You don’t normally get free air, and you certainly don’t get free air when you put an axe through a prime minister.
Alan Griffin
AS THE NARRATIVE in the first two episodes of The Killing Season flowed towards the leadership challenge, so events in the third episode flowed from it. Gillard’s narrative about the inevitability of the challenge was replaced by another equally fixed narrative from Rudd: he was not the cause of her downfall; her demise began on the night she challenged him for the leadership and every mistake she made after that compounded her problems, with the electorate and the party.
It was a tragedy, wound up tightly like a spring, and the players’ sense of it was evident in their language, richer than at any other moment in the story.
Leader of the House Anthony Albanese had already described the challenge as the original sin. Greg Combet identified its central flaw.
The way in which that change was enacted smacked of this self-serving factionalism in Labor. There was no democratic touchstone for her that legitimised her leadership. It was done in the dead of night and it was a calamity for the Labor Party and it infected our entire subsequent period in government. So you wouldn’t say it was well exercised, would you?
Images of night were everywhere. Opposition Leader Tony Abbott described the challenge at the time as a midnight knock on the door, a political move under cover of darkness. Chris Bowen put it simply.
For most challenges, it’s seen a long way coming. When Paul Keating became Prime Minister it was no surprise to the Australian people. The big problem [here] was that people went to bed with one Prime Minister and woke up with another and didn’t like that at all.
Union leader Paul Howes went on to become one of Gillard’s most rusted-on supporters. He thought the decision to remove Rudd was right but the manner of its execution was wrong.
The nation wakes up and thinks there’s been a coup d’état … The role that I and others played in elevating her to the leadership damaged her legitimacy in the eyes of the public … It’s a political tragedy that Julia was damned from her first day in office.
I put Howes’ view to Gillard. In her answer we heard the title of the third episode: the long shadow.
I understand that analysis. I’m just not sure what the alternative in the moment was, I don’t see it. Bt it is certainly true that as Prime Minister I always had this long shadow from the way in which I became Prime Minister, and active steps were taken basically every day of my prime ministership to have that shadow become darker and darker and not lighter and lighter.
So much of Gillard’s story is about defending her decision that I was fascinated by this glimpse into the possibility of regret. Every one of her colleagues agreed she was Rudd’s natural successor. What would her story have looked like if she had waited? Her response was hesitant.
I think about it a lot and I, well, just thinking about it is not quite right. I don’t think about it a lot now. I’ve thought about this but, you know, the reality would’ve been a 2010 election when either I couldn’t have continued as Deputy Prime Minister or throughout the whole of the campaign Kevin would’ve looked at me with suspicion. Would we have won? Open question. I don’t think anybody who puts this alternate reality says there’s a time when Kevin would cheerfully have said, ‘Oh Julia, you have the leadership now’. So there would still have been Kevin in the prime ministership not coping, the suspicions and the stresses and strains that came from that. That was not going to be an easy set of propositions or days either. So I think people are really wistfully hoping for something that was never going to be.
According to Immigration Minister Chris Evans, the forces unleashed by the challenge put the events that followed beyond their control.
It was like a Greek tragedy. We were watching this unfold, knowing that the major characters would be killed, knowing that this would all end terribly, and with no way out. It felt like you were observing the theatre and were unable to influence it.
Rudd’s future was still unresolved. He was already committed to staying in Parliament, a decision Gillard resented. Rudd’s confidant on the night of the challenge, Anthony Albanese, understood why.
Would it have been better for Julia if Kevin had not run in 2010? Yes. That is clearly the case, because his presence was a reminder of what had happened.
Rudd wanted Gillard to appoint him Foreign Minister straight away, or failing that, after the election. He claimed the offer was made then retracted in conversations with her in the days following the challenge.
KR: The tone from Julia was very harsh and she said she’d consulted with Wayne [Swan] and that she’d consulted with Stephen [Smith]. Neither of them supported this proposal and it was far better that I left the Parliament.
SF: What did you say?
KR: I said, ‘Julia, you’re the leader; you’re the Prime Minister. You can wish for a number of things, but whether I continue as the Member for Griffith is a matter for me, not for you’.
Gillard didn’t recall those conversations. She said the decision not to put Rudd in the Cabinet immediately was a kindness.
I thought he needed recovery time consistent with my view that there would be some relief. I thought it was best for him to have some clear time and ability to pack up from The Lodge and Kirribilli as slowly as he wanted to, to get the next stage of his life into gear.
Kevin Rudd left The Lodge without the one consolation prize he wanted.
What did Gillard and her backers think would happen next? Greg Combet said the lack of foresight was astonishing.
I later learnt that the assumption was that Kevin Rudd would just pull up stumps and leave Parliament. Well that just betrays a complete lack of understanding about Kevin Rudd. You know, it’s not surprising to me that he stayed and fought it out and conducted a campaign of retribution … that ultimately destroyed our government.
Rudd’s former chief of staff, David Epstein, who left the Prime Minister’s office in 2008, put it in brutal terms.
The people involved in deposing Kevin Rudd in 2010, those in the Parliament and round the periphery, didn’t realise the magnitude of what they’ve done. They didn’t realise his political resilience. He was like the Toltoy: you can knock him down and he’ll keep on bouncing back. I remember making this point to Paul Howes. I said he’s like a vampire: if you’re going to kill a vampire, you’ve got to stab him in the heart and you’ve got to make sure damn well that the silver stake has gone right through it.
(Epstein was mixing his vampires and werewolves, but you get the point.)
Kevin Rudd retreated to his home in Queensland. It was a difficult time, he said, describing it as ‘a long dark night of the soul’.
I’m human. These things are not just clinical, they’re also personal, and in my own case a very public thing as well, and I’m a very private person.
According to Treasury Secretary Ken Henry the government ran more smoothly when Gillard became Prime Minister. Gillard focused on making early progress in the areas that had damaged the Rudd government. In her first press conference, she committed to fixing the mining tax and delivering a surplus by 2013. Two weeks later she laid out a new policy on asylum seekers: offshore processing in East Timor. But the so-called East Timor solution would collapse in ignominious failure within weeks and the surplus failed to materialise.
The mining tax was a short-term win and a long-term failure, but in July 2010, a speedy resolution to the long and politically damaging dispute looked good for the new government. The change at the top acted as a circuit-breaker in the negotiations with the mining industry. Resources Minister Martin Ferguson said Gillard’s agenda was clear.
Get a deal, and Julia’s a deal maker. Get it off the agenda. That was her attitude. Just get it settled, get it off the agenda.
The concessions the government gave the mining industry made the new Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT) look like a quick political fix. In February 2013, when Treasurer Wayne Swan announced revenue of only $126 million, well below the estimates, it seemed like the critics had been vindicated.
On 15 July 2010, three weeks after the challenge, Julia Gillard made her first major public address as Prime Minister at the National Press Club in Canberra. Among the tables of journalists in the audience she noticed veteran political journalist Laurie Oakes.
I knew as soon as Laurie was there that there was something up.
Oakes stood up and asked a series of questions, a summary of Rudd’s claims about the night of the challenge, including his central charge that Gillard had reneged on the deal they had struck in his office. Gillard kept rigidly still on the podium, listening, the only movement a flicker in her eyes.
Behind that fixed posture, obviously incredibly angry because it was clearly a leak from Kevin to Laurie designed to destroy this event. It was so bad for me because it was directly on character questions about how I had become Prime Minister.
I put the question to Kevin Rudd.
SF: Did you give Laurie Oakes that account?
KR: It’s entirely possible. Julia Gillard marches in and launches a leadership coup and then suddenly there’s supposed to be some veil of total secrecy surrounding a conversation with me?
Gillard told the audience she had gone into the discussion with Rudd on the basis that it was confidential.
JG: I drew a line. I was going to defend that line. And in answer to the Laurie Oakes question I defended that line.
SF: The narrative that Laurie was laying out is that you reneged on the deal. It is complicated because your own version remains ambiguous. Kevin understands one thing, you understand something completely different.
JG: It’s the nature of being human.
SF: Why not spell it out at the time?
JG: I’d taken a decision at the time that on all of these questions I was not going to unpack before the eyes of the public all of the things, the chaos that had built up.
SF: But you didn’t have to unpack all of the chaos.
JG: No. I absolutely disagree with that. I was very conscious that if you put even your toe on this very sticky piece of paper, then you would be caught on it.
More simply, it suited Gillard not to discuss it. It suited Rudd for the details to be known.
It’s not a Cabinet deliberation. It’s of direct relevance to people’s evaluation of those events. I think it was important to ensure that that was into the public domain.
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?
JG: I just don’t agree with that. Politics is a hard business. Hard things happen. A hard thing happened to Malcolm Turnbull. A hard thing happened to Bob Hawke. A hard thing happened to Kim Beazley. A hard thing happened to Kevin Rudd. A hard thing happened to me. You can still make choices about how you conduct yourself.
Listening to Gillard’s answers about the leaks gave a sense that at that time she was fighting for her political life. The honeymoon that new leaders usually enjoy didn’t last long for Julia Gillard. She was on the back foot from very early in her prime ministership.
Victorian MP Alan Griffin said in the circumstances she couldn’t have expected anything different.
The problem in politics is you don’t normally get free air, and you certainly don’t get free air when you put an axe through a prime minister. You’re in a situation where … you’re going to be judged straightaway. If you then call an election, you’re not going to get free air because you’re going to be going straight into an election. But the bottom line [is] it’s pretty hard to expect that things were just going to go back to any sense of normalcy, because you’ve removed the normalcy by what happened.
Saturday 21 August: election night, and the contrast with Labor’s victory in 2007 was stark. Sean Kelly described the atmosphere as funereal. By the close of counting, neither party had a clear majority.
The negotiations to form a minority government lasted for seventeen days and tested the nation’s patience. Making a Four Corners program, I watched behind the scenes, camped in the offices of the three independents who would hold the balance of power: Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and Bob Katter. I observed Gillard and Abbott through their eyes. Gillard was much more confident in her negotiations, although Abbott nearly stole the show at the eleventh hour, besting Labor’s offer of an increase in regional spending, aimed at the seats held by the independents. It was more than Labor had offered, and I watched Oakeshott in particular hesitate at the proposition before him. Gillard was right to say the outcome was not inevitable.
The history of this is told now wrongly, as if it was always inevitable that I was going to form government. That wasn’t the truth. It certainly wasn’t how it felt. It was get to know these people much more fully and try and find a way of welding them, independents from conservative country seats through to the Greens on the other, into something that could look like a fighting force that could form a government.
Gillard moved first, securing the vote of Greens MP Adam Bandt. It took Labor to seventy-two votes, equal with the Coalition. The deal included weekly consultation with the Greens and a commitment to carbon pricing. The alliance with the Greens, formalised in a scene more like a wedding than a political deal, was heavily criticised by people in Gillard’s own party and would come back to haunt her. Chris Bowen had doubts about it.
I think the Greens had no choice but to support a Labor government. If the Greens really wanted to make Tony Abbott the Prime Minister and explain that to their support base, well they would have been very welcome to do that, so I don’t think that that arrangement was necessary.
Paul Howes agreed.
I support Labor doing deals to win government. I was concerned at the time about the nature in which that deal was done. It played into the narrative which is dangerous for Labor, that the Greens are somehow an extension of Labor.
Greg Combet argued there was strategic value in a formal working relationship with the Greens.
It’s all very well in hindsight too, of course, to say that we didn’t need to make these concessions to the Greens in particular to have confidence in the House of Representatives. There’s validity to that. But there’s also validity to the fact that the Greens had an important controlling influence in the Senate. And if we wanted to form government and have their support in the House of Reps, we had to confront the reality of the Senate as well. It was a very successful government, the Gillard government, from a legislative and reform standpoint and that’s because we had the Greens in the House of Reps and the Senate in that relationship.
First-time MP Andrew Wilkie threw his support behind Gillard, along with Windsor and Oakeshott. It was enough for Labor to form government.
Julia Gillard was sworn in as Prime Minister on 14 September 2010. There were promotions for the men who orchestrated the leadership change: Bill Shorten, Mark Arbib, David Feeney and Don Farrell were all included in the ministry. Gillard explained why.
I pick people on merit: Mark Arbib, Bill Shorten, these are people of real political merit, policy merit. I’d worked with Mark. I thought Mark was a person with real capacity beyond the organisational roles that he’d played in the party, and clearly I’ve got a very favourable view of Bill Shorten’s capacities.
We watched the archive of the victorious Labor Caucus of September 2010, recalling Rudd’s triumphant arrival in Caucus in 2007. This time he sat at the back of the room, applauding, with a fixed smile.
In the aftermath of the leadership change, Victorian Senator Stephen Conroy remembered a conversation about whether Kevin Rudd should be brought back into the Cabinet.
I think Cabinet had a discussion about that and there was a strong view put by many people that he shouldn’t be around the Cabinet table, it would be too difficult, and with some surprising people advocating that.
Anthony Albanese opposed the challenge but thought Rudd should be excluded from Cabinet.
I felt that in terms of the change [that] had occurred it was difficult for him to stay in the Cabinet. He’d just been executed as the Prime Minister.
But with Labor back in government, and Gillard’s commitment during the campaign, Rudd was sworn in as Minister for Foreign Affairs. He said returning to the Cabinet was a hard moment.
You have to take a very deep physical breath and a very deep mental breath as you do so and compose yourself. It was a strained atmosphere as I looked in the eyes of those who sought to avert my gaze.
Gillard said Cabinet meetings were better when he was absent.
There was always an awkwardness with Kevin in Cabinet. The atmosphere was always easier and freer when he wasn’t there.
In mid September, Newspoll reported Labor’s primary vote had dropped to 34 per cent. The irony was not lost on political insiders. Gillard had written to Rudd two days before the challenge telling him the party was in crisis because the primary vote had slipped to 35. Now, less than three months after the change, it was lower. The two-party-preferred measure had the ALP at 50 per cent, equal with the Coalition, but 2 points lower than in the week Rudd was removed.
Whether or not Rudd was responsible for destabilising the election campaign, Gillard was uniquely responsible for the error of political judgement that came next. In a television interview during the election campaign, Gillard ruled out a carbon tax. In the heat of the campaign, no-one paid much attention. In February, the government announced its new climate policy, negotiated with the Greens and the independents: a three-year fixed price for carbon that would transition to a floating price.
Trade Minister Craig Emerson advised Gillard on how to sell the policy.
I contacted Julia, by email and in two meetings, at which I said, ‘After the election you must not concede that you are pressing ahead with a carbon tax. This is an emissions trading scheme with a fixed price for three years’… and the response I got was, ‘We’re not going to get drawn into a game of semantics here. If people want to describe it as a carbon tax, well, it’s a carbon tax because the price was fixed’. It’s clear that Julia didn’t calculate the damage that that would do to her
In an interview on the ABC’s 7.30 Report in February 2011, Gillard said it publicly.
Heather Ewart (HE): With this carbon tax—you do concede it’s a carbon tax, do you not?
JG: Oh look, I’m happy to use the word ‘tax’, Heather. I understand some silly little collateral debate has broken out today. I mean, how ridiculous. This is a market-based mechanism to price carbon.
HE: Well, with this carbon tax then, it does seem certain that fuel and electricity prices will go up. How are you going to be sure that you can compensate for that, especially for low-income earners?
JG: Well, can I say this is a market-based mechanism to price carbon. It has a fixed price period at the start, a price that will be fixed. That is effectively a tax and I’m happy to say the word ‘tax’.
Gillard explained her thinking, that logic should be enough to carry the argument.
What I did decide was if the assertion, ‘This is a fixed price, it’s just like a tax isn’t it, it’s effectively a carbon tax, isn’t this a carbon tax’, that if that was put to me on the 7.30 Report or anywhere else, that I wasn’t going to chase a rabbit down a burrow about the naming, that I would try and answer it on the substance.
Gillard’s deputy, Wayne Swan, admitted their political misjudgement.
We lost control of that debate. We should have more vigorously contested its characterisation as a carbon tax.
A few months earlier Gillard had criticised Rudd for failing to deliver clear messages on government policy. Now judgement on her own message had deserted her completely.
Greg Combet also advised against calling the scheme a tax, but by a piece of ill fortune he had not seen the campaign promise and did not know how significant the mistake would be.
The concession that we’re implementing a carbon tax, and then the playing to the community of the election commitment that there’d be no carbon tax, that did cut through the community within twenty-four hours like a scalpel.
Alan Griffin also said the effect was immediate.
In politics, tax is a four-letter word and words are weapons. And the bottom line is once that word was said, then effectively it surrendered a significant component of political ground around the debate, and we were always on the back foot from that moment.
SF: Do you remember your immediate thoughts when you became aware of it?
AG: Yes. They’re completely unprintable.
For Simon Crean, it was about breaking the commitment.
It’s one thing to say, ‘Call it what you want’, but when you’ve made a watertight promise about what you’re not going to do, it’s even more important to argue why it isn’t a tax … there’s not much you can do, once you’ve said it. But it was wrong, and in the context of elections these days, broken promises can be lethal.
Rudd had broken his promise to introduce an ETS and paid a huge price. Now Gillard had broken her pledge too. Tony Mitchelmore put it simply.
The carbon tax wasn’t about the carbon tax. The carbon tax was about ‘the lie’.
In the Newspoll following the scheme’s announcement, Labor’s primary vote fell 6 points to 30 per cent. Gillard’s satisfaction rating dropped 11 points to 39 per cent—exactly the same fall suffered by Kevin Rudd after the decision on the ETS.
Inside the government, some MPs, including Alan Griffin, lost faith in the leadership.
It was damaging internally, not only in respect to the fact that a lot of people said, ‘Oh my God’, but it’s then what came through in the opinion polls, in the weeks immediately following that, where we saw the massive dive in our primary vote. That was really the beginning of the end.
Greg Combet said it was a gift for Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and conservatives in the media.
Tony Abbott was a dramatically effective campaigner once he had that bit between the teeth: the carbon tax. All sorts of fruit loops came out of the dark corners of the country. And mixed up in that I think was misogyny. You know, a hatred for a woman as Prime Minister, it was palpable from some of those loonies that descended upon Parliament at the time, ‘Ditch the witch’ and all the rest. Like truly disgusting misogyny mixed in with far-right politics. Really, some of the elements there were really weird. Whipped up into a frenzy by Alan Jones and other shock jocks and the like. And News Corporation piling in on top—they saw their opportunity and they took it.
Reviewing the archive of the period, distance from the events made the ugliness more shocking. Gross sexism was not an unknown phenomenon, but the scale and the intensity of the attack seemed to mark a new low.
Outside Parliament House, Tony Abbott appeared at one of the rallies for ‘honest government’. He claimed not to have seen the signs behind him depicting Gillard as a witch, a bitch and a liar. Gillard was incensed.
My reaction to that was anger, very hot anger—not distress, anger. People like Alan Jones willing to say anything about me, call me anything, no sense of respect, no boundaries about the political office. For the Leader of the Opposition to go and stand in front of that, I have had Liberal colleagues of his tell me that it is inconceivable that he did not see and read those signs before he stood in front of them. That was giving a tick, an open door to this ugliness that I thought was a great moral wrong. I really don’t know why this wasn’t a career-ending moment for Tony Abbott. Sexism is no better than racism.
In his interview, recalling the rallies brought Craig Emerson to tears.
I felt like vomiting when I saw the signs. ‘Ditch the witch’ is bad enough but ‘Bob Brown’s bitch’ is so deeply and utterly offensive to any woman in this country, let alone the Prime Minister of Australia, and to have eleven members of the Coalition standing up on that truck with that sign behind them, at least two of whom were women, calling the Prime Minister a bitch and they don’t see what this issue is. I just wonder if we’ve made any progress in this country in the last half-century.
Paul Howes shared Emerson’s point of view and was equally passionate in his account. Howes became a close friend of Julia Gillard and his interview was one of the most emotional of the series. He came to the ABC with a minder from KPMG, the professional services firm where he worked, presumably to keep him on track if he wandered off the political path. I wondered what she made of Howes’ poignant, tearful recollections of the period.
We developed a closeness. The more you get to know her, the harder it is not to love her. It’s the opposite of Kevin. I used to get really upset that a woman who was perceived publicly as a cold, mean-hearted bitch was in fact the nicest person in that building.
Greg Combet said Gillard’s fortitude was extraordinary.
Our support as a government started to come off from that point onwards, so I felt it very acutely. And I was really crushed by the political burden of that, more so than Julia. I mean it’s not that she doesn’t feel those things profoundly, but she’s a very tough woman and extremely capable person and she just shouldered that and ploughed on.
Her fortitude could do nothing to stop the picture forming in the voters’ minds. Tony Mitchelmore described what he saw in focus groups.
As soon as she would come up, the group would kind of come to life and people would come out with this stuff about her and it was always nasty. It quite often ended in the word ‘bitch’ … The picture that they’d painted in their own minds of her being kind of cold and backstabbing and untrustworthy was not the picture of what a woman should be. And so that made it permissible to talk about her in those terms.
Mitchelmore had the uncomfortable job of telling Gillard what was coming through in the research.
There was only one time where I felt like she gave something away, where I’d presented nasty stuff that people were saying and she said, ‘Look, it’s fine. There’s only two things that really bother me. One is going to funerals’—at that stage she was going to a lot of soldiers’ funerals. And she said, ‘The other thing that messes with my head is Kevin Rudd’.
In early April, in the middle of the storm over the carbon tax, Kevin Rudd made his first public statements about internal disagreements over climate policy in his government. On the ABC’s Q&A program, he told the audience there were ‘some folk’ in his Cabinet who wanted to get rid of the ETS altogether. He didn’t name Gillard and Swan but the implication was clear. The discussions in early 2010 were about postponing the ETS; there was no evidence Gillard had argued to kill the policy.
Kevin Rudd’s chief critique of his colleagues is over their disloyalty to him as Prime Minister. Rudd was then a member of Gillard’s Cabinet. What was this if it wasn’t disloyal?
Gillard said there was nothing she could do.
One of the consequences, of course, of minority government when there was bad behaviour, and Kevin consistently danced right out on that line of bad behaviour, always having some plausible deniability about why he’d said or done things, but the truth was using the foreign ministry position to stake out leadership claims, I couldn’t do that much to discipline him because the nature of minority government is everybody’s got their hand on the grenade and anybody can pull the pin.