In politics there are some problems so big you can’t go round them, you’ve got to go through them.
John McTernan
IN THE LAST days of summer in 2015, I took my seat opposite Kevin Rudd in the Gore Hill studio in Sydney for the final session of our interview. I looked across at him. He was anxious, fidgeting with the cushion he used for his back, taking his glasses on and off. I scrawled in my notebook and passed the page over to series producer Deb Masters: ‘He’s in the zone—let’s go’. The crew took their places. Rudd sipped his water and smoothed down his jacket.
SF: Are you enjoying the experience of doing these interviews?
KR: Not particularly.
SF: Why not?
KR: Well, these are very traumatic periods. What do you think?
SF: What happens when you go back over it and relive it?
KR: Well, I’m a human being, just like you. I sleep, I dream, and as a result a lot of these things come back in more vivid ways than either of us would like.
The emptiness of the studio seemed to press in. I continued.
SF: What is it that comes back to you that you don’t like?
KR: I’m not about to engage in self-reflective psychoanalysis. So I won’t answer that question.
In long interviews you judge the mood: when to insist, when to pull back. I asked another simple question.
SF: Was it always the case that you wanted that job back?
KR: No. I was very happy being Foreign Minister.
This was Rudd’s fixed narrative, the mirror image of Gillard’s: that she had never considered replacing Rudd. Why couldn’t Rudd say, ‘Of course I wanted to be vindicated’? The viewers would understand.
KR: Well, that says a lot about people watching and the way people receive the narrative.
SF: Really? It’s impossible to believe that you didn’t want to be vindicated?
KR: But I didn’t see it as vindication. Everyone’s leapt to a conclusion. They don’t understand me.
Rudd’s story was that he waited, passively, to have the Labor leadership handed back to him.
I did not see it as being either probable or frankly, as time marched on, possible that there would be a return to the prime ministership. And the reason was, as I said to many, many of my continuing supporters, ‘Unless one day you can establish to me there’s an overwhelming view within the Caucus that there must be a change in order to save the party from political oblivion, I’m not about to move, thank you very much’.
Rudd’s friend, ALP strategist Bruce Hawker, saw it differently.
SF: How deep was his drive to be vindicated?
Bruce Hawker (BH): Almost immeasurable. It was a sense in him not only of injustice but also unfinished business, and boosted I got to say by a public which kept reinforcing the point that he made, and that was that the manner of his removal was deeply unfair.
West Australian Senator Mark Bishop supported Gillard’s challenge but understood Rudd’s drive to return.
You don’t get to be the prime minister or the leader of the party, and this applies to Mr Howard and to Miss Gillard and to Mr Rudd and possibly to Mr Shorten, without having in your own DNA an overdeveloped sense of your own worth. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that he moved to protect his name and position himself to retake his leadership.
Adviser Patrick Gorman thinks the comeback began early.
I think probably around January of 2011 he started to think that this government was not going to have a healthy three-year term, and so therefore it was no longer about just serving well as Foreign Minister and then looking for the next gig outside of Parliament. I definitely think that he ebbed and flowed. He went for days where he would think, ‘Why on earth would you want to be any closer or any further tied into this business than I currently am?’ So I don’t think it was linear. But I think the first time that he really thought there was a potential that this government was going to need an alternate leader was in the early part of 2011.
In the months following Gillard’s concession on the carbon tax, the anti–carbon tax rallies continued with their rancorous message, in unison with Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and sections of the media. Anthony Albanese had the job of managing legislation through the House.
The nature of the hung parliament meant that during that entire period it was unstable in terms of the media and in terms of the perceptions. It was like living in two worlds because at the same time the government and the Parliament were actually functioning pretty well. We got things done: 595 pieces of legislation were carried by that Parliament.
Despite the government’s legislative progress—the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), education reforms and carbon pricing—Rudd was always present: in Gillard’s view, not passively, as he claimed.
What Kevin was doing was calibrating his media performances to distract attention from things that I was doing as Prime Minister. So it was very, very common for me to have a big announcement and for Kevin to enter that media cycle to take attention away. Second, he was going out to do media, to show how popular he was with people: contrived opportunities to show people beseeching him for selfies and surrounding him in crowds and that kind of stuff. He would be backgrounding off the record to make sure that the government looked like it was divided.
Independent MP Tony Windsor said Rudd was a hindrance.
It was almost as if he was the second Opposition Leader. In a hung Parliament it’s hard enough for anybody to deal with one, but when you’ve got two Opposition Leaders fighting against you, no doubt Gillard felt that pressure.
In Kevin Rudd’s narrative, Julia Gillard was the cause of her own problems.
It’s pretty tiresome when you see one series of mistakes by that government after another, for her staff to then turn around and say, ‘It’s Kevin’s fault. It’s Kevin’s fault’. Why is it Kevin’s fault? Because Kevin’s breathing. I think it’s time people actually asked themselves this question: what objectively did Julia get right and get wrong on her own merits in that period of government?
So how do you unpack (to borrow Gillard’s word) the relative contributions of Rudd and Gillard to her difficulties in government?
British political adviser John McTernan became Gillard’s director of communications in November 2011. He brought an outsider’s perspective but also a reputation for aggressive media management honed in Tony Blair’s New Labour, a political operation that became synonymous with spin. McTernan identified the fundamental problem with Gillard’s explanation of how she came to power.
Listen, in politics you can get through almost everything, but you’ve got to start with full disclosure. Full disclosure doesn’t get you out of a problem, but a lack of disclosure keeps you trapped in a problem that you can probably never escape from.
According to McTernan, Gillard’s decision not to talk about the reasons for the challenge was the wrong one.
The public’s view of the Labor Party was a sense there was a guilty secret, that Julia was some kind of regicide. But the truth is that Kevin Rudd was not Duncan in Macbeth. He was the madwoman in the attic.
Tony Burke had reminded us that as Deputy Prime Minister, Gillard was regarded as the government’s best communicator. Maybe the voters’ hearts were already hardened against her, but Gillard’s ability to connect with them fell away on the national stage. Rudd speechwriter Tim Dixon explained why.
Julia couldn’t walk into a room and command the room. She couldn’t project herself into the television screens of the nation in a way that Kevin could. Kevin had this preternatural sense of how to do that, and Julia just didn’t. I think she always struggled with creating that connection with a country that wasn’t sure why she was there in the first place. It wouldn’t have happened if she’d come to office in a different way.
Early in her prime ministership, the Queensland floods drew the unavoidable comparison between Gillard and the warm and emotional Premier Anna Bligh, who was praised for her leadership in the crisis. Media adviser Sean Kelly said the Prime Minister was already second-guessing herself.
I remember in early 2011 we had a conversation about Julia’s press conference style. She was very aware of the problem at that point. There was widespread criticism of her appearing wooden during the floods, of her appearing inauthentic. One of the things she said to me was that she could feel that she had slowed down her delivery, that she had begun to self-censor in the fear of making a mistake.
Gillard thought Kevin Rudd was partly responsible.
People say I should have been a better communicator. I’m happy to take that on the chin. In the context when you’ve got the Leader of the Opposition out every day saying, ‘She’s a liar, a backstabber’, and you’ve got people internally, including Kevin, saying, ‘Yes, she’s a liar and a backstabber and she doesn’t believe in carbon pricing and she only did the deal ‘cause she had to’, it creates this pincer movement in which it’s hard to find enough space, enough clear air, to put across what you want to say to the Australian nation.
One of the final editorial decisions we made was to include the beautiful photograph of Gillard taken by Sophie Deane, a young girl with Down syndrome who Gillard had met campaigning for the NDIS. The photo captured the warmth not seen by the voters.
Wayne Swan explained why that warmth couldn’t cut through.
It was a combination of a difficult political environment, part of it self-inflicted through disunity, from Kevin in particular, but not exclusively so. Part of it I think may have been her own reaction or protective mechanism towards the volume of abuse that was being poured upon her. Part of it may well have been the sheer volume of work. I think it was all of those things wrapped up in one.
Gillard’s attempts to fix the policies that had dogged the Rudd government came unstuck. Gillard had been sharply critical of Rudd’s failure as Prime Minister to look for solutions to the growing number of boat arrivals. Influenced by Mark Arbib, she saw electoral potency in the issue. As Immigration Minister, Chris Evans said Gillard was prepared to take a tougher stance than Rudd.
Kevin had resisted some of the more draconian options, and it’s fair to say I think that Julia was probably more hardline in terms of her support for responses to people smuggling than say Kevin or myself.
But with Gillard as Prime Minister, the asylum seeker issue got worse, not better, for the government. The number of boats continued to rise: 6555 asylum seekers reached Australian waters in 2010, more than twice as many as the previous year. Kevin Rudd had no sympathy for his successor’s difficulties.
Julia had a frontal encounter with reality! And that is, it’s pretty complex out there. I think the sheer complexity confronted her and hit her between the eyeballs. It’s hard stuff out there.
In May 2011, Gillard announced an agreement with the Malaysian government, forged by Evans’ successor, Chris Bowen. Asylum seekers arriving by boat would no longer remain in Australia but would be sent directly to Malaysia, a transit country for asylum seekers on their way to Australia. Bowen called it a ‘virtual’ turning back of boats, without risky confrontations at sea.
Before the first group of asylum seekers left Australia for Malaysia, the deal was struck down in the High Court. Bowen offered his resignation.
I said, ‘Prime Minister, this is a diabolical political situation for the government. I’m happy to give you my resignation and I will take responsibility for the High Court loss’. To her credit she said that would be fundamentally unfair and she would not accept my resignation if I offered it.
Gillard acknowledged the failure but compared her efforts favourably with Rudd’s.
I ended up striving continuously for new policies here. My criticisms of Kevin were not only that he watched this political problem rise, he exacerbated it with the decision of Oceanic Viking; he didn’t go on a methodical search for a solution.
In late 2011, Gillard gave her first speech as Prime Minister to the ALP National Conference. She listed the achievements of former Labor leaders Whitlam, Hawke and Keating but didn’t mention Kevin Rudd. She insisted it wasn’t deliberate.
There wasn’t a reference to Kevin. I’m prepared to put my hand up well and truly for this error but there was no intention to be dismissive of Kevin, not at all.
Sean Kelly’s recollection is different.
There was a lot of work put into Julia’s speech. There was some debate about whether or not Kevin should be mentioned in the list of prime ministers and I remember Julia not being particularly keen on the idea.
Kevin Rudd was in the audience.
‘Angry’ overstates it. I was a bit hurt, because it’s a gathering of the party faithful. But more than that, I just thought it was politically dumb.
British political adviser John McTernan’s recollection of Rudd’s response at the conference reflected his contempt for the former Prime Minister.
It’s the most ridiculous piece of manufactured victimhood I’ve ever seen in my life. He’s there in the story of the Labor Party projected in the conference hall. The notion that he would do this to himself, make himself look weak, and hissy, stampy, Rumpelstiltskiny, stomp around, maybe that was an error.
Intentional or not, the omission of Rudd from the pantheon became the story of the conference, drowning out all other business. Sean Kelly said the consequences were felt immediately.
At the conference itself I remember that being a huge moment, the fact that Kevin hadn’t been mentioned. And of course there was the sense that that speech had fallen flat, that there had been a chance for Julia to regain some momentum and that chance had been squandered.
By the time Rudd had been slighted by the Prime Minister, Alan Griffin had already spoken to him about a return to the leadership.
Griffin provided some light relief during the making of the series. He liked Rudd but also said there were times when he wanted to throttle him. A reluctant interview at first, Griffin said yes, then spent months rueing his decision, or pretending to. He was in New York as an observer at the UN when I was in Boston interviewing Rudd. I rang him when the interview was not going well. His advice didn’t meet ABC editorial guidelines, suggesting the only way to get through a marathon interview with Kevin Rudd was self-medication.
Griffin explained why he had approached Rudd.
AG: I put the view to Kevin that I thought things were becoming untenable, that the long-term trend line with respect to public support was diabolical, and that on top of what was then appearing like an ongoing series of poor judgements … established a pattern which was not going to change. And in those circumstances, he should consider his position with respect to the leadership, should that situation present itself sometime in the future.
SF: And what was his response?
AG: Coy! Coy. But that’s the nature of how these things often are … it’s not unusual for candidates to at least appear to be coy, even when you know they’re red-hot.
Patrick Gorman saw a growing number of disaffected MPs come to Rudd’s office.
We had a steadily increasing openness with members who would come and speak to Kevin about their frustrations. It started out with those who once were his closer friends, then it expanded to other people who wouldn’t have normally had a deep political conversation with him. You really did have quite a few people who’d been more open than you would’ve expected about whether or not this government was going to go full-term.
One of the backers of the 2010 leadership challenge, Mark Bishop, decided his decision had been a mistake.
The things that we sought to achieve by changing the leadership and in the manner that it was changed had been totally unproductive, counterproductive … it was a terrible misjudgement.
Encouraged by what he was hearing, Rudd ventured into marginal seats.
SF: You started touring backbench electorates. Why did you do that? It looks like a provocative act.
KR: Firstly because they invited me and because they were fearful of how they were going in the polls. Secondly, they knew that I had strong levels of support in the Australian community. And thirdly, because on each occasion it was authorised by Julia Gillard’s office.
By the new year, Labor’s primary vote had dropped to 30; when Rudd lost the prime ministership, the primary vote was at 35. Rudd again said the cause lay with Gillard, not him.
I think one of the things Julia needs to recognise was she was not performing effectively as a Prime Minister. Secondly, I’m not responsible for public opinion polls which, when they throw my name back into the midst, have me as the preferred Prime Minister of the country. That of itself creates its own dynamic.
During a break in the interview, researcher Trish Drum expressed frustration that Rudd was giving the same answer over and over. But that was Rudd’s skill: every response contained the message he wanted to get across: Gillard’s poor judgement, the stain of the challenge and his reluctance to return. The light and shade about his motivation would have to come from his colleagues.
In our first meeting, Gillard told series producer Deb Masters and I that we couldn’t make the series without a full analysis of the role of journalists, many of whom in her eyes had become Rudd partisans. The relationship between politicians and the media is vexed, particularly for the Press Gallery, who work in the same building as the people they report on.
John McTernan was robust about the relationship.
I think that everybody faces a hostile press in the end and the honeymoon in politics is increasingly rare. Kevin Rudd got a honeymoon because it wasn’t just time for a change: he seemed to be the change … Politicians who complain about their treatment at the hands of the press are like footy players who expect to be able to score every time. The other guys are on the pitch too and if you can’t play against other people, find some other job to do.
In a rare expression of candour about the nature of politics, Alan Griffin described the history of destabilisation in Labor.
No-one comes to this with clean hands. Frankly, Kevin destabilised Julia. Julia destabilised Kevin and Kim Beazley. Wayne Swan destabilised Simon Crean. It’s the nature of politics. If you’re not happy with how you think things are going, the result is disunity. And disunity is death. So what I did is what a range of colleagues have done at various times on various occasions to various leaders. I take no pride in it at all. However, do I think it was necessary in the circumstances? I do.
He spelled out the business of undermining the Prime Minister.
I was talking to members of Caucus about how they saw things. I was putting a view about what I thought they should take from things like the polling and what they should understand are the political implications from some of the decisions that had been taken. It became a situation where a journalist would ring me to seek advice along similar lines. And so that was principally what I was doing.
Gillard said her supporters spoke to the media too.
Certainly I had to try and answer all of this, so did I ask some of my good colleagues to speak to journalists and say, ‘You know how you’ve been told that Julia’s only got support from x number of people and if a ballot was held tomorrow Kevin would triumph, you do know all that’s nonsense don’t you?’
Kevin Rudd admitted he briefed the media about the government’s deteriorating circumstances, but only about a specific occasion already in the public domain.
A group of them came round, I think just before the events of February 2012, and had an expansive off-the-record discussion with me about how the government was going, at their request. I was full and frank with them about how I thought we were going, as I was full and frank with them that I would be doing nothing about it.
A few months after the Labor conference, the simmering tensions in the party exploded. Senator Stephen Conroy described how it began with a newspaper article.
There was a front-page Sunday attack on Julia with Darren Cheeseman, the most marginal candidate. It became clear that Kevin was planning on mounting his challenge very shortly. So a decision was taken that enough was enough.
Someone had been keeping an ace up their sleeve for just this moment. A video of an angry, swearing Rudd was released on YouTube, the outtakes of a message Rudd delivered in Mandarin when he was Prime Minister. Rudd regarded McTernan as the culprit. On camera, McTernan denied it with a pantomime leer.
I was completely surprised. I thought, ‘Somebody really doesn’t like Kevin’.
Before departing for Washington, Rudd gave an interview very late to Sky News. Contained in the interview were Rudd’s first concessions that his management style as Prime Minister was flawed. It sounded to many like a job application.
SF: Were you letting your Caucus colleagues know that you were a different person for whom they could vote in a potential leadership contest?
KR: Absolutely not, because if you look at when the interview is given, it is in direct response to a decision by Julia’s office to release this doctored video in order to dominate the news the next day and have me in the witness box, which it seems I still am.
Rudd’s willingness to concede mistakes had shrunk; he made the smallest of concessions about consulting more on the mining tax and the ETS.
KR: What both of those things cause me to reflect on is the need with those decisions to have a more tempering environment by the advice of colleagues. But government is an imperfect business and there are a whole series of facts surrounding those two decisions.
SF: You said yourself in the interview that you did before you left for Washington that you would be a mug if you didn’t change. What is it about yourself that you thought needed to change?
KR: I’ve just answered that. To be consultative with your senior colleagues more intensively on these acute decisions of the government.
Two days later in a radio interview, Simon Crean said Kevin Rudd was not a team player and challenged him to put up or shut up. The impetus for the interview came from Gillard.
SF: Did you encourage Simon Crean to do that?
JG: My office spoke to Simon about doing an interview and saying some things about Kevin, absolutely.
Chris Bowen was part of the discussions with Rudd.
Kevin had reached the view that it was likely that the Prime Minister would dismiss him from the Cabinet. There was clear backgrounding from Cabinet colleagues, walking around the Press Gallery saying, ‘The Prime Minister will dismiss Kevin’, and he didn’t want that to happen.
In Washington, Rudd resigned as Foreign Minister then flew home to Brisbane. Bowen said Gillard outmanoeuvred him.
It took him eighteen hours to get home, and in that time Julia Gillard was very legitimately ringing around wining votes back and so Kevin was at a disadvantage.
Julia Gillard called a spill and Rudd nominated for the leadership.
At that point my conclusion was, having discussed it with my colleagues in the Caucus, that the honourable thing to do was then to put myself forward as a candidate. To have failed to have done so would’ve resulted in accusations of cowardice and lack of principle.
McTernan was enthusiastic about the strategy.
He was forced into a spill and from that moment onwards, Julia had the advantage. She was dictating the timetable and the terms.
Party figures lined up to excoriate Rudd. Gillard said it was time to explain the 2010 challenge to the public.
It was time for a bit of truth telling and I was prepared to go to areas that in the past I’d kept away from the public square and public stage.
Senior ministers including Tony Burke, Nicola Roxon and Stephen Conroy gave frank interviews criticising the former Prime Minister, describing him as contemptuous and chaotic. Wayne Swan delivered a stinging rebuke to his former friend via a press release.
For too long, Kevin Rudd has been putting his own self-interest ahead of the interests of the broader labour movement and the country as a whole, and that needs to stop … He was the party’s biggest beneficiary, then its biggest critic; but never a loyal or selfless example of its values and objectives.
Gillard’s strategy was to convince the media and the public that a Rudd return was impossible.
SF: Were you happy with the bloodbath that followed?
JG: I was happy to be able to tell the truth about what had gone on. I’d been silent effectively for so long and so much rubbish had been spoken in the meantime.
The real consequence was to make public the divisions and bitterness inside the party. Anthony Albanese wondered how they could recover any credibility with the electorate. He was distraught about the behaviour. Albanese was a senior member of Gillard’s government but he felt compelled to speak out. Ahead of the ballot he gave an emotional press conference, announcing he would be voting for Rudd, despite knowing Rudd would lose.
I was traumatised by what was going on in the Labor Party. You had senior people going out with no handbrake on just smashing Kevin Rudd’s reputation but what was worse was they were trashing Labor’s reputation at the same time, and speaking about a government which I didn’t recognise that I’d served in.
Albanese also viewed the public brawling from the voters’ perspective.
It was self-indulgent, as if the outside world didn’t matter, and I think we were doing a great deal of damage regardless of who won.
The lack of respect for a former Prime Minister angered Chief Whip Joel Fitzgibbon.
I was livid, and I made sure people understood how I felt. Whatever they thought of Kevin, at the end of the day he’s a former Labor Prime Minister and other than Billy Hughes, I have never heard either current or past serving parliamentarians talk about a former Labor Prime Minister in that way. In doing so they were enormously damaging the brand.
Even AWU leader Paul Howes, one of Gillard’s most loyal supporters, called it blood lust.
John McTernan thought the public humiliation of Labor’s former leader was an unqualified success.
In politics there are some problems so big you can’t go round them, you’ve got to go through them, so it had to be said. It wasn’t said in 2010. It had to be said at some point. Was it damaging? In the end it didn’t damage the party brand. Didn’t damage the government’s brand … It gave a freedom, a lightness of step afterwards.
On 27 February, Gillard defeated Rudd, seventy-one votes to thirty-one. Rudd’s supporters had predicted he would do better. Chris Bowen explained what happened.
SF: He said he had forty votes. Why didn’t they materialise?
Chris Bowen (CB): Well, in politics there’s such a thing as a winner’s surplus, I think. When somebody’s going to win, they tend to collect more votes because people like to vote for the winner.
I asked Rudd if he thought about quitting.
I’m made of sterner stuff than that. If the intention of Julia and Wayne Swan and those around [them] was to carpet-bomb me into oblivion, then I think I’d proven by then I’m a resilient individual …When you have a whole bunch of people rolling in the door straight after that leadership ballot saying, ‘For God’s sake, don’t go anywhere because this party is in for the shellacking of the century come the next election’, that also weighs on your conscience.
In the aftermath of the failed challenge, Mark Arbib, one of the key figures behind Gillard’s elevation to the leadership, announced he was resigning from Parliament.
Rudd said Arbib came to see him on his way out. There was no rapprochement.
He said, ‘I just thought we should have a chat’. I said, ‘So do you admit that you got it wrong?’ He said, ‘No, no’ …It became clear why he wanted to be there, because within twenty-four hours it had been briefed out to the media by Arbib that we had a reconciliation and a meeting.
Rudd then delivered one of his best lines.
You spin your way in, you spin your way out. There goes the heart and soul of the New South Wales Right … Off to casino land, the moral epicentre of that particular factional grouping!
He left a theatrical pause.
Was that too harsh?
Arbib was replaced by a stalwart of the New South Wales Right, former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr. It looked like a deft move at the time, bring much-needed experience into the ranks of the battered parliamentary party. For The Killing Season, it brought a lucid and entertaining interview. Carr also inspired the sequences filmed with the key players, starting with a series of Bob Carr stretches against the wall of his office library. We added scenes with Griffin, Fitzgibbon, Swan and Burke in the corridors and offices of Parliament House, and the notorious shots of New South Wales Senator Sam Dastyari on his iPhone in Melbourne, a gift to the close observers who informed us it was the wrong iPhone model for that year.
Julia Gillard discovered Bob Carr’s ultimate loyalty was to the party, not the leader.
I gave him the opportunity of a lifetime. What I found was firstly, as Foreign Minister, he found the workload very telling. Despite the fact that I supported him, got him the position—he wouldn’t have had the position if it wasn’t for me and my decision-making—ultimately he was not loyal or supportive.
Whatever satisfaction Gillard drew from success in the spill, it was short-lived. Like Albanese, Greg Combet looked on in despair.
It was absolutely terrible. I’d get into my office early and I’d look at the papers and here it is, front-page splash—the Herald Sun, The Australian … forgive me but they usually were News Corporation papers—more shit on Labor all provided by unnamed sources within Labor, and day after day after day of vicious backgrounding by people from within our own government. It’s deeply dispiriting and I looked at my staff and I apologised to them. I felt ashamed at times.
Tony Burke said how hard it was to get the media to focus on anything other than the leadership.
It was like when you’re trying to tune a TV and the static’s there the whole time. I’ll never forget announcing that we’d finally signed off on a Murray-Darling Basin plan. This had been a Federation debate raging for more than a hundred years and we’d resolved it. Gave a speech at the National Press Club, went to questions from the media, could hardly get anyone to ask me a question about the reform because they had to ask about leadership. It became a complete brick wall to communicating to the public.
Burke accepted it wasn’t all because of Rudd.
Kevin can’t be expected to take responsibility for the Craig Thomson stories or the Peter Slipper stories. You never get static-free government. But there ended up being almost no space left for us to win arguments within the community.
The hung Parliament presented particular challenges for the country’s first female Prime Minister. Despite Tony Abbott’s commitment to a ‘kinder, gentler polity’, the forty-third Parliament was toxic.
Tony Windsor recalls overhearing conversations about Julia Gillard.
There were people in the Parliament, in general discussion, but within earshot, that would quite often make derogatory comments about Prime Minister Gillard. Her attire, her body shape. I’ve never seen a circumstance where an individual man, woman or dog was treated like Julia Gillard was, particularly in the press, but also by members of Parliament. There was a constructed campaign to disassemble this particular person.
The issue of sexism became entwined with the tawdry twin sagas of Craig Thomson and Peter Slipper.
In November 2011, Labor Speaker Harry Jenkins resigned the office and the Coalition’s Peter Slipper was appointed as his replacement. Anthony Albanese said elevating Slipper to the speakership gave the government ‘flexibility’, improving the voting margin from one to three. Slipper became embroiled in sexual harassment proceedings brought by a former staffer. The case was later abandoned, but not before its lurid details became part of a parliamentary numbers game. At the same time, backbencher and former union official Craig Thomson was under investigation for misuse of union funds, including using a union credit card to pay for prostitutes.
In April 2012 Slipper stepped aside while the case went to court, and Gillard suspended Thomson from the ALP. As the Slipper saga played out, Gillard had to endure one of the lowest attacks in Australian political history.
In a particularly moving piece of archive from September of that year, Julia Gillard emerged from the APEC summit in Russia, having just learnt of her father’s death. Her eyes swollen with tears, she walked quickly towards a waiting car. Who could fail to be moved by her grief in that moment or her obvious regard for her father?
Shortly after her return to Australia, broadcaster Alan Jones was recorded at a Liberal Party function mocking her father’s death. Trade Minister Craig Emerson had been with the Prime Minister in Russia.
When you get a radio host such as Alan Jones saying that her father died of shame, I just can’t describe the horror of that, and I don’t understand how people can think that way and have that in their hearts. There … was so much hatred for her being a female Labor Prime Minister.
Julia Gillard felt there was no boundary that couldn’t be crossed.
I had to steel myself throughout my prime ministership, but particularly in this period of time. It did seem to me like tomorrow you could wake up to anything if this is how far we’ve gone. There just are no rules anymore.
Health Minister Tanya Plibersek said the party was too slow to respond.
I think because we left it, the sexism got worse over time, and perhaps if we’d called it earlier, the people who were so quick to engage in it might have had pause for thought.
In October 2012, the release of lewd text messages in Slipper’s court case caused a furore. Tony Abbott moved a motion of no confidence in the Speaker. He repeated the infamous phrase used by Alan Jones.
And every day the Prime Minister stands in this Parliament to defend this Speaker will be another day of shame for this Parliament and another day of shame for a government which should have already died of shame.
Gillard said she was ready to ‘give it back hard’. Her speech, which became known as ‘the misogyny speech’, was one of the defining moments of her parliamentary career.
I rise to oppose the motion moved by the Leader of the Opposition. And in so doing I say to the Leader of the Opposition, I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not. And the government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever … If he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn’t need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror. That’s what he needs.
In the Prime Minister’s office, Sean Kelly watched Gillard’s speech with his colleagues.
Oftentimes people watch Question Time out of the corner of their eye. That day everybody stopped to watch the speech.
At the end, people applauded. It was an amazing moment of enormously high morale in an office where low morale had become the governing principle.
Asked what he remembered of Parliament that day, Rudd said this.
Peter Slipper had been Julia’s choice of Speaker. It didn’t take a Rhodes scholar to work out where the Liberal Party would go with that. So I think in terms of flawed political judgement, this was not the smartest call.
He went on to praise the speech.
I thought it was a brilliant speech, and the reason I thought it was a brilliant speech was that she effectively named the then Leader of the Opposition for what ultimately was his view of women. I congratulate her.
The speech was watched around the world, but at home with the voters, the impact didn’t last long. ALP market researcher Tony Mitchelmore said the response was as much about their dislike of Abbott.
It did resonate for about a month there. There was more-positive feedback, especially from women. People cheered her on again and said, ‘That’s the feisty, witty, intelligent Gillard that I remember’. You’ve got to remember that Tony Abbott was never popular, so while she wasn’t popular during that period, when I’d talk to people about Tony Abbott, it was equally negative.
The polls seemed to reflect Mitchelmore’s observations. In a late October Newspoll, Labor’s primary vote was up 3 points to 36, and they were equal with the Coalition on the two-party-preferred measure. But it didn’t last. As Parliament resumed the following February, Labor trailed the Coalition 44 to 56. It was the start of an election year and the polls were pointing to a landslide defeat.
Gillard was not prepared to relinquish the leadership.
I would have said it to almost anybody who had the conversation with me, that it was inconceivable to me in terms of the long-term future of Labor’s cultural norms and internal values, that the kind of anti-Labor work that Kevin had been involved in, the destabilisation, the leaking, would be rewarded by the leadership.
Kevin Rudd’s position hadn’t changed. He was waiting to be drafted.
My position to media folks who ask me, and my position to the Caucus colleagues was a consistent one: where’s the overwhelming majority? Haven’t got one? See you later.
Anthony Albanese could see no resolution to the impasse.
He wanted it to happen, but he also was saying that he wouldn’t challenge. I was of the view at that point in time that it was two immoveable objects, that Kevin wouldn’t challenge and Julia wouldn’t resign, so there wouldn’t be a change.