, had few friends in the Labor Caucus.

You know, it's not insignificant that all it took was someone to light a match, just a little match, and say the game's up.
Yes, there was factional organisation in it. Yes, there would have been scheming and plotting. But when it got to it, Kevin Rudd's support in the Caucus just appeared to vanish.

A leadership change isn't over when the returning officer comes out of the party room or when the victor gives his or her speech to the media.

Bob Carr

T
HE EXTRAORDINARY NATURE
of the challenge continued into the following day. As Australia woke to the bewildering news of the night before, Rudd decided not to contest the ballot but rather to hand the leadership to his Deputy. For a man renowned for his resilience, it was surprising. The fight would come later.

Rudd said he relied on advice from Leader of the House Anthony Albanese.

Albo came and saw me. He said, ‘Mate, I really strongly counsel you not to do this. We're going to tear the show apart and you can't win'.

For Albanese, a decisive outcome would be better for the party.

It was clear to me that Kevin Rudd could not secure a majority. I put it to him that it was my view that it was in [the] Labor
Party's interests that Julia Gillard be elected unopposed, rather than go through a ballot whereby there would have been lists produced and the media would have done the obvious and easy graphics.

Gillard says Rudd would have been humiliated in a ballot.

Kevin could have entered the leadership ballot in 2010. He didn't because he would have got around fourteen votes.

Treasurer Wayne Swan regretted there was no public reckoning.

We should have had a ballot, which would have demonstrated how absolutely comprehensive the numbers were, and I think that was probably the most critical mistake. It then left Kevin subsequently in the position of trying to claim that his support at the time was far greater than it actually was.

Some members of the Caucus suspected this might have been intentional on Rudd's part, including Greg Combet.

It was a masterstroke in hindsight of Kevin Rudd's really. I don't know whether he thought about it at the time, but to deny a ballot denied her the legitimacy of an elected role that I think would have helped her.

I put the question to Rudd.

What a curious post-facto construction of events. This is a crisis. A coup has been launched barely twelve hours before and now the historiography is that I had some particularly clever plan in conducting or not conducting a ballot? …. A political coup has been delivered to me, the Prime Minister of Australia, and now … I was somehow behaving badly? Gillard launches a coup and within twelve hours I'm guilty of something?

In this moment in the series, Rudd and Gillard switch roles: victim to offender, offender to victim. In both cases it was more complicated, but those were the propositions we tested.

Labor members made their way to the Caucus room—a scene that would be repeated three more times in the next three years, almost to the point of parody. It must have been a strange experience for the eighteen Cabinet ministers, the most powerful members of government, most of whom had been sidelined in the events of the night before.

Resources Minister Martin Ferguson expressed his disbelief.

[I] went around to John Faulkner's office and sat for hours. He and I knew that we'd just destroyed ourselves. To think there wasn't even a proper process of discussion with the Cabinet 'cause they didn't want to. We just killed ourselves.

Immigration Minister Chris Evans described himself as ‘gob-smacked'.

To do it without warning, to do it without broad discussion, is just unbelievable. Within a couple of hours to be told that the Prime Minister had lost the support of the Caucus, without you having been lobbied yourself, was quite amazing.