The Killing Season Uncut (33 page)

There was a morbid inevitability about her defeat, I suspect by a very big margin, and that's why I reached the position that the kindest way of handling her was to persuade her to give it away.

Julia Gillard rejected the idea out of hand.

I wanted to hold back the last leadership change because I think it was an error for Labor to say if you destabilise and drag our political party down, you will be rewarded with the leadership. I thought that was hugely wrong, wrong for the values of Labor.

Jenny Macklin wasn't prepared to put loyalty to the party ahead of her own personal sense of right and wrong.

I understood things were pretty tough, but equally, by that stage, I had taken the very clear view that I could not go back to Kevin Rudd, that his behaviour during the election campaign and since, the way in which he destabilised Julia, was unforgivable.

In those bleak last days, friendships and loyalties were tested and broken. Julia Gillard and Finance Minister Penny Wong had a hard conversation about what should happen.

Penny came to see me to suggest that it would be easier for me if I didn't contest against Kevin, to which I did retort, ‘No, you mean easier for you'. I was not going to leave Kevin assuming the Labor leadership uncontested.

According to Brendan O'Connor, Wong's defection was a significant moment.

That probably was the point where we lost the majority, when Penny supported Kevin.

There was one person whose support Rudd insisted on before he would challenge.

KR: Remember my criterion, which is show me there is an overwhelming majority of the Caucus wanting change, and the key part of that overwhelming majority lay [with] Mr Shorten and his supporters, who had taken the meat axe to my back in June of 2010. Bill Shorten in that sense was an essential demonstration of whether in fact there was a groundswell mounting to change the leadership.

SF: Because he'd played such a pivotal role in removing you in 2010?

KR: That in part, but also because there was a whole lot of people who would only vote in support of a change if that's the way Bill himself was going to go.

…

SF: A number of other people have said he didn't actually have the capacity to move many votes.

KR: People's opinions differ on that question. But if you were to walk in three months before an election with the government split on factional lines with Bill Shorten, the Australian
Workers' Union pitted again you, then that's just terminal land, and that's why I was insistent that we needed a unity ticket.

Bruce Hawker explained why Rudd wanted Shorten in his corner.

He was a strong faction leader inside the party of course, but also somebody who enjoyed some respect as a serious player inside the Labor Party. But more than anything else, in terms of the immediate challenge, which was to get Kevin into the leadership, it said to the Gillard people, ‘Look, that game's up. The Victorian Right's now going to come in behind the New South Wales Right and the Left and support Rudd'.

In opposition, both Rudd and Gillard decried the influence of the factional chiefs: Rudd called them thugs, and Gillard's condemnation of factionalism was a powerful statement of her political beliefs. But each depended on factional powerbrokers to win the leadership. When Mark Arbib was organising against Beazley for Rudd, it was a behind-the-scenes operation. The nature of Gillard's challenge in 2010 left the organisers exposed, giving credence to the claim she was indebted to the ‘faceless men'. It haunted her throughout her prime ministership.

Patrick Gorman described how Rudd and Shorten came together in 2013.

In June, a discussion starts between Kevin, Richard Marles and Bill Shorten that there was more that probably united them in terms of views on the government then divided them.

Gorman said that on the night of the Press Gallery's Midwinter Ball in Parliament House, Kevin Rudd had a meeting with Bill Shorten.

After a couple of hours of sitting around with journalists, with pollies, Kevin makes an early exit from the Midwinter Ball and
heads up to Richard Marles' office where Bill Shorten is, and they continue discussions that have happened a few days earlier.

Rudd recalled the scene.

KR: I caught up with Bill in our respective dinner jackets, which look faintly absurd … My question and position to him was, ‘Bill, I ain't moving unless all your folks are onboard, for the simple reason that I'm not about to inherit a divided shop, thank you very much!' I mean this is starting to become a very, very narrow timeline. The conclusion I drew from that conversation was that Bill understood.

SF: Did you ever ask Bill Shorten to account for his actions in 2010?

KR: I said to Bill, ‘And so do you think that was a smart idea?' Bill was pretty open about the fact that with twenty-twenty hindsight it was a really dumb idea.

SF: Did he say that to you?

KR: I can't remember the exact language, but I think there was a clear recognition that this had been a really dumb idea.

Rudd said they also discussed his demand for a change to the party's rules about leadership ballots, to ensure a challenge couldn't happen again without formal notice, as it had in 2010, and a majority of Caucus calling for the ballot.

Joel Fitzgibbon believed the Labor Caucus had no choice but to reinstall Rudd.

In the end, pragmatism cuts in. Pragmatism wins the day. And the Labor Party turned to the only person that they thought might save them.

On the morning of 26 June, Gillard had a phone hook-up with her closest advisers. Paul Howes was one of them.

PH: It was the call about whether she should call it or not. I remember her saying very clearly, ‘We have to end this for the sake of the party one way or another', and I liked that, but it was a sad call. At the end of that call I thought, ‘I better go down'. Because I was trying to avoid being seen there, but I thought if we're losing, I should be there.

SF: And why did you want to be there?

PH: Grief loves company.

Stephen Conroy said Gillard's demeanour on that day was dignified.

She continued to be extraordinarily focused given the challenge. She maintained a calm that she'd shown the whole time during her period of being Prime Minister. She demonstrated her class.

Gillard called a ballot for 7 p.m. At 6.30 p.m., Shorten made his announcement. Patrick Gorman watched the television in Rudd's office.

We saw him do that press conference. There was a moment that we knew that, yes, this was going to happen. Then very quickly, within minutes of that, we had the AFP in Kevin's office getting ready for his return from the Caucus room.

Rudd won the ballot, fifty-seven votes to forty-five.

If Labor were decimated as a political force at the election, rebuilding and returning to government would take a long time.
As Bob Carr explained, the decision to elect Rudd that night was an unsentimental one.

Under one leader it looked like our vote might sink to 30, 28, even 25 per cent. Under the other leader we'd lose, but the vote could be up around 36 per cent. I just thought of all those colleagues who were going to have their careers wiped out. And I thought of the conservatives who might get an extra term off the back of a really savage defeat. So we just had to make a cold-blooded decision, absolutely cold-blooded. Our chances of saving seats for being able to fight another day were greater under K Rudd than under J Gillard.

 

Julia Gillard delivered a gracious speech in defeat, acknowledging the invidious position some of her colleagues had been in, and urging unity. She found a way to address the sexism she had faced as Australia's first female Prime Minister.

It doesn't explain everything, it doesn't explain nothing, it explains some things, and it is for the nation to think in a sophisticated way about those shades of grey.

That evening, before she visited the Governor-General, one of Julia Gillard's last tasks was to finish a letter to Fairfax journalist Joanne McCarthy, whose work was an inspiration for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

After I returned from the Caucus meeting I amended that letter and finalised it … She had impressed me incredibly, campaigning for the royal commission and telling the truth about some of the dreadful things that happened to people in Newcastle … I remember it because it had an emotional significance for me.

 

Media adviser Sean Kelly described the scale of the battlefront Julia Gillard had faced for those three years.

It was a perfect storm for her. Perhaps she could have survived minority government, perhaps she could have survived Kevin Rudd undermining her, perhaps she could have survived the carbon tax, perhaps she could have survived Tony Abbott, but throw them all into the mix and there's not a chance.

Anthony Albanese offered a simple explanation for the complex relationship between Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and the Labor Party. It at least sounded like the truth.

What became clear was that the Parliament wasn't big enough, the Caucus wasn't big enough, for both Julia and Kevin.

Gillard's narrative remained intact.

JG: The 2010 decision that I made was about a government that no longer had the ability to function because the leader wasn't functioning, and no amount of looking backwards changes those facts. There have been plenty of people who have done incredibly gracious things when the toughest of times have happened to them. I'm thinking of people like Kim Beazley. So much of this history is explained by Kevin not making a positive choice in what was the darkest of times for him.

SF: I think he would say you made the wrong choice.

JG: And that is as it may be and he can go to his grave believing that, and he probably will.

Despite my repeated questions, Rudd would not acknowledge any vindication in victory.

KR: I don't think that's the right word.

SF: What's the right word?

KR: More of a sense of, for God's sake, how can we save this show? I mean, I'm not trying to be terribly saintly about it.

SF: It does sound like you're trying to be saintly about it.

KR: No, no, no. It's projection on your part. I'm just telling you, if you were to run through a whole series of words to describe how you would feel, the ones you've given me don't even begin to equate—they just don't. I march to the beat of a different drum.

 

We filmed two simple sequences for the end of the series: Gillard getting up from her seat and leaving the studio in Adelaide, and Rudd walking out of the blackness of the studio at Gore Hill into a wall of light outside.

We had known for weeks we couldn't give the final word to either of them. They couldn't see what was obvious to their colleagues. Bruce Hawker put it simply: they were better together.

Gillard and Rudd together were a very powerful combination. She was everything to the Labor Party that he wasn't and he was everything to the public that she wasn't. Together they worked perfectly. Separate[ly] they fell apart. Neither of them was able to ever regain the respect and power that they enjoyed when they were a team.

The last words of
The Killing Season
went to an outsider, former British MP Alan Milburn.

Everyone is culpable in different ways. The hard question that the Australian Labor Party has to ask itself is this: how is it
possible that you win an election in November 2007 on the scale that you do, with the goodwill that you have, with the permission that you're gifted by the public, and you manage to lose all that goodwill, to trash the permission and to find yourself out of office, within just six years? I've never seen anything quite like it in any country, anywhere, anytime, in any part of the world. And that is something that no-one can escape blame for.

 

Reviewing
The Killing Season
interviews for this book, I thought about the interplay of truth and memory more than I had before, freed from television's requirements of delivery and performance. We learnt early on that truth is elusive and that sometimes a close resemblance is the best we can hope for.

I thought too about the triangle of Rudd, Gillard and myself that existed during the making of the series, and the tensions it created as I moved between the two. Their approaches to the interviews were different: Rudd wanted to master the interviews; Gillard wanted to get through them. They gave a great deal, perhaps unaware when they started how the camera would get to know them and seek out their frailties.

Rudd is better at media: he understands instinctively the nature of the exchange. But there were more moments of unfiltered reflection by Gillard. I came to distinguish her ‘true' voice, not the one that tells the truth but the one closer to her candid self, more rueful and more human than the one she uses to reproach her colleagues and less fey than the one she uses when she wants to divert attention from the heart of a question. John McTernan said she had a brilliant political mind. She tried to disguise it as if she feared I would draw a straight line between political acumen and the machinations that brought on the challenge against Rudd. But politics is her nature and the camera could see through to it.

An interview with Kevin Rudd requires patience. His moments of clarity have to break through the almost comical folksiness. His relentless message about the faceless men and Julia Gillard's betrayal was more of a barrier to understanding than were Gillard's ambiguities. The way through, I found, was trust, not combat.

Chris Evans suggested there had been a lot of revision about Rudd, that he was brilliant but that his personality was fatal to him. Rudd is complex, as Macklin said. People seem to enjoy their dislike of him. A series full of contempt was not one I could ever have made.

In his final words Alan Milburn had summed up the great betrayal of the era, not of the individuals but of the public who had voted Labor into power in 2007. Albanese was one of the few who saw the party turn its back on the public on the night of 23 June 2010. Does Labor see it now?