The Killing Season Uncut (30 page)

Before the first group of asylum seekers left Australia for Malaysia, the deal was struck down in the High Court. Bowen offered his resignation.

I said, ‘Prime Minister, this is a diabolical political situation for the government. I'm happy to give you my resignation and I will take responsibility for the High Court loss'. To her credit she said that would be fundamentally unfair and she would not accept my resignation if I offered it.

Gillard acknowledged the failure but compared her efforts favourably with Rudd's.

I ended up striving continuously for new policies here. My criticisms of Kevin were not only that he watched this political
problem rise, he exacerbated it with the decision of
Oceanic Viking
; he didn't go on a methodical search for a solution.

 

In late 2011, Gillard gave her first speech as Prime Minister to the ALP National Conference. She listed the achievements of former Labor leaders Whitlam, Hawke and Keating but didn't mention Kevin Rudd. She insisted it wasn't deliberate.

There wasn't a reference to Kevin. I'm prepared to put my hand up well and truly for this error but there was no intention to be dismissive of Kevin, not at all.

Sean Kelly's recollection is different.

There was a lot of work put into Julia's speech. There was some debate about whether or not Kevin should be mentioned in the list of prime ministers and I remember Julia not being particularly keen on the idea.

Kevin Rudd was in the audience.

‘Angry' overstates it. I was a bit hurt, because it's a gathering of the party faithful. But more than that, I just thought it was politically dumb.

British political adviser John McTernan's recollection of Rudd's response at the conference reflected his contempt for the former Prime Minister.

It's the most ridiculous piece of manufactured victimhood I've ever seen in my life. He's there in the story of the Labor Party projected in the conference hall. The notion that he would
do this to himself, make himself look weak, and hissy, stampy, Rumpelstiltskiny, stomp around, maybe that was an error.

Intentional or not, the omission of Rudd from the pantheon became the story of the conference, drowning out all other business. Sean Kelly said the consequences were felt immediately.

At the conference itself I remember that being a huge moment, the fact that Kevin hadn't been mentioned. And of course there was the sense that that speech had fallen flat, that there had been a chance for Julia to regain some momentum and that chance had been squandered.

By the time Rudd had been slighted by the Prime Minister, Alan Griffin had already spoken to him about a return to the leadership.

Griffin provided some light relief during the making of the series. He liked Rudd but also said there were times when he wanted to throttle him. A reluctant interview at first, Griffin said yes, then spent months rueing his decision, or pretending to. He was in New York as an observer at the UN when I was in Boston interviewing Rudd. I rang him when the interview was not going well. His advice didn't meet ABC editorial guidelines, suggesting the only way to get through a marathon interview with Kevin Rudd was self-medication.

Griffin explained why he had approached Rudd.

AG: I put the view to Kevin that I thought things were becoming untenable, that the long-term trend line with respect to public support was diabolical, and that on top of what was then appearing like an ongoing series of poor judgements … established a pattern which was not going to change. And in those circumstances, he should consider his position with respect to the leadership, should that situation present itself sometime in the future.

SF: And what was his response?

AG: Coy! Coy. But that's the nature of how these things often are … it's not unusual for candidates to at least appear to be coy, even when you know they're red-hot.

Patrick Gorman saw a growing number of disaffected MPs come to Rudd's office.

We had a steadily increasing openness with members who would come and speak to Kevin about their frustrations. It started out with those who once were his closer friends, then it expanded to other people who wouldn't have normally had a deep political conversation with him. You really did have quite a few people who'd been more open than you would've expected about whether or not this government was going to go full-term.

One of the backers of the 2010 leadership challenge, Mark Bishop, decided his decision had been a mistake.

The things that we sought to achieve by changing the leadership and in the manner that it was changed had been totally unproductive, counterproductive … it was a terrible misjudgement.

Encouraged by what he was hearing, Rudd ventured into marginal seats.

SF: You started touring backbench electorates. Why did you do that? It looks like a provocative act.

KR: Firstly because they invited me and because they were fearful of how they were going in the polls. Secondly, they knew that I had strong levels of support in the Australian community. And thirdly, because on each occasion it was authorised by Julia Gillard's office.

By the new year, Labor's primary vote had dropped to 30; when Rudd lost the prime ministership, the primary vote was at 35. Rudd again said the cause lay with Gillard, not him.

I think one of the things Julia needs to recognise was she was not performing effectively as a Prime Minister. Secondly, I'm not responsible for public opinion polls which, when they throw my name back into the midst, have me as the preferred Prime Minister of the country. That of itself creates its own dynamic.

During a break in the interview, researcher Trish Drum expressed frustration that Rudd was giving the same answer over and over. But that was Rudd's skill: every response contained the message he wanted to get across: Gillard's poor judgement, the stain of the challenge and his reluctance to return. The light and shade about his motivation would have to come from his colleagues.

 

In our first meeting, Gillard told series producer Deb Masters and I that we couldn't make the series without a full analysis of the role of journalists, many of whom in her eyes had become Rudd partisans. The relationship between politicians and the media is vexed, particularly for the Press Gallery, who work in the same building as the people they report on.

John McTernan was robust about the relationship.

I think that everybody faces a hostile press in the end and the honeymoon in politics is increasingly rare. Kevin Rudd got a honeymoon because it wasn't just time for a change: he seemed to be the change … Politicians who complain about their treatment at the hands of the press are like footy players who expect to be able to score every time. The other guys are on the pitch too and if you can't play against other people, find some other job to do.

In a rare expression of candour about the nature of politics, Alan Griffin described the history of destabilisation in Labor.

No-one comes to this with clean hands. Frankly, Kevin destabilised Julia. Julia destabilised Kevin and Kim Beazley. Wayne Swan destabilised Simon Crean. It's the nature of politics. If you're not happy with how you think things are going, the result is disunity. And disunity is death. So what I did is what a range of colleagues have done at various times on various occasions to various leaders. I take no pride in it at all. However, do I think it was necessary in the circumstances? I do.

He spelled out the business of undermining the Prime Minister.

I was talking to members of Caucus about how they saw things. I was putting a view about what I thought they should take from things like the polling and what they should understand are the political implications from some of the decisions that had been taken. It became a situation where a journalist would ring me to seek advice along similar lines. And so that was principally what I was doing.

Gillard said her supporters spoke to the media too.

Certainly I had to try and answer all of this, so did I ask some of my good colleagues to speak to journalists and say, ‘You know how you've been told that Julia's only got support from x number of people and if a ballot was held tomorrow Kevin would triumph, you do know all that's nonsense don't you?'

Kevin Rudd admitted he briefed the media about the government's deteriorating circumstances, but only about a specific occasion already in the public domain.

A group of them came round, I think just before the events of February 2012, and had an expansive off-the-record discussion
with me about how the government was going, at their request. I was full and frank with them about how I thought we were going, as I was full and frank with them that I would be doing nothing about it.

 

A few months after the Labor conference, the simmering tensions in the party exploded. Senator Stephen Conroy described how it began with a newspaper article.

There was a front-page Sunday attack on Julia with Darren Cheeseman, the most marginal candidate. It became clear that Kevin was planning on mounting his challenge very shortly. So a decision was taken that enough was enough.

Someone had been keeping an ace up their sleeve for just this moment. A video of an angry, swearing Rudd was released on YouTube, the outtakes of a message Rudd delivered in Mandarin when he was Prime Minister. Rudd regarded McTernan as the culprit. On camera, McTernan denied it with a pantomime leer.

I was completely surprised. I thought, ‘Somebody really doesn't like Kevin'.

Before departing for Washington, Rudd gave an interview very late to Sky News. Contained in the interview were Rudd's first concessions that his management style as Prime Minister was flawed. It sounded to many like a job application.

SF: Were you letting your Caucus colleagues know that you were a different person for whom they could vote in a potential leadership contest?

KR: Absolutely not, because if you look at when the interview is given, it is in direct response to a decision by Julia's office
to release this doctored video in order to dominate the news the next day and have me in the witness box, which it seems I still am.

Rudd's willingness to concede mistakes had shrunk; he made the smallest of concessions about consulting more on the mining tax and the ETS.

KR: What both of those things cause me to reflect on is the need with those decisions to have a more tempering environment by the advice of colleagues. But government is an imperfect business and there are a whole series of facts surrounding those two decisions.

SF: You said yourself in the interview that you did before you left for Washington that you would be a mug if you didn't change. What is it about yourself that you thought needed to change?

KR: I've just answered that. To be consultative with your senior colleagues more intensively on these acute decisions of the government.

Two days later in a radio interview, Simon Crean said Kevin Rudd was not a team player and challenged him to put up or shut up. The impetus for the interview came from Gillard.

SF: Did you encourage Simon Crean to do that?

JG: My office spoke to Simon about doing an interview and saying some things about Kevin, absolutely.

Chris Bowen was part of the discussions with Rudd.

Kevin had reached the view that it was likely that the Prime Minister would dismiss him from the Cabinet. There was clear
backgrounding from Cabinet colleagues, walking around the Press Gallery saying, ‘The Prime Minister will dismiss Kevin', and he didn't want that to happen.

In Washington, Rudd resigned as Foreign Minister then flew home to Brisbane. Bowen said Gillard outmanoeuvred him.

It took him eighteen hours to get home, and in that time Julia Gillard was very legitimately ringing around wining votes back and so Kevin was at a disadvantage.

Julia Gillard called a spill and Rudd nominated for the leadership.

At that point my conclusion was, having discussed it with my colleagues in the Caucus, that the honourable thing to do was then to put myself forward as a candidate. To have failed to have done so would've resulted in accusations of cowardice and lack of principle.

McTernan was enthusiastic about the strategy.

He was forced into a spill and from that moment onwards, Julia had the advantage. She was dictating the timetable and the terms.

Party figures lined up to excoriate Rudd. Gillard said it was time to explain the 2010 challenge to the public.

It was time for a bit of truth telling and I was prepared to go to areas that in the past I'd kept away from the public square and public stage.

Senior ministers including Tony Burke, Nicola Roxon and Stephen Conroy gave frank interviews criticising the former Prime Minister, describing him as contemptuous and chaotic. Wayne Swan delivered a stinging rebuke to his former friend via a press release.

For too long, Kevin Rudd has been putting his own self-interest ahead of the interests of the broader labour movement and the country as a whole, and that needs to stop … He was the party's biggest beneficiary, then its biggest critic; but never a loyal or selfless example of its values and objectives.

Gillard's strategy was to convince the media and the public that a Rudd return was impossible.

SF: Were you happy with the bloodbath that followed?

JG: I was happy to be able to tell the truth about what had gone on. I'd been silent effectively for so long and so much rubbish had been spoken in the meantime.

The real consequence was to make public the divisions and bitterness inside the party. Anthony Albanese wondered how they could recover any credibility with the electorate. He was distraught about the behaviour. Albanese was a senior member of Gillard's government but he felt compelled to speak out. Ahead of the ballot he gave an emotional press conference, announcing he would be voting for Rudd, despite knowing Rudd would lose.

I was traumatised by what was going on in the Labor Party. You had senior people going out with no handbrake on just smashing Kevin Rudd's reputation but what was worse was they were trashing Labor's reputation at the same time, and speaking about a government which I didn't recognise that I'd served in.