This was something that developed quite slowly really. I’m going to avoid using a particular phrase that comes to mind but one of those slow-moving catastrophes.
Ken Henry
AS THE INTERVIEWS progressed towards the critical months of mid 2010, truth became more elusive. For one thing, Kevin Rudd was unwilling to concede any fault, even those he had already publicly acknowledged.
SF: You said you were, I quote, guilty to the charge of poor organisation. You’d be making sure your day was better regulated, that you weren’t trying to do too much, that you delegated more …
KR: By the way, when’s that from?
He engaged in a battle of semantics over whether he had technically challenged for the leadership in 2012. When I brought him back to the original question, he still wouldn’t give a straight answer.
KR: You know something? Every political leader, if they’re honest about it, there’s stuff they can always do better. I think even Paul [Keating] would admit that. Hawkey I’m not so sure, ’cause Hawkey always walked on water. Even John Howard, I’ve noticed in recent times, has had a minor mea culpa about a few things.
SF: What was your biggest failing?
KR: In terms of day-to-day stuff, if you as the leader are focused on the four or five big things that a government is addressing, and it’s core narrative, then to ensure that you’re in the business of active delegation to the rest of your team.
SF: You think you have a problem with delegating?
KR: No, you just said that …
SF: I think you were suggesting that before …
KR: No, you said that yourself. [Laughs]
SF: I’m only going on what you said, that you were guilty to the charge of poor organisation.
KR: Well, ah, on the question, um, off the record …
There were a few exasperating exchanges like that one.
By now we had begun our second set of interviews. After Boston, Rudd had offered two further days of interviews in Brisbane finishing on Christmas Eve 2014. We said yes because we didn’t have a choice, but I predicted we’d all end up stranded in Brisbane, pulling crackers in the Novotel on Christmas morning, having missed the last flight to Sydney. Fortunately, Rudd rescheduled for early January 2015.
The night before we resumed, we agreed on a meeting to lay out the material I wanted to cover. (I had done the same thing with Gillard, but in her case via email to Bruce Wolpe.) We met at the Hotel Intercontinental in Sydney and sat in the courtyard bar, pretentiously named The Cortile. This time I felt I could order a gin and tonic. Rudd lent forward and whispered in French, ‘The man behind is listening in to our conversation. Let’s move’. We relocated to a quieter corner of the bar. The exchange was more relaxed than the first meeting. We didn’t talk much about the interview; again, I thought he was checking me out, to see if my intentions for the series had changed.
We met the following day at the old ABC studios at Gore Hill. Most of Sydney was still on holiday and the industrial zone around the site was deserted. Two men from the props department were painting new staging for the Q&A set. They were old-school types, taking smokos leaning up against a wall, complaining about the breakdown in industrial conditions. They weren’t interested in us.
The lighting rig had been set up to match Boston exactly. When I took my seat opposite Rudd, he made a joke about my jacket, the same one I’d worn for the first interviews: ‘I see you’ve got your Star Trek jacket on’. Not every female reporter would appreciate the feedback, but he had a point so I didn’t mind.
In the makeup chair half an hour earlier, Rudd had described with great tenderness a scene from his childhood. The makeup artist, Chris Sall, is a gentle man who listens well. This was Rudd in a vulnerable mood, sitting in the otherwise empty makeup room swathed in a purple cape as Chris applied powder to his cheeks. Rudd talked about horseriding as a kid in Queensland, and how he liked to ride as an adult in the Snowy Mountains, but he would never let the media film him on a horse because he knew they would ridicule him. It was true of course.
How do you balance that Rudd with the other one, the one described as a bully who mistreated staff and colleagues? Jenny Macklin’s answer to a similar question was: ‘People are complex’. I would add that few are more complex than Kevin Rudd.
The secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Terry Moran, was well placed to have a view on this issue.
Many have said that Kevin’s approach to government was dysfunctional, and it was in some respects, but in other respects a number of myths have built up around his time as Prime Minister. He was never personally rude to me, and I can recall a dinner with the most senior figures in the national security community where I said, ‘Look, has anybody actually found that Kevin Rudd has been rude to them’, and they all said, ‘Well, no, not to us’.
Moran went on to suggest there were other culprits.
There were ministers in his Cabinet who were far more ill-mannered and rude in their handlings of public servants than Kevin … Some people who, on the TV screen, appeared mild-mannered and charming were, inside a Cabinet committee room, foul-mouthed and abusive. And that does not include Kevin Rudd.
Lachlan Harris worked closely with Rudd as his press secretary for four years until Rudd’s removal as leader. He is loyal, but his interview was also one of the most considered of the series.
The reality is the prime ministership is like a pressure cooker, and what it does is it exaggerates your strengths and it exaggerates your weaknesses. People who think that Rudd is this wonderful person who’s on Sunrise and is always smiling, they’re exaggerating Rudd’s strengths. And this school of thought that says Rudd was horrible and you couldn’t work with him, they’re exaggerating his weaknesses as well. He was much more in the middle of the scale, just as all the rest of us were.
Gillard’s interview in Adelaide progressed according to its strict timetable. Gillard can be a good television performer. At its best her language is vivid: her description of Kevin Rudd’s office on the night of the 2010 challenge was poetic. When discussing some of the early decisions of the government, she could explain Rudd’s reasoning, but now that dimension fell away, leaving the single narrative that led to the challenge.
We broke for lunch and ate sandwiches in a room next to the studio. With the cameras and microphones switched off, I expected Gillard to relax or at least offer an observation about the experience of the interview. It never came. We talked about contemporary politics, Joe Hockey’s recent performance as treasurer: safe ground.
When we resumed, Gillard continued with the theme that Rudd was ill-equipped for the task of being Prime Minister.
JG: There would be times when, you know, a Cabinet minister would be wanting to see him and he’d say to me, ‘I just can’t face it. Can you do it for me?’
SF: What did he mean by ‘I can’t face them’?
JG: Just, you know, ‘I’m overtired, too much to do’. It wouldn’t have been an acknowledgement that ‘I’m psychologically not up to it’.
SF: But you saw it as part of the psychological problems?
JG: Yes, I did.
Gillard again was laying the groundwork for the legitimacy of Rudd’s removal. As she asserted at the end of her interview, ‘Kevin was unable to hold the weight of being Prime Minister’. There was no ‘alternate reality’.
There were alternate realities, of course, those described by her colleagues. Alan Griffin, Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, made the point that if Rudd struggled after Copenhagen, it was the job of his colleagues to prop him up.
I’ll use the example of Bob Hawke. It’s been well documented that he had some serious personal issues. Senior people in the Hawke government gathered round him and held him up. They got him through it and I think he was one of our best prime ministers. Now when Kevin had issues, despite some cursory attempts, they just cut him down.
Going into the election year, according to Gillard, the backbenchers were jittery.
JG: Post the Oceanic Viking, the mood in Caucus, particularly in New South Wales, was very dark. Then as we moved into 2010, I think people just didn’t have the sense that there was a plan. They weren’t sure how as backbenchers, marginal seat holders, they should link in to the government’s campaign strategy, ’cause they couldn’t see what the campaign strategy was.
SF: Did you warn Rudd?
JG: Oh look, I wouldn’t have put my discussions to Kevin on the basis of Caucus is unhappy. I put my discussions to Kevin on the basis of what’s the best campaign strategy for us.
This was the first time I asked Gillard if she warned Rudd about the mood on the backbench. She slid off the question, not answering it directly. I asked again.
SF: You had a much better relationship [with] and understanding of Caucus than he did. Why didn’t you warn him?
JG: Because the great motivator for solving these problems in my view wasn’t let’s fix disquiet in Caucus. The great motivator was let’s make sure government’s running well and we’ve got a political strategy to win the 2010 election.
Is it a deputy’s job to warn the leader that Caucus is grumbling? What was it about the relationship between them that made criticism of Rudd something Gillard couldn’t broach?
Gillard described how she saw the government’s fortunes at the beginning of that election year.
The early election prospect receded and we’re there with all of this stuff—CPRS, Henry Review [on the tax system], asylum seekers, health—trying to beat it into a political plan.
Ken Henry, who had served under three previous governments, judged the reform agenda as ambitious.
It certainly looked to me that he [Rudd] was prosecuting an extraordinary number of very, very big issues, more than previous Australian governments would have prosecuted in a similar period of time.
One of the government’s biggest election promises, an overhaul of the country’s hospital system, was months behind schedule. Health was yet another policy debate the government had to win before they could settle their campaign strategy.
Treasurer Wayne Swan complained that Rudd’s focus on health was to the exclusion of other priorities. Decisions were mounting and time was running out.
What happened, de facto, was that Kevin decided that his main priority was going to be health, [so he] put all these eggs in the health basket and pushed aside immediate consideration for what we’d [do] in terms of climate change and the CPRS, or indeed what we would do in terms of Henry [the tax review]. The consequence of that was the traffic jam that I had expected to occur came to fruition.
In March, after a long period of consultation, the Prime Minister was due to make a major speech at the National Press Club about health. His speechwriter, Tim Dixon, recalled the lead-up.
I give him [Rudd] a copy of the draft speech which has got the policy as it’s been decided. You can see that he’s on edge and he gets to the second page and he sees this line, ‘There’ll be a significant increase’, and he throws it down on the ground and he says, ‘Significant? Significant? I don’t do significant. I only do first time or biggest ever’, and then just stormed out of the room.
Kevin Rudd warned the states and territories that he would present a national health reform package at the Council of Australian Governments meeting five or so weeks later.
Health Minister Nicola Roxon crisscrossed the country with Rudd, visiting hospitals and clinics to sell their reforms.
We had many, many meetings on planes with bureaucrats and advisers and others sitting on the folding chairs trying to nut out something. It was often difficult to get the big-picture decision made. Kevin is really smart and he wants to know lots of detail, so he would often jump right to the detail when really we needed to make a more strategic decision.
She said she found the chaotic routine intolerable.
By the time we get into the Australia Day week where we travelled by plane from every capital city in the country doing health reform between these major Australia Day speeches, people were pretty frustrated.
Other ministers had to fit in with the Prime Minister’s unpredictable schedule, including Assistant Climate Change Minister Greg Combet.
I needed to get before my colleagues in the Gang of Four so that brought me into that environment where this kind of crazy city hopping was going on … The whole group would decamp to Brisbane ’cause that’s where Kevin had to go. You’d end up in the parliamentary offices in Brisbane, hanging around in corridors: this is ministers, parliamentary secretaries, secretaries of departments, other public servants and ministerial staff. You haven’t brought any underpants with you or a change of shirt. You’ve got to go out and buy gear to stay overnight, scramble for hotel bookings, the meeting’s rescheduled. You get the idea?
Rudd argued that he needed to prosecute the government’s case from the front line.
The future of Health and Hospital Reform [the package] was a political debate with the premiers and chief ministers. I had to win that debate within their own turf, speaking from their own hospitals. I’m their counterpart, I’m their peer, and I’m the one with whom they’ll finally do the deal and the negotiation. I did it consciously and deliberately and, perish the thought, successfully.
Roxon’s own relationship with Rudd was collegial but she says he put unreasonable pressure on staff.
He was always incredibly charming to me. I mean he was demanding and I didn’t mind that, but I didn’t like seeing him abuse other staff … He was rude to people. He was dismissive of their work. He would tear things up in front of people and stomp around.
Lachlan Harris observed the effect Rudd’s work practices had on others.
LH: Kevin put a lot of demands on people. He put a lot on himself but he also put a lot on others, and I think there were people around Kevin who felt those demands were so great that that turned their unhappiness into a vehement dislike, a kind of hatred. Particularly people with other things in their life: families, children. It really drove them up the wall.
SF: Why not you?
LH: Didn’t have anything else to do.
How do you arrive at a reasonable account of the business of government during this period? In my view, the most powerful and persuasive account came from Ken Henry.
The Killing Season is a series characterised by its fast-paced editing style: there are in excess of 1200 shots in each episode, more than most feature films. In the middle of the series, we slowed the pace down for a long exchange with Henry. For me, it became the fulcrum of the episode.
He [Rudd] took on a lot. It put his public service advisers under a lot of pressure. He was aware of that, by the way, but he didn’t think the pressure was inappropriate. Certainly with respect to dealing with the global financial crisis, nobody would’ve said the pressure was inappropriate, nobody. With respect to the CPRS and the Health and Hospital Reform package and the way in which the tax reform document was dealt with there were elements of discomfort, disquiet within the public service.
Henry observed that decision-making became less efficient, but typically considered whether some of the blame lay with himself.
KH: I should’ve been stronger on this point at the time. That when a prime minister says I need to have more on this topic and this is what I need, and it’s twenty dot points of extra work and I need to see it at 7.30 in the morning, that at least on a number of occasions I should’ve said, ‘Well, no Prime Minister. I really don’t think that’s a good idea’.
SF: Did you ever say, ‘No, Prime Minister’?
KH: No, I don’t recall ever saying no when the Prime Minister, or any minister for that matter, requests of a department more information, more advice. It’s part of the ethos of the place. You don’t say to the Prime Minister, ‘No, we’re not going to do this’. All I’m really saying to you is that with the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had.
SF: Is there a particular moment that you recall where you thought it had gone too far?
KH: This was something that developed quite slowly really. I’m going to avoid using a particular phrase that comes to mind but …
SF: What is it?
KH: I just said I’m going to avoid it! But you know, one of those slow-moving catastrophes.
SF: Train wreck?
KH: You said it. Yeah, that’s right.
SF: But you’re not disagreeing?
KH: I’m not disagreeing, no. Didn’t look like it at the time. But you know, in retrospect, that’s what we were witnessing.
SF: Was government prevented from functioning properly?
KH: Well, what does that mean? No, I don’t think so. Functioning properly means that they were attending to the things that absolutely had to be attended to. Those things happened. But no, this concern has more to do with the way that the big issues that the government had identified for itself to prosecute, that those big issues were not being dealt with as well as they might.
SF: To the point where somebody needed to step in?
KH: Yeah.
SF: Does that mean there is some justification for the Prime Minister being removed?
KH: Well, that’s quite an extension of this point. No, I don’t think so. Well, that’s not what I thought at the time. And even in retrospect that’s not the question I’ve asked myself. The question I’ve asked myself is whether there shouldn’t have been a deeper-quality conversation with the man about what needed to change.
I did not relish putting Ken Henry’s assessment to Rudd. Henry’s views could not be dismissed, like Gillard’s, as ‘post-facto constructions’.
KR: The federal public service is a highly professional institution. Remember we were in atypical times. You have the global financial crisis, and by the way you’ve got all the pent-up expectations around the delivery of your pre-election commitments. No, not one of my predecessors since Jim Scullin has had to deal with an economic challenge of that order of magnitude.
SF: Does that mean that your behaviour was abnormal?
KR: It means that because the challenges were great, I worked very hard. I also expected others to work hard. We were not elected to be an encounter group, to act as a national association for hand wringing and hand holding. We’re there as the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia in an unprecedented economic crisis.
The other major unresolved reform was the ETS. It’s tempting to say that the story of the government’s climate policy was the most disputed part of the narrative, but that sentence could preface a description of every major policy in 2010.
There are a few certainties. Rudd’s decision to shelve the ETS was a disaster, and the way the news broke, via a story in The Sydney Morning Herald, robbed the government of the ability to present a coherent argument for the delay in implementing the scheme. And Rudd’s statement in 2006 in a nondescript room in Parliament House, that climate change was a great moral challenge, had cut through, even with voters who didn’t understand or particularly like the idea of an ETS: they knew a core commitment when they heard one and punished Rudd when he broke faith with it.
Over time Rudd blamed Gillard and Swan, claiming they forced him into making the decision. So what really happened? Friend and ALP strategist Bruce Hawker saw Rudd soon after he returned from Copenhagen.
I saw him at Kirribilli one day and he was more angry I think about the way in which China particularly had conducted itself. I think it took him a while to really come to grips with the hard reality that this was an issue that was causing us a lot of damage.
A document prepared for the post-election review committee suggested that in February 2010, Kevin Rudd’s chief of staff, Alister Jordan, discreetly commissioned research to test the public’s response to postponing the CPRS. Rudd denied any knowledge of it.
I have no recollection of any such conversation with Alister. The fact that it was done and that Alister may have been party to such a discussion, I just regard as entirely normal. I had reached no such decisions at all.
ALP national secretary Karl Bitar was arguing for the CPRS to be delayed. Craig Emerson recalled a meeting with Bitar in early 2010 where the Small Business Minister thought Bitar was looking for allies in his efforts to convince the Prime Minister to abandon the policy.
I found out that the CPRS was on the nose with the Secretariat when they came to see me. Karl Bitar said to me that the polling on the emissions trading scheme was diabolical, that people had turned very strongly against it. So the Secretariat had taken the view that this thing needed to be dumped.
Lachlan Harris said the reliance on polling to drive decisions on such a complex issue was absurd.
There was a huge, huge misinterpretation of what polling can tell you and what it can’t. It can tell you what someone thinks of a policy. What it can’t tell you is how someone will judge a leader who changes that policy.
At the same time, Gillard was also arguing the CPRS should be postponed.
JG: Yes, at that stage I thought the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was something that we hadn’t sufficiently campaigned for and we had boxed ourselves in.
SF: You thought it was the right thing to do to delay the ETS and you were arguing forcefully for that?
JG: Yes I was.
During a pause in our interview, as we discussed Rudd’s use of the word ‘moral’ in his original climate change statement, Gillard rolled her eyes. It was a brief moment of candour caught on camera. Kevin Rudd claimed to have seen the same attitude in Cabinet.
Julia, to my great surprise, in a meeting of the full Cabinet, began somewhat mockingly to refer to the commitment on climate change as the greatest moral challenge of our age, and I was surprised by that, because that was the mockery that we had externally from Tony Abbott.
Rudd’s focus stayed on health. The media wasn’t pressing hard for an answer on the future of the ETS policy and the decision-making stalled. For Combet, the Prime Minister’s indecisiveness may have been fatal to his leadership.
No-one knew what the game plan was. We didn’t. None of us knew whether we were going to bring it [the ETS] back into Parliament, try and renegotiate it, try with the Greens to get [it] through Parliament, go to a double dissolution election. What do you do? And Kevin’s delay and obvious difficulty in grappling with such an important decision just led to this corrosion of confidence in his leadership over those months. You know, that’s not to be underestimated. The carbon pricing has brought down a lot of political leaders and I’d count Kevin Rudd amongst them.
Every now and then we found a precious piece of archive. One afternoon, producer Justin Stevens tore off his headphones and told us to come and look at some footage of Rudd and his economic adviser Andrew Charlton sitting at a table in a courtyard at Parliament House. The date was 21 April, the day the decision to shelve the CPRS was taken.
Imagine telling a story about a policy as abstract as the CPRS where almost every important scene takes place behind closed doors. Here was a moment when the cameras were present at such a scene, albeit without realising it. We pleaded with Charlton to come back for a second interview to explain it, which he agreed to do.
On Wednesday 21 April, with Wayne Swan’s third Budget only weeks away and the Treasurer looking to finalise the details, a meeting of a special Cabinet subcommittee was scheduled in Canberra. Combet recalled Swan’s demeanour that afternoon.
So that meeting, it started in Canberra and decamped somewhere else … [it] was an endgame where finally a decision had to made. I remember Wayne Swan, while we were waiting for Kevin to come to that meeting, he was very agitated about the necessity to lock the Budget away … He [Kevin] was very, very late to the meeting, like hours I think from memory, and he was out in the courtyard with one of his staffers. And I don’t begrudge him this, I’m not criticising him by making the observation. This was such a hard bloody call and he must have known how significant it was for him, and he was taking the advice of one of the guys in his office that he trusted very much.
There was no useable sound in the archive of this scene: the camera was too far away. Charlton described his conversation with Rudd.
We had a final look at all of the options to take the climate change policy forward … He selects one based on his belief that the key to unlocking this problem is getting other countries to move. And he believes that we can get other countries to sign up to another post Kyoto agreement, and that once we do that, that will change the politics in Australia, obliterate the Liberal Party’s opposition and enable us to get the climate change legislation through the Parliament.
This came at the end of a charged week for the Prime Minister. After some bitter battles, Rudd had concluded the health reform agreement with the states and territories and at the same time had been involved in discussions on the controversial mining tax.
Andrew Charlton (AC): After four months of searching for the right answer on this question, this was D-day. We were getting close to finalising the Budget and this was the Cabinet subcommittee meeting that was required to make a decision … The consequences of the Budget were significant. This was a big policy change, it flowed right through the Budget, and so leaving it to the last minute wasn’t really an option.
SF: I suppose the Treasurer would say you were already pretty close to the last minute by then.
AC: And he’d be right.
Rudd, however, maintained the decision about the CPRS did not need to be taken then. There was still time before they had to close the Budget.
KR: I was quite angry that they were seeking to push me into a decision to suspend funding for the CPRS in the May Budget. I needed to look at the papers. I needed to get my head around it and look at both the policy and the politics, and the budgetary implications. And that was my way of proceeding. And there was time to do that.
SF: Not a lot of time?
KR: There was time to do that.
SF: There were only a couple of weeks before the Budget.
KR: There was time to do that.
Rudd described the meeting.
My view was that we should continue. That was not the view of Julia Gillard. Wayne Swan backed her position on that, ostensibly for budgetary reasons. Lindsay Tanner was concerned about the fiscal implications of continuing with the position, but Lindsay also said that the policy itself should not be walked away from. Penny Wong was with me with it: we shouldn’t back away from the policy.
Rudd’s claim seemed to be at odds with his discussion with Charlton.
SF: Are you saying that you were not looking for a way yourself of delaying the CPRS?
KR: This was not on my mind as I entered those discussions.
Rudd agreed to take the figures associated with the CPRS out of the Budget. It was gone, at least until after the election.
Rudd became testy, insisting the ETS decision, so damaging to his reputation, was taken under duress.
I had my most senior colleagues within the SPBC fundamentally opposed to my continuation with this policy. It was a question of government unity at the most senior levels.
Gillard was even more emphatic in her response.
No, that’s rubbish. I said clearly on more than one occasion, ‘If your judgement call, Kevin, is to go out and fight this thing, then let’s go’.
Gillard had pushed hard to delay the policy, but on the issue of government unity, onscreen her answer is more credible.
Wayne Swan also disputed Rudd’s interpretation of the events.
SF: Kevin Rudd said that you and Julia Gillard argued vehemently against the CPRS. His suggestion was he had been forced into that decision by the two of you. Does that accurately represent what happened?
WS: Well, that wasn’t what I did. It was a decision that he couldn’t come to grips with and he’s seeking to blame other people for his own failure of leadership.
As with many events in The Killing Season, the depredations of memory also played their part in this particular story. In our interviews we heard conflicting versions about who was at the special Cabinet subcommittee meeting, exactly where the meeting was held, and whether or not a decision was finally made. Some versions had Penny Wong present; Rudd thought she joined in by phone. Combet was in the room in Canberra but couldn’t recall a formal decision being made.
It was a bit of a blur. Doesn’t that tell you how the government was operating? I mean that should have been a full Cabinet meeting with papers prepared in advance and a political and policy analysis, with strategy articulated behind it, the responsible minister leading the discussion with the Prime Minister so that the Prime Minister has the benefit of the advice of the Cabinet ministers. You know, when those processes break down, this is the sort of thing that happens.
Six days after the meeting, The Sydney Morning Herald published an article by journalist Lenore Taylor claiming the Rudd government had ‘shelved its emissions trading scheme for at least three years’. Taylor’s piece, ‘ETS off the agenda until late next term’, cited Budget savings, ongoing internal debate and opposition attacks as reasons for the decision:
as debate rages within the government over political strategy on climate change, the Herald has learnt it has decided to put the scheme on ice to undercut the “great big new tax” scare campaign, particularly after the failure of the Copenhagen climate conference and uncertainty over the fate of the US emissions trading scheme …
It was a bad start to the day for Lachlan Harris.
It must have been five-fifteen in the morning, lying in bed, receiving the alert, reading the story and understanding straightaway that a series of events had begun that most likely would end very, very badly … I don’t think it was clear at that point that that was going to lead to the unwinding of the first Rudd government, but there was absolute clarity. There was no doubt that this was a ginormous, huge political problem, bigger than anything we’d faced before.
Agriculture Minister Tony Burke was unaware his colleagues were considering changing the policy.
I had absolutely no idea the conversation was going on at all. I was a member of the climate change subcommittee of the Cabinet: the discussion wasn’t happening there. I knew that Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar had a view that we should pull back. I had a different view. But I didn’t advance it in private conversations ’cause I was waiting for the issue to come to Cabinet.
Jenny Macklin was on the Expenditure Review Committee, a group of ministers involved in determining the government’s financial priorities and shaping the Budget. She was also unaware of the decision to delay the ETS.
[We] got word that Lenore Taylor had the story and of course we all then had to put aside what we were thinking about and consider what the Prime Minister was going to say. It was a shock, because a decision actually hadn’t been finally made as far as I was concerned.
Andrew Charlton said the government wasn’t ready for the decision to be made public.
The leak meant that the government was caught on the hop. The government didn’t have a chance to explain the policy logic of the change that it had made and the narrative was defined as the government dumps the CPRS, which was a long way from what the Prime Minister had intended.
The morning the story broke, Kevin Rudd was on his way to the Nepean Hospital in western Sydney to spruik the recent health reform agreement. Media adviser Sean Kelly was with him.
Alister Jordan was in the car with us. Now Alister was very closely involved in a lot of things, but for him to be in the car writing the script for a press conference gives you a real sense of the gravity of that leak.
Kelly recalled Rudd’s mood at the hospital before fronting the press conference.
The advancers always find you a room that you can brief the Prime Minister in before a press conference. Kevin is working on the script that Alister has prepared. And he is furious. I’ve seen Kevin angry quite a lot but I’ve never seen him as angry as he was that day. Absolutely icy-cold anger.
Julia Gillard was critical of Rudd’s performance that day.
The press conference had made a bad situation worse in that climate change had been dealt with almost as a kind of afterthought, and the explanation given by Kevin had just not credibly come out. Now to be fair to Kevin, he’s woken up to the newspapers too, but in a situation where he was on the back foot I think it went badly rather than a little bit better than badly, the two choices for the day.
Rudd claimed the leak was an attempt to lock him into a position. He pointed the finger at Gillard and Swan and their staff.
This was demonstrably a premeditated leak by somebody who wanted to entrench the position, and they succeeded … It’s a very narrow group of people who had access to this information … There was a significant interest in putting this into the newspaper, locking the Prime Minister in, and that’s exactly what happened … Who wants to lock the Prime Minister in? Well, there were two very adamant ministers in that group and their immediate staffs. Draw your own conclusions.
Within a week of Taylor’s story, Newspoll revealed that Labor was behind the Coalition in the two-party vote for the first time since Rudd had become leader in 2006. But the biggest hit was to Rudd’s personal popularity: it fell 11 points, the steepest single fall in the history of the poll. That was a shock, even to Gillard.
I was quite surprised at how hard the poll hit for his standing was. I did understand that the government would face huge backflip issues, I wasn’t naive about that. But the big personal plummet for Kevin, I didn’t foresee that.
Lachlan Harris described the ETS decision as Labor’s collective failure.
My very clear memory is that every single source of advice going to Rudd told him to dump the CPRS. Now that doesn’t let Rudd off the hook: he has to take responsibility as the Prime Minister for that misjudgement. But so do all of the rest of us, every single person around him in the Secretariat and in the ministry and in his own office, including me. We have to accept that was bad advice. It was a huge, huge mistake, and the reality is it was done with the complicit support of almost every single source of advice and authority within the party, except Penny Wong.