The Killing Season Uncut (28 page)

JG: I just don't agree with that. Politics is a hard business. Hard things happen. A hard thing happened to Malcolm Turnbull. A hard thing happened to Bob Hawke. A hard thing happened to Kim Beazley. A hard thing happened to Kevin Rudd. A hard thing happened to me. You can still make choices about how you conduct yourself.

Listening to Gillard's answers about the leaks gave a sense that at that time she was fighting for her political life. The honeymoon that new leaders usually enjoy didn't last long for Julia Gillard. She was on the back foot from very early in her prime ministership.

Victorian MP Alan Griffin said in the circumstances she couldn't have expected anything different.

The problem in politics is you don't normally get free air, and you certainly don't get free air when you put an axe through a prime minister. You're in a situation where … you're going to be judged straightaway. If you then call an election, you're not going to get free air because you're going to be going straight into an election. But the bottom line [is] it's pretty hard to expect that things were just going to go back to any sense of normalcy, because you've removed the normalcy by what happened.

 

Saturday 21 August: election night, and the contrast with Labor's victory in 2007 was stark. Sean Kelly described the atmosphere as funereal. By the close of counting, neither party had a clear majority.

The negotiations to form a minority government lasted for seventeen days and tested the nation's patience. Making a
Four Corners
program, I watched behind the scenes, camped in the offices of the three independents who would hold the balance of power: Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and Bob Katter. I observed Gillard and Abbott through their eyes. Gillard was much more confident in her negotiations, although Abbott nearly stole the show at the eleventh hour, besting Labor's offer of an increase in regional spending, aimed at the seats held by the independents. It was more than Labor had offered, and I watched Oakeshott in particular hesitate at the proposition before him. Gillard was right to say the outcome was not inevitable.

The history of this is told now wrongly, as if it was always inevitable that I was going to form government. That wasn't the
truth. It certainly wasn't how it felt. It was get to know these people much more fully and try and find a way of welding them, independents from conservative country seats through to the Greens on the other, into something that could look like a fighting force that could form a government.

Gillard moved first, securing the vote of Greens MP Adam Bandt. It took Labor to seventy-two votes, equal with the Coalition. The deal included weekly consultation with the Greens and a commitment to carbon pricing. The alliance with the Greens, formalised in a scene more like a wedding than a political deal, was heavily criticised by people in Gillard's own party and would come back to haunt her. Chris Bowen had doubts about it.

I think the Greens had no choice but to support a Labor government. If the Greens really wanted to make Tony Abbott the Prime Minister and explain that to their support base, well they would have been very welcome to do that, so I don't think that that arrangement was necessary.

Paul Howes agreed.

I support Labor doing deals to win government. I was concerned at the time about the nature in which that deal was done. It played into the narrative which is dangerous for Labor, that the Greens are somehow an extension of Labor.

Greg Combet argued there was strategic value in a formal working relationship with the Greens.

It's all very well in hindsight too, of course, to say that we didn't need to make these concessions to the Greens in particular to have confidence in the House of Representatives. There's validity to that. But there's also validity to the fact that the Greens had an important controlling influence in the Senate.
And if we wanted to form government and have their support in the House of Reps, we had to confront the reality of the Senate as well. It was a very successful government, the Gillard government, from a legislative and reform standpoint and that's because we had the Greens in the House of Reps and the Senate in that relationship.

First-time MP Andrew Wilkie threw his support behind Gillard, along with Windsor and Oakeshott. It was enough for Labor to form government.

 

Julia Gillard was sworn in as Prime Minister on 14 September 2010. There were promotions for the men who orchestrated the leadership change: Bill Shorten, Mark Arbib, David Feeney and Don Farrell were all included in the ministry. Gillard explained why.

I pick people on merit: Mark Arbib, Bill Shorten, these are people of real political merit, policy merit. I'd worked with Mark. I thought Mark was a person with real capacity beyond the organisational roles that he'd played in the party, and clearly I've got a very favourable view of Bill Shorten's capacities.

We watched the archive of the victorious Labor Caucus of September 2010, recalling Rudd's triumphant arrival in Caucus in 2007. This time he sat at the back of the room, applauding, with a fixed smile.

In the aftermath of the leadership change, Victorian Senator Stephen Conroy remembered a conversation about whether Kevin Rudd should be brought back into the Cabinet.

I think Cabinet had a discussion about that and there was a strong view put by many people that he shouldn't be around the Cabinet table, it would be too difficult, and with some surprising people advocating that.

Anthony Albanese opposed the challenge but thought Rudd should be excluded from Cabinet.

I felt that in terms of the change [that] had occurred it was difficult for him to stay in the Cabinet. He'd just been executed as the Prime Minister.

But with Labor back in government, and Gillard's commitment during the campaign, Rudd was sworn in as Minister for Foreign Affairs. He said returning to the Cabinet was a hard moment.

You have to take a very deep physical breath and a very deep mental breath as you do so and compose yourself. It was a strained atmosphere as I looked in the eyes of those who sought to avert my gaze.

Gillard said Cabinet meetings were better when he was absent.

There was always an awkwardness with Kevin in Cabinet. The atmosphere was always easier and freer when he wasn't there.

 

In mid September, Newspoll reported Labor's primary vote had dropped to 34 per cent. The irony was not lost on political insiders. Gillard had written to Rudd two days before the challenge telling him the party was in crisis because the primary vote had slipped to 35. Now, less than three months after the change, it was lower. The two-party-preferred measure had the ALP at 50 per cent, equal with the Coalition, but 2 points lower than in the week Rudd was removed.

Whether or not Rudd was responsible for destabilising the election campaign, Gillard was uniquely responsible for the error of political judgement that came next. In a television interview during the election campaign, Gillard ruled out a carbon tax. In the heat of the campaign, no-one paid much attention. In February, the
government announced its new climate policy, negotiated with the Greens and the independents: a three-year fixed price for carbon that would transition to a floating price.

Trade Minister Craig Emerson advised Gillard on how to sell the policy.

I contacted Julia, by email and in two meetings, at which I said, ‘After the election you must not concede that you are pressing ahead with a carbon tax. This is an emissions trading scheme with a fixed price for three years'… and the response I got was, ‘We're not going to get drawn into a game of semantics here. If people want to describe it as a carbon tax, well, it's a carbon tax because the price was fixed'. It's clear that Julia didn't calculate the damage that that would do to her

In an interview on the ABC's
7.30 Report
in February 2011, Gillard said it publicly.

Heather Ewart (HE): With this carbon tax—you do concede it's a carbon tax, do you not?

JG: Oh look, I'm happy to use the word ‘tax', Heather. I understand some silly little collateral debate has broken out today. I mean, how ridiculous. This is a market-based mechanism to price carbon.

HE: Well, with this carbon tax then, it does seem certain that fuel and electricity prices will go up. How are you going to be sure that you can compensate for that, especially for low-income earners?

JG: Well, can I say this is a market-based mechanism to price carbon. It has a fixed price period at the start, a price that will be fixed. That is effectively a tax and I'm happy to say the word ‘tax'.

Gillard explained her thinking, that logic should be enough to carry the argument.

What I did decide was if the assertion, ‘This is a fixed price, it's just like a tax isn't it, it's effectively a carbon tax, isn't this a carbon tax', that if that was put to me on the
7.30 Report
or anywhere else, that I wasn't going to chase a rabbit down a burrow about the naming, that I would try and answer it on the substance.

Gillard's deputy, Wayne Swan, admitted their political misjudgement.

We lost control of that debate. We should have more vigorously contested its characterisation as a carbon tax.

A few months earlier Gillard had criticised Rudd for failing to deliver clear messages on government policy. Now judgement on her own message had deserted her completely.

Greg Combet also advised against calling the scheme a tax, but by a piece of ill fortune he had not seen the campaign promise and did not know how significant the mistake would be.

The concession that we're implementing a carbon tax, and then the playing to the community of the election commitment that there'd be no carbon tax, that did cut through the community within twenty-four hours like a scalpel.

Alan Griffin also said the effect was immediate.

In politics, tax is a four-letter word and words are weapons. And the bottom line is once that word was said, then effectively it surrendered a significant component of political ground around the debate, and we were always on the back foot from that moment.

SF: Do you remember your immediate thoughts when you became aware of it?

AG: Yes. They're completely unprintable.

For Simon Crean, it was about breaking the commitment.

It's one thing to say, ‘Call it what you want', but when you've made a watertight promise about what you're not going to do, it's even more important to argue why it isn't a tax … there's not much you can do, once you've said it. But it was wrong, and in the context of elections these days, broken promises can be lethal.

Rudd had broken his promise to introduce an ETS and paid a huge price. Now Gillard had broken her pledge too. Tony Mitchelmore put it simply.

The carbon tax wasn't about the carbon tax. The carbon tax was about ‘the lie'.

In the Newspoll following the scheme's announcement, Labor's primary vote fell 6 points to 30 per cent. Gillard's satisfaction rating dropped 11 points to 39 per cent—exactly the same fall suffered by Kevin Rudd after the decision on the ETS.

Inside the government, some MPs, including Alan Griffin, lost faith in the leadership.

It was damaging internally, not only in respect to the fact that a lot of people said, ‘Oh my God', but it's then what came through in the opinion polls, in the weeks immediately following that, where we saw the massive dive in our primary vote. That was really the beginning of the end.

Greg Combet said it was a gift for Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and conservatives in the media.

Tony Abbott was a dramatically effective campaigner once he had that bit between the teeth: the carbon tax. All sorts of fruit loops came out of the dark corners of the country. And mixed
up in that I think was misogyny. You know, a hatred for a woman as Prime Minister, it was palpable from some of those loonies that descended upon Parliament at the time, ‘Ditch the witch' and all the rest. Like truly disgusting misogyny mixed in with far-right politics. Really, some of the elements there were really weird. Whipped up into a frenzy by Alan Jones and other shock jocks and the like. And News Corporation piling in on top—they saw their opportunity and they took it.

Reviewing the archive of the period, distance from the events made the ugliness more shocking. Gross sexism was not an unknown phenomenon, but the scale and the intensity of the attack seemed to mark a new low.

Outside Parliament House, Tony Abbott appeared at one of the rallies for ‘honest government'. He claimed not to have seen the signs behind him depicting Gillard as a witch, a bitch and a liar. Gillard was incensed.

My reaction to that was anger, very hot anger—not distress, anger. People like Alan Jones willing to say anything about me, call me anything, no sense of respect, no boundaries about the political office. For the Leader of the Opposition to go and stand in front of that, I have had Liberal colleagues of his tell me that it is inconceivable that he did not see and read those signs before he stood in front of them. That was giving a tick, an open door to this ugliness that I thought was a great moral wrong. I really don't know why this wasn't a career-ending moment for Tony Abbott. Sexism is no better than racism.

In his interview, recalling the rallies brought Craig Emerson to tears.

I felt like vomiting when I saw the signs. ‘Ditch the witch' is bad enough but ‘Bob Brown's bitch' is so deeply and utterly offensive to any woman in this country, let alone the Prime Minister of Australia, and to have eleven members of the
Coalition standing up on that truck with that sign behind them, at least two of whom were women, calling the Prime Minister a bitch and they don't see what this issue is. I just wonder if we've made any progress in this country in the last half-century.

Paul Howes shared Emerson's point of view and was equally passionate in his account. Howes became a close friend of Julia Gillard and his interview was one of the most emotional of the series. He came to the ABC with a minder from KPMG, the professional services firm where he worked, presumably to keep him on track if he wandered off the political path. I wondered what she made of Howes' poignant, tearful recollections of the period.