The Parliament wasn’t big enough, the Caucus wasn’t big enough, for both Julia and Kevin.
Anthony Albanese
ON THE AFTERNOON of Wednesday 26 June 2013, Bill Shorten’s spokesman told the Canberra Press Gallery the MP had no comment to make about the Labor leadership. At 6.30 p.m., a doleful-looking Bill Shorten walked towards the press throng and announced he was backing Kevin Rudd for the leadership of the Australian Labor Party. ‘The future of the Labor Party is at risk. Kevin Rudd is the best chance the Labor Party has of winning the election’, Shorten said joylessly.
Shorten’s brief remarks signalled the end of Julia Gillard’s prime ministership. In 2010, in concert with other factional leaders, he had cut down Kevin Rudd and propelled Gillard into the top job. Almost three years to the day, he reversed his decision.
Gillard said Shorten came to see her on the eve of the final sitting weeks before the long winter break.
I had a conversation with Bill in Melbourne before the last parliamentary fortnight, where he indicated to me he thought things were pretty dire. He didn’t say to me, ‘And I have moved my support’, but the fact that he would even come and indicate that he thought not only electorally but internally for me things were dire, caused me to conclude that clearly he was thinking of moving.
As always, Gillard’s criticism of Shorten was muted.
I understood he was going to make a different decision. Yes, in the moment you’re disappointed.
There was no harsh criticism of Shorten from Rudd either. He identified Shorten as one of the key organisers of the 2010 challenge, but without the bitterness he directed at Mark Arbib. Staffer Patrick Gorman said the former PM had a higher opinion of Shorten.
I think he knew that Bill did have potential to be an incredibly good Labor leader and so I think he’d always given Bill a little bit more leeway.
We made a final attempt to get Shorten to agree to an interview. He declined formally, by letter.
My views on this period are well known … Previously, I have acknowledged the error I made in not articulating my reason for voting for Julia Gillard in 2010. However, I did not repeat that mistake in 2013 and made very clear my position and the rationale behind my decision to vote for Kevin Rudd in a very public statement. Therefore my efforts are focused on the future, not the battles we have left behind us.
What Shorten didn’t count in his refusal was the cost of silence. In truth, his views are only partially known. The questions about what motivated him in 2010, and therefore what he stands for, remain.
Martin Ferguson suggested Shorten had learnt from the challenge against Rudd.
I think in hindsight he now regrets it … You know politics is not about having the numbers. Politics is about knowing when to use them. You’re a better politician if you never use the numbers. You work out what’s right for the party and you step back. That’s the sign of a certain maturity which I think Julia and the faceless men showed they lacked that evening in June 2010.
The last act of The Killing Season was driven by the momentum leading to Rudd’s return to the prime ministership. Government Whip Joel Fitzgibbon had given Gillard an ultimatum after the 2012 leadership ballot.
I just said to her, ‘Julia, I voted for you, I encouraged others to vote for you, but things are tough and I believe you’ve got about six months to turn it round’ … It’s not easy telling a Prime Minister that if they don’t lift their game or improve their standings, that they might be a goner.
The six months expired without a change in the government’s position. Fitzgibbon shifted his allegiance to Rudd and became one of his most prominent supporters.
I made it known to Julia that she’d lost me, that I thought a change was necessary, and I actively lobbied the Caucus for it to happen. I expressed my view to people that I thought we were heading for a train crash and we had no choice but to consider changing the leader.
Fitzgibbon explained how he worked with the press to build support for Rudd.
I wasn’t leaking to the press, I was talking to the press. I never hid my views. There would be plenty of people that would say that I was too open in expressing my views, and that’s a very valid criticism, but I did what I thought was necessary and right at the time. The amount of briefing is directly proportional to the difficulty a party finds itself in, and the party was in a lot of difficulty and there were a lot of people prepared to talk.
Foreign Minister Bob Carr’s depiction of the press in Parliament House owed more to the Court of the Medici than Canberra.
It’s a whispering gallery, it’s a whispering gallery. They can hear you on the other side of the wall. They can hear you thinking. And on the most modest evidence there’s a wealth of speculation, and people who know you well can anticipate how you’re thinking anyway.
In early 2013, New South Wales ALP general secretary Sam Dastyari met Julia Gillard at Kirribilli House to deliver bad news about the government’s polling.
The numbers were diabolical in New South Wales and especially in Sydney. We hadn’t lost the migrant communities—they’d abandoned us. The bedrock of the Labor vote in Sydney has and will always be these big, diverse migrant communities and they were running [away at] a hundred miles an hour. So we[‘d] gotten to this point where we risked being down to just two seats in Sydney: the seat of Sydney, Tanya Plibersek’s innercity seat, and the seat of Grayndler. But in the bedrock, western Sydney seats, seats held by Chris Hayes, Ed Husic, Chris Bowen, Jason Clair, Tony Burke, we were dead as a duck.
I asked Gillard a difficult question about the disastrous polling numbers.
SF: Why were you so unpopular, particularly with men?
JG: You’ll get a million answers to this. I think blue-collar men in particular feared the impact of the carbon tax on their jobs. They probably looked at that image of a woman and put together a whole lot of things that they didn’t like and reacted to it. I think for women there were still some who were feeling a sense of connection to the first woman doing the job. But yes, it was difficult days, difficult environment.
Chris Bowen couldn’t recall a particular moment when he thought Kevin Rudd should be Prime Minister again. It was more of an evolution.
You don’t wake up one day and say, ‘I know what I’ll do. Let’s make Kevin Rudd Prime Minister’. You hope for the best, you try and make the current arrangements work. I can’t put a finger on a particular day. It’s something which emerges over time, where you grow increasingly concerned about what’s happening and increasingly convinced that maybe a drastic decision is necessary.
According to Sam Dastyari, MPs in Victoria were still backing Gillard.
There was a sense amongst the New South Wales Labor MPs [of] how bad it was. But the Victorian Labor MPs were holding completely firm with Julia Gillard. They were sticking with her. And the numbers as a result were never there.
In March, the Financial Review reported that the Coalition had been ahead in all twenty-seven Nielsen polls taken during the forty-third Parliament. Within weeks, the Labor Caucus was lining up for yet another vote on the leadership, after Simon Crean called for a spill. It was premature and badly managed. Contrary to Crean’s expectations, Rudd didn’t nominate.
In a press conference, Rudd said he was honouring his commitment not to stand for the leadership again. He said he needed an overwhelming majority of his colleagues to draft him back into the position.
My position was absolutely clear. No overwhelming majority, no action from Kevin. Why? Because there’s no point. You inherit a divided Caucus—pointless.
The chaos in Parliament House diverted attention from the business of the day, an apology to the victims of forced adoptions and their families. AWU leader Paul Howes had been an adviser for the event and was in the audience as Gillard made her speech.
For me it was a very important day, and for hundreds of thousands of mothers, fathers and children it was a day that we’d been waiting for all of our lives. And to have it waylaid with a crazy-arse kind of brain fart just shat me to no end, to put it politely. The capacity of that party to lose complete perspective of everything else [that] is going on in the world and focus on itself is demonstrated by actions like that.
Julia Gillard was returned unopposed. She sacked her former mentor.
I believed he had behaved not only wrongly but absurdly. He’s too smart a person to be wandering around Parliament House with TV cameras, muttering and stuttering. I mean I just thought this was an absurd performance.
Gillard said the pantomime in Parliament that day was when the voters lost faith in Labor.
There had been the farce of the challenge that wasn’t a challenge. It made the party look like a joke, it made the government look like a joke. And in my view when Australians completely hardened their hearts against the Labor government, it was in and around that moment when we just looked clown-like.
Victorian MP Alan Griffin recalled how he was feeling at the end of the day.
Strung out, and exhausted and quite despairing, because I honestly thought at that stage that was probably it and that we would go to the election in the circumstances of Julia as leader, and it would be a very bad result.
Chris Bowen was with Rudd and other supporters at the Hyatt Hotel in Canberra that night.
SF: Did you think it was over?
CB: Yes, absolutely. I felt that that we’d tried. I felt with every bone in my body that the best thing for the Labor Party and for Australia would be Kevin’s return, but that we’d given it a good and honourable go but we hadn’t made it. I had the view that the most likely result would be a cataclysmic result for the Labor Party at the election.
Seven Rudd backers resigned, including three ministers: Bowen, Martin Ferguson and Kim Carr.
In the aftermath of the failed challenge, Gillard sent a message to Rudd via Anthony Albanese, offering him an overseas post if he would announce his retirement. Rudd wasn’t interested.
I just regarded it as laughable. I would never take it. I found it quite bizarre and pretty insulting really.
Gillard had tried to get rid of Rudd but failed. With little time and dwindling political capital, she fought to secure her legacy in education and disability.
Across a life time I’d come to meet Sophie Dean and so many other children with disabilities who were doing amazing things with their lives. I knew that we were going to make a huge difference for girls like her and for so many others that I had met … I’m also a realist and I could hear the forces amassing, even though Kevin Rudd had given a hand-on-the-heart promise after the challenge that wasn’t a challenge that there would be no circumstances in which he came back to the leadership … I was very very keen to make sure that I got our big reforms done before those forces could reach a critical point.
I suggested to Gillard it must have been hard gearing up every day.
I know it’s going to sound ridiculous but I couldn’t and I didn’t put myself to bed every night with my teeth grinding, ‘Arrrr, the Labor leadership’, wake up every morning like that either. I didn’t.
The prospect of victory at the election that year had all but gone. According to ALP strategist Bruce Hawker, it was replaced by a desire only to avoid a rout.
There had to be a change of leader and it had to happen soon. It was pretty much open warfare at that stage. No-one was in any real doubt that there were two groups inside the party and that the group supporting Kevin was growing.
The concern for party officials like Sam Dastyari was the generation of talent at risk.
What about the Labor Party afterwards? What’s going to be left the day after the 2013 election? What, my worry was, if you don’t have a Chris Bowen, if you don’t have a Jason Clair, if you don’t have an Ed Husic, if you don’t have a Tony Burke, if you don’t have a Chris Hayes? How on earth do you even rebuild?
To his great irritation, Bob Carr had been outed by Rudd’s supporters as a number in their column. A wily politician, Carr didn’t want to be the catalyst for a challenge, but he knew that Gillard could no longer give her colleagues what they wanted: a shot at saving their seats.
Look, one can feel sorry for her. But in the end, your parliamentary team have got to be sitting there having their bowl of soup in the Qantas lounge going home after a week in Parliament saying, ‘Gee, the boss got on top of them in the House’. You’ve got to deliver your team the whiff of a win in a future election. And the most rusted-on supporters of Julia, critics of Kevin Rudd, had no whiff of the possibility of the government being re-elected.
Sam Dastyari described the panic that took over in Victoria.
What you suddenly had was the polling coming out of Victoria and the phones kept ringing and it was the Victorians, all of a sudden they started calling saying, ‘Hey, it’s bad down here. It’s really, really bad’ … it was the realisation that the same problem was happening in Victoria that was happening in Sydney, and that suddenly sent a real shock wave through the system.
MPs implored Rudd to make appearances with them in their electorates to improve their chances of victory. By coincidence, the series cameraman, Louie Eroglu, had filmed Rudd on a tour through Fairfield in western Sydney in 2013. Chris Bowen was there.
It was an extraordinary day. It was [a] quite spontaneous outpouring, genuine outpouring of affection for Kevin. People were coming from everywhere. Word was spreading very fast that Kevin was in Fairfield, walking down the main street. There were literally hundreds, probably a thousand people mobbing around him, wanting to touch him, selfies, autographs. It’s something I’ve never experienced before and perhaps never will again in terms of an outpouring of raw support and emotion and people chanting his name.
Bruce Hawker sounded a note of caution.
There was a Messianic sort of a sense about his return to the leadership. I remember thinking, ‘Is this like Jesus coming into Jerusalem? Maybe this is just a bit too good’. But there was a huge feeling of goodwill towards him.
In focus groups, ALP market researcher Tony Mitchelmore found voters had maintained their connection with Rudd throughout Gillard’s prime ministership.
When you brought up Kevin Rudd at that time, they were emotionally on his side and against Gillard. So they almost forgave him the soap opera because they wanted justice restored. They wanted their man back, our Kevin.
Mitchelmore said the rejection of Gillard was irreversible.
Towards the end, it’d got so bad and that prejudice against her was so hard, I remember saying, ‘Look, it wouldn’t matter if she went up to every voter in Australia and offered them $10 000. They’d just say no and they’d probably tell her where to go as well’.
Politicians criticise the media for focusing too much on personality at the expense of policy. Kevin Rudd reproached me for asking too many negative questions about the blood on the carpet, as he called it. Paul Keating had criticised the Labor in Power documentary series for the same reason, that it didn’t contain enough examination of policy. But in 2013, whatever else was going on in government, the story was the leadership and a party at war with itself, as its two most powerful players fought it out to the end.
When the final parliamentary session before the long winter break arrived, Labor was losing ground fast. In early June, the party’s primary vote was at 30; weeks later it was down to 29. Bob Carr thought Gillard should hand the leadership to Rudd.
There was a morbid inevitability about her defeat, I suspect by a very big margin, and that’s why I reached the position that the kindest way of handling her was to persuade her to give it away.
Julia Gillard rejected the idea out of hand.
I wanted to hold back the last leadership change because I think it was an error for Labor to say if you destabilise and drag our political party down, you will be rewarded with the leadership. I thought that was hugely wrong, wrong for the values of Labor.
Jenny Macklin wasn’t prepared to put loyalty to the party ahead of her own personal sense of right and wrong.
I understood things were pretty tough, but equally, by that stage, I had taken the very clear view that I could not go back to Kevin Rudd, that his behaviour during the election campaign and since, the way in which he destabilised Julia, was unforgivable.
In those bleak last days, friendships and loyalties were tested and broken. Julia Gillard and Finance Minister Penny Wong had a hard conversation about what should happen.
Penny came to see me to suggest that it would be easier for me if I didn’t contest against Kevin, to which I did retort, ‘No, you mean easier for you’. I was not going to leave Kevin assuming the Labor leadership uncontested.
According to Brendan O’Connor, Wong’s defection was a significant moment.
That probably was the point where we lost the majority, when Penny supported Kevin.
There was one person whose support Rudd insisted on before he would challenge.
KR: Remember my criterion, which is show me there is an overwhelming majority of the Caucus wanting change, and the key part of that overwhelming majority lay [with] Mr Shorten and his supporters, who had taken the meat axe to my back in June of 2010. Bill Shorten in that sense was an essential demonstration of whether in fact there was a groundswell mounting to change the leadership.
SF: Because he’d played such a pivotal role in removing you in 2010?
KR: That in part, but also because there was a whole lot of people who would only vote in support of a change if that’s the way Bill himself was going to go.
…
SF: A number of other people have said he didn’t actually have the capacity to move many votes.
KR: People’s opinions differ on that question. But if you were to walk in three months before an election with the government split on factional lines with Bill Shorten, the Australian Workers’ Union pitted again you, then that’s just terminal land, and that’s why I was insistent that we needed a unity ticket.
Bruce Hawker explained why Rudd wanted Shorten in his corner.
He was a strong faction leader inside the party of course, but also somebody who enjoyed some respect as a serious player inside the Labor Party. But more than anything else, in terms of the immediate challenge, which was to get Kevin into the leadership, it said to the Gillard people, ‘Look, that game’s up. The Victorian Right’s now going to come in behind the New South Wales Right and the Left and support Rudd’.
In opposition, both Rudd and Gillard decried the influence of the factional chiefs: Rudd called them thugs, and Gillard’s condemnation of factionalism was a powerful statement of her political beliefs. But each depended on factional powerbrokers to win the leadership. When Mark Arbib was organising against Beazley for Rudd, it was a behind-the-scenes operation. The nature of Gillard’s challenge in 2010 left the organisers exposed, giving credence to the claim she was indebted to the ‘faceless men’. It haunted her throughout her prime ministership.
Patrick Gorman described how Rudd and Shorten came together in 2013.
In June, a discussion starts between Kevin, Richard Marles and Bill Shorten that there was more that probably united them in terms of views on the government then divided them.
Gorman said that on the night of the Press Gallery’s Midwinter Ball in Parliament House, Kevin Rudd had a meeting with Bill Shorten.
After a couple of hours of sitting around with journalists, with pollies, Kevin makes an early exit from the Midwinter Ball and heads up to Richard Marles’ office where Bill Shorten is, and they continue discussions that have happened a few days earlier.
Rudd recalled the scene.
KR: I caught up with Bill in our respective dinner jackets, which look faintly absurd … My question and position to him was, ‘Bill, I ain’t moving unless all your folks are onboard, for the simple reason that I’m not about to inherit a divided shop, thank you very much!’ I mean this is starting to become a very, very narrow timeline. The conclusion I drew from that conversation was that Bill understood.
SF: Did you ever ask Bill Shorten to account for his actions in 2010?
KR: I said to Bill, ‘And so do you think that was a smart idea?’ Bill was pretty open about the fact that with twenty-twenty hindsight it was a really dumb idea.
SF: Did he say that to you?
KR: I can’t remember the exact language, but I think there was a clear recognition that this had been a really dumb idea.
Rudd said they also discussed his demand for a change to the party’s rules about leadership ballots, to ensure a challenge couldn’t happen again without formal notice, as it had in 2010, and a majority of Caucus calling for the ballot.
Joel Fitzgibbon believed the Labor Caucus had no choice but to reinstall Rudd.
In the end, pragmatism cuts in. Pragmatism wins the day. And the Labor Party turned to the only person that they thought might save them.
On the morning of 26 June, Gillard had a phone hook-up with her closest advisers. Paul Howes was one of them.
PH: It was the call about whether she should call it or not. I remember her saying very clearly, ‘We have to end this for the sake of the party one way or another’, and I liked that, but it was a sad call. At the end of that call I thought, ‘I better go down’. Because I was trying to avoid being seen there, but I thought if we’re losing, I should be there.
SF: And why did you want to be there?
PH: Grief loves company.
Stephen Conroy said Gillard’s demeanour on that day was dignified.
She continued to be extraordinarily focused given the challenge. She maintained a calm that she’d shown the whole time during her period of being Prime Minister. She demonstrated her class.
Gillard called a ballot for 7 p.m. At 6.30 p.m., Shorten made his announcement. Patrick Gorman watched the television in Rudd’s office.
We saw him do that press conference. There was a moment that we knew that, yes, this was going to happen. Then very quickly, within minutes of that, we had the AFP in Kevin’s office getting ready for his return from the Caucus room.
Rudd won the ballot, fifty-seven votes to forty-five.
If Labor were decimated as a political force at the election, rebuilding and returning to government would take a long time. As Bob Carr explained, the decision to elect Rudd that night was an unsentimental one.
Under one leader it looked like our vote might sink to 30, 28, even 25 per cent. Under the other leader we’d lose, but the vote could be up around 36 per cent. I just thought of all those colleagues who were going to have their careers wiped out. And I thought of the conservatives who might get an extra term off the back of a really savage defeat. So we just had to make a cold-blooded decision, absolutely cold-blooded. Our chances of saving seats for being able to fight another day were greater under K Rudd than under J Gillard.
Julia Gillard delivered a gracious speech in defeat, acknowledging the invidious position some of her colleagues had been in, and urging unity. She found a way to address the sexism she had faced as Australia’s first female Prime Minister.
It doesn’t explain everything, it doesn’t explain nothing, it explains some things, and it is for the nation to think in a sophisticated way about those shades of grey.
That evening, before she visited the Governor-General, one of Julia Gillard’s last tasks was to finish a letter to Fairfax journalist Joanne McCarthy, whose work was an inspiration for the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
After I returned from the Caucus meeting I amended that letter and finalised it … She had impressed me incredibly, campaigning for the royal commission and telling the truth about some of the dreadful things that happened to people in Newcastle … I remember it because it had an emotional significance for me.
Media adviser Sean Kelly described the scale of the battlefront Julia Gillard had faced for those three years.
It was a perfect storm for her. Perhaps she could have survived minority government, perhaps she could have survived Kevin Rudd undermining her, perhaps she could have survived the carbon tax, perhaps she could have survived Tony Abbott, but throw them all into the mix and there’s not a chance.
Anthony Albanese offered a simple explanation for the complex relationship between Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and the Labor Party. It at least sounded like the truth.
What became clear was that the Parliament wasn’t big enough, the Caucus wasn’t big enough, for both Julia and Kevin.
Gillard’s narrative remained intact.
JG: The 2010 decision that I made was about a government that no longer had the ability to function because the leader wasn’t functioning, and no amount of looking backwards changes those facts. There have been plenty of people who have done incredibly gracious things when the toughest of times have happened to them. I’m thinking of people like Kim Beazley. So much of this history is explained by Kevin not making a positive choice in what was the darkest of times for him.
SF: I think he would say you made the wrong choice.
JG: And that is as it may be and he can go to his grave believing that, and he probably will.
Despite my repeated questions, Rudd would not acknowledge any vindication in victory.
KR: I don’t think that’s the right word.
KR: More of a sense of, for God’s sake, how can we save this show? I mean, I’m not trying to be terribly saintly about it.
SF: It does sound like you’re trying to be saintly about it.
KR: No, no, no. It’s projection on your part. I’m just telling you, if you were to run through a whole series of words to describe how you would feel, the ones you’ve given me don’t even begin to equate—they just don’t. I march to the beat of a different drum.
We filmed two simple sequences for the end of the series: Gillard getting up from her seat and leaving the studio in Adelaide, and Rudd walking out of the blackness of the studio at Gore Hill into a wall of light outside.
We had known for weeks we couldn’t give the final word to either of them. They couldn’t see what was obvious to their colleagues. Bruce Hawker put it simply: they were better together.
Gillard and Rudd together were a very powerful combination. She was everything to the Labor Party that he wasn’t and he was everything to the public that she wasn’t. Together they worked perfectly. Separate[ly] they fell apart. Neither of them was able to ever regain the respect and power that they enjoyed when they were a team.
The last words of The Killing Season went to an outsider, former British MP Alan Milburn.
Everyone is culpable in different ways. The hard question that the Australian Labor Party has to ask itself is this: how is it possible that you win an election in November 2007 on the scale that you do, with the goodwill that you have, with the permission that you’re gifted by the public, and you manage to lose all that goodwill, to trash the permission and to find yourself out of office, within just six years? I’ve never seen anything quite like it in any country, anywhere, anytime, in any part of the world. And that is something that no-one can escape blame for.
Reviewing The Killing Season interviews for this book, I thought about the interplay of truth and memory more than I had before, freed from television’s requirements of delivery and performance. We learnt early on that truth is elusive and that sometimes a close resemblance is the best we can hope for.
I thought too about the triangle of Rudd, Gillard and myself that existed during the making of the series, and the tensions it created as I moved between the two. Their approaches to the interviews were different: Rudd wanted to master the interviews; Gillard wanted to get through them. They gave a great deal, perhaps unaware when they started how the camera would get to know them and seek out their frailties.
Rudd is better at media: he understands instinctively the nature of the exchange. But there were more moments of unfiltered reflection by Gillard. I came to distinguish her ‘true’ voice, not the one that tells the truth but the one closer to her candid self, more rueful and more human than the one she uses to reproach her colleagues and less fey than the one she uses when she wants to divert attention from the heart of a question. John McTernan said she had a brilliant political mind. She tried to disguise it as if she feared I would draw a straight line between political acumen and the machinations that brought on the challenge against Rudd. But politics is her nature and the camera could see through to it.
An interview with Kevin Rudd requires patience. His moments of clarity have to break through the almost comical folksiness. His relentless message about the faceless men and Julia Gillard’s betrayal was more of a barrier to understanding than were Gillard’s ambiguities. The way through, I found, was trust, not combat.
Chris Evans suggested there had been a lot of revision about Rudd, that he was brilliant but that his personality was fatal to him. Rudd is complex, as Macklin said. People seem to enjoy their dislike of him. A series full of contempt was not one I could ever have made.
In his final words Alan Milburn had summed up the great betrayal of the era, not of the individuals but of the public who had voted Labor into power in 2007. Albanese was one of the few who saw the party turn its back on the public on the night of 23 June 2010. Does Labor see it now?
Julia Gillard remained guarded to the end. We walked through the basement corridors of the ABC after her final interview, down in a large props elevator to the back entrance where her Comcar was waiting, engine on. She told me as she had at our first meeting that I must examine the role of the media in supporting Rudd’s return. We said goodbye as formally as we began.
At the end of his interview, Rudd posed for a photo with the crew on the lot at Gore Hill, then left too in his Comcar. The crew and producers and I sat outside, drinking beer, talking quietly under the sodium lights. I hadn’t asked everything I wanted to, but I think I’d asked enough.