I think it had a feeling of uprising about it.
Julia Gillard
WEDNESDAY 23 June 2010. Page 1 of The Sydney Morning Herald.
When Kevin Rudd talked confidently on Monday about the strength of Labor support for his leadership it was not based solely on bravado—he has been discreetly checking that his party is still behind him.
The Herald has learnt from a number of MPs that the Prime Minister’s most trusted lieutenant, his chief of staff, Alister Jordan, has been talking privately to almost half the caucus to gauge whether Mr Rudd has the support of his party …
Mr Jordan is understood to have sounded out the bulk of cabinet ministers and some members of the outer ministry.
The Herald understands he has also tested sentiment with up to three dozen backbenchers, chiefly factional operatives from the Right and Left, and some of the more seasoned rank and filers.
Early that morning in Julia Gillard’s office at Parliament House, staffer Gerry Kitchener saw her reaction to the story by Peter Hartcher and Phillip Coorey.
She was in her private bathroom and came out of there and just started going on about the article that was in the paper. She had a spray about it and was really genuinely pissed off about it.
Gillard had used the word ‘crystallise’ before to describe how she felt about the article.
That article seemed to crystallise for me the voice in the back of my head that was saying the bonds of trust are frayed here.
Leader of the House Anthony Albanese saw the article too.
I didn’t think that much of it. I thought it was a bit strange, frankly, that it had been written that the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff was ringing Caucus members about anything. I saw that as much ado about nothing.
The story prompted New South Wales Labor secretary Sam Dastyari to contact Mark Arbib.
I text Mark. I go, ‘Is there anything in this?’ And he calls me straight up and he goes, ‘Mate, it’s bad’. And I go, ‘Okay, how bad?’ He goes, ‘Bad, bad, and I go, ‘What does that mean?’ And he goes, ‘Mate, I think I’ll be in a better position to tell you what it means later today. Let me give you a call in a few hours’.
Leadership challenges require a trigger: sometimes they’re spontaneous, sometimes they’re planned. The Herald story has been widely regarded as the ‘trigger’ for the 2010 challenge against Kevin Rudd—though to describe it that way is part of a black-and-white approach to explaining the complicated events that followed.
The idea that the Herald piece was a legitimate reason for a challenge was met with blunt scepticism by some, including Anthony Albanese.
You don’t make a decision to challenge for the leadership of the Labor Party against a first-term sitting Prime Minister because an article suggests that the chief of staff is supporting his boss to remain as Prime Minister.
Gillard said she asked for a meeting with party elder John Faulkner.
JG: I’m not someone who dissolves into tears very often, [but I] surprised myself by ending up crying as John Faulkner sort of comforted me.
SF: How were you feeling?
JG: I was feeling incredibly betrayed. I mean I could’ve at any point immersed myself right in the middle of destabilising Kevin. I could’ve said yes to all these people when they came pounding into my office to talk about leadership: let’s have a long conversation about leadership and let’s leak it to the media. Could’ve done that at any time. I did the complete reverse of that to keep supporting Kevin, and you know despite all of that, these huge efforts to support him, I was being viewed with suspicion.
Gerry Kitchener didn’t make much of it.
Gerry Kitchener (GK): I didn’t disagree with her. [It] wasn’t a personal attack on me so it was easier for me to be ambivalent about it, but I thought that it was probably not all that surprising if it was true that the PM’s chief of staff was speaking to people.
SF: Who leaked it do you think?
GK: I don’t know who leaked it, obviously, but I’d be surprised if it was Rudd’s office who leaked it.
SF: What about your office?
GK: I don’t know whether anyone in our office would’ve leaked it. I would’ve thought that if someone who was supportive of Julia leaked it, it would be someone in the New South Wales Right.
Kevin Rudd’s chief of staff, Alister Jordan, had developed a close relationship with Julia Gillard. They used to walk together on Sundays when Parliament was sitting. Alister Jordan would not give an interview for the series: he was one of the few whose claim to want to move on was convincing. It was Gillard who told me that Jordan went to her office to tell her the story in the Herald was untrue.
JG: Alister obviously came in to see me and try and reassure me. My memory of that was a very awkward conversation, not one where I ended up feeling particularly reassured.
SF: But you had a good relationship with Alister?
JG: Very.
SF: And he was telling you it was untrue?
JG: Yes, and look I appreciate that. I also appreciated that Alister’s loyalty to Kevin knew no bounds.
SF: So you’re suggesting he was lying to you?
JG: Look, I’m suggesting he was trying to deal with a political problem.
Kevin Rudd also took the few steps over to Gillard’s office.
JG: His opening words coming in the door were, ‘You’re obviously very concerned about The Sydney Morning Herald article. It’s not true’.
SF: And when he said it wasn’t true, you ignored him?
JG: Well, I continued to be concerned not only about the contents of the article but this broader issue of where we were in terms of being able to function together. And whilst there were the reassuring words, there was nothing in his demeanour that I found particularly reassuring.
Rudd and Gillard agreed to continue their conversation later. There was no sign that Rudd perceived the danger he was in.
The Herald story said that Jordan had sounded out ‘the bulk of cabinet ministers and some members of the outer ministry’. It also claimed he’d spoken to ‘up to’ thirty-six backbenchers. The chief of staff is the prime minister’s eyes and ears in the Caucus. It is part of their job to be in regular contact with MPs, to test the mood and find out if there are any problems likely to affect the Prime Minister’s support. Swan’s deputy chief of staff, Jim Chalmers, didn’t think there was anything out of the ordinary about the claims.
In the days leading up to the leadership challenge, the Prime Minister’s office was making inquiries around the building to make sure that people were, you know, okay and solid, or to hear what their views were, to give people the opportunity to voice any concerns. That was entirely understandable and not in any way surprising.
But The Sydney Morning Herald article was suggesting more-pointed conversations that went further than normal staff work.
We checked the claims reported in the story, for the series and for this book. We contacted Rudd’s Cabinet, members of the outer ministry and a large number of backbenchers. Only two out of seventy-two Caucus members we contacted described having a conversation with Jordan in the weeks before the challenge in which he might have been testing support for Rudd. Fifteen of the eighteen-member Cabinet said they had not been sounded out—three declined to answer: Penny Wong, Stephen Smith and Joe Ludwig.
On the day of the challenge, John Faulkner was the person Gillard and Rudd sought out for advice. We asked Faulkner about the article.
I can’t help you. He [Jordan] didn’t canvas me about such matters and I am completely unaware of anybody else being canvassed.
I put our findings to Gillard, who had forgotten what the article claimed.
SF: There is nobody amongst your Cabinet colleagues who has a recollection as described in the article.
JG: Well I certainly wouldn’t have expected any of those calls to be made to Cabinet colleagues, by definition.
SF: Sorry, the article said that it was Cabinet colleagues as well.
JG: My assumption would be that someone ringing around would be focusing on the backbench. I can’t give you numbers of people contacted, obviously. You’ve done your own research. But it speaks to this question and climate of suspicion and that’s the important thing.
…
SF: But it matters whether or not it was true doesn’t it?
JG: Let me just, I just want to order my thoughts about this. It wasn’t the only thing. The very fact that someone was feeding to The Sydney Morning Herald issues about my loyalty, that had to be concerning, and that wouldn’t be written about unless someone had raised it with them.
That morning, Gillard stayed in her office and had a round of discussions with factional operatives and confidants. I asked her a number of times about the key players that day. She required prompting on the role of Bill Shorten.
SF: How important was Bill Shorten’s role?
JG: Look I think Bill played a role. He didn’t play the role. The person who played the role was me. A number of people played a role and Bill was one of them. I think Mark Arbib and a number of others probably played a bigger role.
It suits the contemporary Labor narrative to say the challenge was driven by Mark Arbib. Unlike Shorten, Arbib is out of politics.
JG: Of course I was keen to hear the political intelligence and analysis of people like Mark Arbib and Kim Carr, particularly Mark, whose savvy I admired.
…
SF: And Shorten, would you include him in that group?
JG: Yes, Bill I think is a very sophisticated political person. Good policy brain, good political brain.
SF: And he thought it was crucial, you had to do it?
JG: Yes, he did.
Victorian Senator David Feeney and Mark Arbib went to see Gillard together. Gerry Kitchener noted the significance.
It was almost a sign that the Right of the Labor Party had solidified around backing Julia, because my understanding is that for a lengthy period, the Victorian Right and the New South Wales Right had been meeting and caucusing separately.
Gillard said at that point she had not yet made up her mind about challenging Rudd.
My recollection is when they first came to see me I was still thinking and I said I would do some more thinking and I would get back to them later on.
Tony Burke said that Gillard sent a message asking him to come and see her.
Julia had The Sydney Morning Herald in front of her, asked whether I’d read the article. She said that having read it after all the loyalty that she had been showing in trying to fix the government, she felt she only had two choices, either to stand down as Deputy Prime Minister and go to the backbench, or to challenge.
In Gillard’s version, the suggestion came from Burke.
Tony said to me that his view was I had two choices: I should either run for the leadership or I would need to take myself to the backbench.
Burke offered to test Gillard’s support in the Caucus.
I’d said to Julia, at the end of that conversation, ‘Do you want me to start making some phone calls, discreetly’ and she said, ‘Yes’.
I asked Gillard why she chose Tony Burke for the task.
JG: I did that because we had a relationship of trust.
SF: Does that mean that you trusted Tony Burke more than David Feeney, Arbib and Shorten?
JG: I was very close to Mark. Obviously I’ve known Bill and David Feeney a lifetime. But in terms of the people that I wanted to talk to in that moment, I wanted to talk to Tony Burke.
Gillard chose not to call any of her senior Cabinet colleagues.
JG: I did talk to a number of colleagues, of course, during those very compressed hours. It was not possible to talk to everyone.
SF: But you could’ve spoken to the Cabinet and you chose not to. Why was that?
…
JG: Look, I made a selection about who I’d talk to, yes.
The most obvious omission was Wayne Swan. Despite the strong relationship they had formed in government, she did not ask him for his advice.
JG: I’m not sure that there’s a good answer to that actually. I didn’t speak to Wayne and obviously with the benefit of hindsight, I most certainly should have.
SF: Were you concerned that Wayne Swan was going to say don’t do it?
JG: No, no, that’s not the explanation.
On the other side of Parliament House, in the Senate chamber, the day began as usual with prayers. South Australian Senator Don Farrell listened to the Lord’s Prayer before returning to his office.
Deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen.
Farrell said when he was back in his office, David Feeney burst through his door.
He shuts the door and says, ‘Look, we’ve got to replace Kevin. We’re going to lose the election, and we need to support Julia Gillard … Let’s go and chat to Mark Arbib about it’. Mark was very strongly of the view that Kevin was unelectable as Prime Minister at the next election, and that without a change we were going to lose government.
Brendan O’Connor also went to see her.
I knew that this was not something that she had seriously engaged in because, without trying to have tickets on myself, I would’ve been engaged earlier if she had been seriously considering challenging Kevin. Things clearly were changing as a result of the article. It might’ve been a combination of other matters, but certainly that seemed to be the trigger at least for that morning, for her to start to think seriously about challenging Kevin.
He recalled one piece of advice that he gave Gillard that morning.
I said to her she would most likely have to get the Caucus back together because there is no way that a sitting Labor prime minister who’s returned us from opposition, within a day could lose the confidence of the Caucus. Well, I was entirely wrong. By midnight she had 80 per cent of the support.
At Gillard’s request, Gerry Kitchener went to see Victorian Senator Kim Carr.
GK: She asked me to speak to a couple of her supporters so I went and spoke to Kim Carr up in his office and then he, out of his own volition, organised a meeting after Question Time, which Julia agreed to attend.
SF: How did Kim Carr respond when you went to see him?
GK: He was, I wouldn’t say shocked but a trifle surprised.
The business of government continued in the Prime Minister’s office, but Rudd’s press secretary, Lachlan Harris, noticed that communications with the Deputy PM and the Treasurer’s offices had ceased.
That’s a very bad sign. You know the distance between the offices is 50 metres. You can look into each other’s windows. If you can’t raise each other, that’s a conscious act of [a] kind of separation, and that’s when we knew something was really, really wrong.
According to Mark Bishop, meetings were going on through the morning and into the afternoon. Numbers were being counted.
Mark Bishop (MB): I was always surprised that there were so many people hovering around Don’s [Farrell] office, that other people didn’t pick up on the significance. And then around about Question Time, I came to the view, this is done.
…
SF: Why did you come to the conclusion then?
MB: Because a very large group of people had been involved in a very delicate operation and no-one had leaked. And secondly, I just did a count of the numbers and came to the view that there was a majority to change the leadership.
Gillard had asked Tony Burke to make the calls to gauge her support.
As people started to be called—and it was Mark [Arbib] and others who were making the calls, not me—we kept working on the basis that you only had to tell one person who didn’t think it was a good idea, Kevin would know, and it might be all off. So I put my office into lockdown.
The report Gillard received from Burke was unequivocal.
Tony Burke certainly took soundings and his view back to me was that I would be very solidly supported if I put myself forward for leader.
Burke expected news of the phone calls to break.
We got to Question Time and it hadn’t broken, and then we got out of Question Time and I said to Mark [Arbib], ‘It still hasn’t broken; are you not calling people?’ He said, ‘No, the calls are happening. We’re not going crazy’. But it was still holding, so everyone who they had spoken to was onboard.
Question Time starts at 2 p.m. There’s a brief lull in the rhythm of the parliamentary day as MPs and Senators go to their respective chambers for an hour of political theatrics.
Sam Dastyari answered a phone call just before Question Time on 23 June.
I get a call from Mark [Arbib]. And he goes, ‘Mate, I think they’re going to move on him’, and I was just kind of floored. He goes, ‘Mate, it’s going to have to happen. The Victorians are onboard. You know we can’t lose an election. We can’t throw things out. We can’t allow this to happen’.
Not long into Question Time, Dastyari said he took another call, this time from New South Wales Senator Ursula Stephens.
She goes to me, ‘Mark just came up to me in Question Time and said, “We’re going to have to do something about Kevin.” Dasher, are we moving on Kevin?’ And I said, ‘Ursula, I don’t know’. And she goes, ‘I’m not in on this. You realise that you’re talking about removing an elected, sitting Prime Minister of Australia. You realise what the consequences are, Sam? I’ve seen this before. When they start talking about it, they start talking themselves into it. This is going to end badly’.
Arbib was making the case that the upcoming election was lost with Rudd as leader, yet the Newspoll published two days earlier had shown the government leading the Coalition on the two-party-preferred measure. When Malcolm Turnbull challenged sitting Prime Minister Tony Abbott in September 2015, the Coalition had been behind Labor for thirty consecutive polls.
Rudd media adviser Sean Kelly went up to the Press Gallery. It appeared to be business as usual.
After Question Time I walked through the Press Gallery. Halfway through I got a call from Lachlan Harris. Lachlan said, ‘Just go back to the senior journalists and see if any of them are talking about leadership’. So I did. Not a word. None of them had any idea. Everything was completely dead. So I went back down.
Question Time was the calm before the storm.
Julia Gillard’s discussions with the factional leaders continued. Greg Combet described them as the ‘urgers’, those who were whispering in her ear.
She would have had a group of people saying to her, like the urgers, ‘Yeah yeah yeah, you know, you’re the one, you’re the one, you’re the one, you know he’s finished, he’s finished, it’s you, it’s you’. And that’s how they talk, some of them. So she’d have had that going on. She’s ambitious, and probably got a sizeable ego too, like the rest of us. An opportunity’s presenting itself. Plus all the frustrations that are there. And you know maybe she might have handled it differently if she’d been a bit more experienced.
Later that afternoon, Gerry Kitchener accompanied Gillard to a meeting in Kim Carr’s office.
Kim had been delayed in Question Time, and so he came afterwards and then Bill Shorten arrived and David Feeney. And at that point Mark Arbib got up and was looking down the quadrangle down towards the Prime Minister’s office and he became quite agitated that the Prime Minister’s office could actually see the meeting. He madly started pulling the curtains across in the office.
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.
I said … ‘If John Faulkner, a person who we both know and respect, judges by the time the election is due that based on the poll research of the party and his political judgement, that I cannot win, I will at that point step down from the leadership, and would do so willingly. We aren’t there at this point; we’re just not there at this point’. Then she began discussing the detail of how that might work and when such a judgement could be made by Faulkner, who’s sitting there looking a bit concerned at this stage that he’s going to be the person charged with the wisdom of Solomon! But it struck me as the most creative solution to a crisis which she and others had brought on.
While Gillard was in the meeting and out of reach, Gerry Kitchener said he was fielding calls from Bill Shorten and Kim Carr.
I was in the office and I took maybe four phone calls from Bill Shorten, I took maybe three phone calls from Kim Carr, wanting to know whether she had made a decision to challenge. They both expressed concern that she was going to be beaten up in Rudd’s office and that she needed to be got out of there as quickly as possible.
One of the most memorable scenes of the night was filmed by news crews in a Vietnamese restaurant in the Canberra suburb of Kingston, where Shorten was having dinner with Mark Bishop, Don Farrell and others. Shorten left the restaurant to make or take calls on his Blackberry, pacing the pavement as he did so. Shorten would repeatedly claim that the calls were to his child’s school-teacher, but Gerry Kitchener said they were also about Gillard and that, as time passed, Shorten became increasingly anxious.
Progressively as the evening went on, his phone calls became more concerned about what the result may be, and I think the last phone call he said to me, ‘Gerry, we’re all fucked if she doesn’t do this’. He was obviously very concerned now that it was out and that he was up to his neck in it.
We gave Bill Shorten many opportunities to tell his story of the night and the events leading up to it, opportunities to correct the picture drawn by others. He declined.
Meanwhile, a number of Cabinet ministers had gathered in Wayne Swan’s office, among them Anthony Albanese, who seemed to be operating as the party’s conscience that night. He was one of the very few who predicted the disastrous consequences.
I had a discussion [with] the old Beazley group: Wayne Swan, Stephen Smith, Jenny Macklin, Stephen Conroy and Chris Bowen, who wasn’t part of that group but came in as well. And I put the view strongly there that the senior Cabinet people needed to step up, that this to me seemed to be driven from outside the experienced hands. The people who were advocating this happening seemed to have in common that they were in their first term of Parliament and so weren’t experienced with opposition or how hard it was to get there [into power].
According to Albanese, Gillard’s senior colleagues were not enthusiastic about the challenge.
They were concerned because if it had reached a point whereby there was a challenge, if Julia lost, then what happens to her? … I remember very vividly leaving the room and saying, ‘If this occurs, we will kill two Labor Prime Ministers’ … I don’t question the motives of people who had a different perspective from where I came down, which was that this was the original sin which once committed would be a stain on the Labor Party which couldn’t be removed by one week or [a] couple of months to the election campaign.
Rudd recalled that, back in the meeting, Gillard accepted the solution that gave him a reprieve.
I reached out my hand and she shook it. I said, ‘So we have a deal’. After we’d shaken hands, the whole temperature in the room came down, not just in my mind, in Faulkner’s mind. And with her there was a degree of calm, a resolution in the room. And this was not my imagination. Hands had been shaken on the basis of an explicit proposition. John Faulkner is the witness to that.
Gillard acknowledged they talked about giving Rudd more time, but rejected his claim that she agreed. It’s a confused position. The transactional, efficient Julia Gillard seemed to have vanished for a while in Rudd’s office that night.
JG: My recollection is that there was discussion of Kevin having more time and seeing if he could fix it. I don’t recall the bit about John Faulkner being the sort of person who did the arbitration about whether or not that was possible. I do recall a discussion about Kevin having more time and I participated in that discussion and gave Kevin some false hope, I absolutely concede that, when I shouldn’t have. I mean out of everything that’s ever been said about that night, it sounds ironic for me to say it now, but I should have been more straightforward and more clinical and less discursive. Being discursive did give Kevin false hope and that’s down to me. That’s my fault.
SF: You say false hope. Did you agree with Kevin Rudd that he could retain the prime ministership, stay Prime Minister?
JG: I don’t, no, I did not agree. I can understand why Kevin felt that there was a potential wedge of sun on the horizon.
Rudd responded to Gillard’s odd analogy.
KR: An agreement is an agreement. Look, I’m a very specific person. I mean I’m the guy who [was] regularly attacked for using the term ‘programmatic specificity’, you know? I’m a very concrete person when it comes to what’s the problem, how do we fix it, what’s the resolution? Here is my proposition, do you agree with it? Yes. Shake hands.
SF: So ‘potential wedge of sun’ doesn’t cover it?
KR: She agreed. She not only agreed, but she had interrogated the detail of the formula on the way through. That’s not a wedge of hope, that’s not a impression. What Julia is doing, having been the principal player in this leadership coup, and then discovering after the event that she has blood all over her hands and the Australian public don’t like this, she’s again in the business of reinventing the historical record.
I asked Gillard, given how much was at stake, how it could be so unclear.
Well, we talked for a long time, a very long time, and we talked in a situation where I felt that Kevin was in denial and just not listening to the messages I was trying to give him … I do believe it’s possible that Kevin thought it’s all going to be okay and that’s my fault.
This was the first Australian leadership challenge with live running commentary, on Sky News, which broadcast the story through the night. Albanese interrupted the meeting in Rudd’s office.
This meeting went on for too long. I entered the room and said to them in fairly impolite terms, ‘What are you doing? The government is melting down’ … There was a whole of lot of misinformation going around. And I just said to them, ‘This meeting cannot go on. You’ve got to make a decision and it can’t continue’, and left them.
Gillard said Albanese’s message shattered the stillness of the room.
When Albo came in, that was the first sense that there was that contrast between this quiet office, two people talking, Faulkner sitting there and the chaos of outside: 24-hour TV camera people pounding everywhere, people on mobile phones getting dragged back from restaurants and all the rest of it. The contrast couldn’t have been starker.
Her chief of staff, Amanda Lampe, insisted on going into the meeting to pass a note to Gillard.
I can’t remember the exact words but it was along the lines of, basically, that it was now on TV. Her meeting had been leaked to the media and we needed to speak to her. She needed to be aware of it.
Kitchener was with Lampe when she wrote that note. He recalled that the message was short and sharp.
I think something along the lines of, ‘You’ve got the numbers. Get out of the meeting’.
The meeting broke up temporarily, Gillard leaving Rudd’s office with Lampe to make a phone call. Rudd went to the toilet.
I have a call of nature, because I’d been sitting there for a long time! So I’m off to the loo, which is out the back of the Prime Minister’s office, and there I’ve got Alister and Faulkner and Albo in deep conversation. I said, ‘We have a conclusion, we have a solution, we have an agreement, this is it. Please get the message now out to the Caucus so we can start to calm this show down and get back to the business of government’.
Albanese’s recollection was clear.
Kevin told me with John Faulkner that it had been resolved and that there wouldn’t be a challenge. I expressed some relief at that and immediately went around to my office to tell people that that was the case. I also went into Wayne Swan’s office and said that that was the case.
Gillard stepped into a smaller office with Lampe, where Gillard made a single phone call.
I called Mark Arbib and I think Stephen Conroy was with him, and I indicated to them I was still talking to Kevin and I was due to go back in the room, and I think they were amazed that the conversation was going on and on.
Stephen Conroy talked about the call between Gillard and Arbib with as few words as possible, clearly reluctant to be connected to the events of the night.
Stephen Conroy (SC): She called Mark and Mark said that from all the information he had, that the numbers were overwhelmingly supporting her, and from everything that Mark had said to me in his office, I agreed.
SF: And you told her that?
SC: I agreed with Mark’s assessment.
Amanda Lampe recalled the moment.
I think she sort of paused for a moment and thought about it and recognised that really, the challenge was occurring.
Gillard said the die was cast.
I was looking at the TV and Amanda’s view and their view was all the same and really, even if I hadn’t had those conversations, I just looked at the TV, it would have been enough. It was very clear that Labor was on the move … I went in and crystallised that, yes, I was asking for a leadership ballot. And the irony of it all is for someone who’s been accused of so much political brutality, that I actually wasn’t more frank, more quick and more potentially brutal in the moment.
There are plenty of other ironies. One of the questions for the series was whether Gillard was pushed prematurely into a contest she wasn’t quite ready for. Gillard has sought to project an image of confidence and control around the events of 23 June 2010. But how much choice did she have after Mark Arbib told her she had enough votes to beat Rudd in a ballot?
SF: Actually by that stage, if you had called it off you would have been in a lot of trouble with your colleagues.
JG: Oh I don’t think it would have been possible, yeah.
SF: Why not? You still had choices.
JG: Oh no, I mean you always have choices, but I don’t think there was any way of stuffing the genie back into the bottle.
The least palatable irony is that Australia’s first female Prime Minister wasn’t voted in by the people but seized power in a manoeuvre organised by the factional men of the Australian Labor Party.
Kevin Rudd had his own way of saying that, by that point, there was no going back: borrowing, appropriately enough, from Julius Caesar.
Once the dogs of war are unleashed, it’s very difficult to bring them back under control.
Rudd said Gillard was different when she came back into his office.
Well, from a general sense of warmth and relief and conclusion about how we were going to diffuse this crisis, suddenly she walked in ice cold, ice cold, with absolute determination in her eyes … What she said coming back was, ‘Following consultations, I am asking you for a ballot for the leadership of the Australian Labor Party’.
Gillard’s recollection was that their handshake came after she’d asked for the ballot.
He shook my hand at that point and it stays in my mind because I do remember thinking, even in that moment, that that was a very decent thing to do under considerable pressure.
After leaving Rudd’s office, Julia Gillard went to see Wayne Swan, confident about the outcome of a ballot. She described their conversation in functional terms, as if the business of government would continue seamlessly.
I needed to go and see Wayne Swan, so I managed to slip down the corridor to his office and found him with Jenny Macklin and Stephen Smith and a few other people, effectively having watched the night on the TV, and asked him to be my deputy leader and as a result Deputy Prime Minister … He agreed to that and we talked briefly about events the next day and oh, there was a G20 coming up so he raised that with me.
Jenny Macklin remembers Gillard testing the line she would use the next day.
Julia came in and there was a discussion about how the change should be described. She raised the issue of ‘a government that’d lost its way’, and I indicated that I didn’t think that was a good idea because there were many things that we’d done that we should be very proud of, and so I do think that was a real mistake.
Swan said he was a reluctant supporter of a leadership change, but Rudd had not made it easy for him to stick with the status quo.
I didn’t want a change but I think it had gone beyond that, and the reason it had gone beyond that was so much of what he’d been doing was indefensible.
Rudd’s repeated charge against Swan, that he had betrayed him, was made with great bitterness. But Cabinet colleague Martin Ferguson exonerated Swan from any involvement, describing a situation in which the Treasurer had little influence over the organisers of the change.
I think the dynamics of the federal Parliament had changed. When you become a minister, I think Wayne realised, you just step away from the hands-on and factional operations. You give it to the new generation. It was basically driven by the young turks in the Right, the faceless men. They had their own momentum and they weren’t going to pull back. They weren’t worried about the party. They had scores to settle.
Sean Kelly recalled the reaction of Rudd’s staff to the news.
Corri McKenzie, who was very close to Kevin, was standing outside Kevin’s office, tears streaming down her face. A few minutes after that Kevin went and gave the press conference.
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.