The Killing Season Uncut (27 page)

Gillard said the leak was designed to define her character in the public's mind.

JG: We're talking about something played out deliberately and destructively as an election campaign is being called …
There were contending narratives. One could have been, and in my view should have been, the truth: ‘Kevin, a man of remarkable abilities who wasn't coping as Prime Minister, had been replaced by someone who was now going to do the job', versus ‘Kevin, the wonderful Prime Minister, dragged down by the faceless men and stabbed in the back by the woman [who] had become Prime Minister'. This was a deliberate attempt to make one of those narratives predominant.

SF: Have you ever considered the issue at stake here is what took place in the room, rather than the way that it was managed afterwards?

JG: The issue of what took place in the room matters for history; I understand that. What matters for the Australian people and what mattered for the Australian Labor Party is having the best government possible with the best values possible. For me, that's a Labor government, so what matters is what puts Labor in the best electoral position.

SF: Values are about honesty, aren't they? The question of what took place that night is at issue.

JG: I think what the Australian people look for in their government is things that matter to their lives—jobs, health, education, national security, an environment that will be there for their children. These are the things that matter.

Gillard's argument offers only one perspective, as if its simple logic should have been enough. But there was no precedent for the sudden removal of a first-time Prime Minister. Her supporters, including Paul Howes, recognised their failure to consider the voters.

That was such a poor move on the part of the party not to recognise that maybe the electorate might be a bit cynical about
what's occurred here. I think because all of us were inside and trapped in the echo chamber that is the labour movement, it just seemed so logical and natural that that would occur that no-one actually stepped back and looked at the perspective of how the electorate might view this.

The switch to Julia Gillard did give Labor a bounce in the polls. Almost a month after she became Prime Minister, Newspoll showed the ALP ahead of the Coalition on preferences, 55 to 45, up 3 points since the poll published in the week of the change. As preferred PM, Gillard led Tony Abbott by 57 to 27; Rudd had led Abbott 46 to 37.

At the same time, the internal polling Labor conducted after the challenge revealed mixed responses to the new leader. When asked to give one-word responses to Gillard, those polled used words like ‘strong', ‘female' and ‘determined', but also ‘backstabber', ‘untrustworthy' and ‘traitor'.

ALP market researcher Tony Mitchelmore, who had been part of the Kevin 07 campaign team, said it was fanciful for Labor to think they could start afresh with a new Prime Minister and a clean slate.

It was really unrealistic to think that you wouldn't upset people, that people wouldn't be shocked, that it wouldn't destabilise Labor, that you could just press the reset button and start again with Gillard.

He said the public didn't dislike Rudd, even though he had disappointed them.

It never felt like the right decision, even though people were questioning Kevin's competence and there were lots of things that'd gone wrong … I never felt that he'd lost that emotional connection with people. They were still on his side, they still thought he was in it for the right reasons. It goes back to the
way that people were really swept up in that whole 07 election and how they bought into it.

Mitchelmore made the point about the former Prime Minister that had been lost on the factional operatives who'd pushed for the change.

The relationship that politicians have with the public is all about an emotional connection … people can read people emotionally and a lot of sympathy just immediately went his way after he was deposed.

Although one of Gillard's more measured supporters, Simon Crean said her failure to explain the leadership challenge was compounded by other early missteps.

The failure to explain the fact that a party had dumped the person they'd last voted for and were asking you to vote for someone else, someone who in my view demonstrated by her actions that she doubted her own legitimacy, because she wouldn't move into The Lodge … She kept saying, ‘I want you to give me that authority'.

On 17 July Julia Gillard called the federal election, promising to move forward. The campaign itself was lacklustre. Gillard turned to Tony Blair's campaign co-ordinator, former British MP Alan Milburn.

Julia rang me up after about three or four days, asking me to go out [to Australia], because the campaign was going really badly. My assessment of the campaign was that we'd made every mistake that was possible. Because she had decided to get rid of Kevin, it was difficult to talk about the success of 2007, 2010. My first piece of advice was you've got to stop all this. You've got to talk about what Labor has done in office. You've got to talk principally about the economy.

In Queensland, the media followed Rudd's every move as he campaigned in his own seat of Griffith. Patrick Gorman went to work for him after he lost the prime ministership. He described the attention Rudd attracted.

It goes nuts. Any journalist he's spoken to in the last fifteen years is on the phone. They're calling him, they're calling me, they're calling the office, and there is no way to meet that appetite. People want Kevin's stories, they want his views on everything.

Gillard criticised Rudd for drawing attention to himself and away from her, including media coverage of his gall bladder surgery during the campaign.

He had been also very unwell during the campaign but had made sure that even him going to hospital attracted maximum media attention.

Rudd said he did no more than defend his own seat.

I said I would not be campaigning outside my electorate. The problem was, as I was out and about in my own electorate, the media would track you down. The allegation from Julia Gillard and the Gillardistas over the campaign is that everything was going hunky-dory except for Kevin. If Kevin would just roll over and die, everything would be fine.

Labor's five-week campaign is best remembered for its mistakes: cash for clunkers, the rebate scheme for trading in old cars for new, energy-efficient models; the citizens' assembly; the ‘real Julia' faux pas; and leaks. The first leak of the campaign was against Rudd, a report that as Prime Minister he had sent his chief of staff to deputise at national security meetings. The next leak reverberated across the campaign and the party.

Ten days in, Laurie Oakes reported on Channel Nine that when she was Deputy Prime Minister, Gillard had opposed paid parental
leave and argued against the size of the proposed pension increase in Cabinet discussions. The leak targeted Gillard as a woman without children with the implicit accusation she didn't care about mothers or the elderly.

Wayne Swan took a call from Oakes before the story broke.

My view was there could only be one highly credible source that he could have spoken to and that was Kevin … Paid parental leave and fixing up the base rate of the aged pension went to the very core of our Labor values, so here was someone suggesting that on two critical issues … we've got a Prime Minister who was against them.

Gillard heard about it just before flying to a campaign event in Adelaide.

When I absorbed the news I thought this was the election-losing moment. Basically the election could not be won from here, that was my internal thought.

She and the campaign team worked out their response on the plane. Media adviser Sean Kelly was part of the discussion.

Should we deny it? Should we admit it? Julia came to the conclusion that she had to tell the truth … I have no doubt that If Julia hadn't given the performance of her life that morning, the campaign would have been over.

Former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr was on the panel that conducted an internal review after the 2010 campaign. Their report examined the impact of the leaks.

These were bombs lobbed into the Labor camp and it's very hard for a Prime Minister to deal with negative story after negative story. And I don't know where the leaks came from, but obviously the people who planned the leadership change
should have calculated that people in the Rudd camp would very likely seek some vengeance. There'd be people, even if they were staff members, not ministers, and not Rudd himself, who'd be aggrieved at the loss of their jobs and their power.

As the minister responsible for pensions and paid parental leave, Jenny Macklin had been in the Cabinet meetings. She was also one of the most reasonable voices in the Rudd and Gillard governments.

SF: Who was responsible for the leaks?

Jenny Macklin (JM): Well, I've always thought it was Kevin Rudd.

SF: Why so sure?

JM: It couldn't have been anybody else.

Kevin Rudd denied he was the source of the leak.

SF: Were you responsible for providing that information to the journalists?

KR: Absolutely not.

When the next leak appeared, a tit-for-tat disclosure about Gillard sending a security guard to national security meetings, her staffer Gerry Kitchener remembered John Faulkner arguing Rudd wasn't responsible.

We were on the plane to Perth. There was a discussion on the plane about who had leaked and he [Faulkner] was adamant that it wasn't Kevin Rudd … I looked over at one of the staff members and said, ‘Who is this if it's not Rudd?' And we were just flabbergasted.

Gillard said it was made clear to her that there was a way to stop more damaging stories getting out.

JG: The only way to stop the leaks was to give Kevin what he wanted, and so I did end up verifying that he'd get what he wanted and he'd be Foreign Minister.

SF: How was that made clear to you?

JG: It was made clear to me in a set of discussions that were going back and forth with John Faulkner as the intermediary. Now in many ways these discussions, the things that were being said, were put in some forms of code, but it all added up to: this can stop if Kevin gets what he wants.

SF: And those conversations were between John Faulkner and Kevin Rudd?

JG: John talked to Kevin. John talked to me. Then there were some other discussions involved with people around Kevin, but they were the principal discussions.

Rudd insisted the discussions were about whether he and Gillard would stage a campaign event together.

KR: The negotiation through John Faulkner was over whether I would appear with her publicly and use that event to demonstrate that bygones were bygones.

SF: Julia Gillard is saying that effectively you bribed her for the Foreign Minister's position in return for stopping leaking against her.

KR: That is an absolutely false proposition.

Rudd and Gillard did an excruciating joint photo-op at the Commonwealth Parliament Offices in Brisbane. The logic points
to Rudd or one of his supporters but there is no conclusive evidence he was responsible other than the outcome,
post hoc ergo propter hoc
: Kevin Rudd was confirmed as Foreign Minister and the leaks stopped.

Bob Carr concluded the leaks put Gillard on the defensive, which led to mistakes in the campaign.

The leaks would have to figure big in explaining the hung Parliament, the lack of a Labor majority and the vulnerability that follow[ed]. Wherever they came from, they were almost diabolically clever in maximising the damage to the government and she ended up being wrong-footed.

In the short term, the most obvious mistake was Gillard's clumsy suggestion after a poor start to the campaign that she would reveal the ‘real Julia'. Greg Combet put it down to inexperience.

She was inexperienced in political leadership and I think she acknowledges this herself now too. I mean who are you if you were not the real Julia? I know what she was trying to say, but the choice of the expression I thought was pretty damaging.

According to Anthony Albanese, the nub of the problem was obvious. Removing Rudd had made it hard to sell his government's achievements.

I think the difficulty that we had was explaining to the Australian people why they should re-elect a Labor government without being in a position to trumpet the success that we had had. In particular, the success through the global financial crisis, but not just limited to that. We had been a successful government and whenever you talked about it you got the inevitable criticism back: ‘Well, why did you change Prime Minister?'

Alan Milburn said the leaks were only part of the problem.

In order to win elections, what have you got to do? You've got to be united, not divided. So we tore up all those rules of the game and thought that it would be easy to win an election. However, the principal problem weren't the leaks in my view. The principal problem was that you had by then a sense unfortunately that Labor was a party that was in power but without any real purpose.

At various times in our interview, Gillard said that she had moved on from the emotions of the time, but when it came to the leaks it was clear that the anger remained.

JG: There is nothing that could lead you to expect bastardry of that magnitude.

SF: He [Rudd] would say that the act against him was the first act of bastardry.

JG: I know what it's like to be unseated as Prime Minister. I could have sat and whinged and taken myself out publicly and tried to embroider on that act of bastardry and the destabilisation that proceeded it. Not in the best interests of the Labor Party. I'll choke all that down in the quiet confines of my lounge room and I'll make sure that there's not a TV camera, that there's not a journalist, that there's not a telephone call, that there's not a statement that I ever make or do that can be used to distract from Labor's campaign.

SF: Political violence begets political violence?