The Killing Season Uncut (3 page)

They came to Parliament at the 1998 election and delivered their maiden speeches on the same day, 11 November, a date steeped in significance for the Labor faithful: the day Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was removed from office in 1975.

Kevin Rudd said he paid close attention to Gillard's first speech.

Kevin Rudd (KR): Very much so. It's your best opportunity to learn what makes a person tick and why they are there.

Sarah Ferguson (SF): Given that she was somebody else who'd been picked out as a future major player in the party, were you also wary of her ability?

KR: Not at all.

Gillard touched on gender in her maiden speech, but by her own admission the issue did not feature prominently in her early parliamentary career.

The impact of sexism and the gendered analysis really didn't present itself to me until the days of being Prime Minister, so I would look at my political career, coming into Parliament being a backbencher, being a shadow minister, and I wouldn't be running a gender prism over all of that.

Gillard and Rudd joined a deeply divided Caucus. The ALP was still recovering from the bruising it had received two years earlier when John Howard's battlers had triumphed over Paul Keating's true believers. Internally, Labor couldn't agree on anything, including who should be their leader.

Over time, Rudd cultivated his national media profile with regular appearances on Channel Seven's breakfast program
Sunrise
, and writing op-ed pieces for newspapers. In the early days of his leadership, New South Wales MP Tony Burke said Rudd's ability to communicate was outstanding.

It was this capacity to move from simple, tight explanations of policy delivered in a fun, gentle way through to being able to analyse every scintilla of detail of complex areas of policy. It's a rare skill.

Gillard, too, had been building her profile, taking on the controversial Shadow Immigration portfolio in 2001 and Health in 2003. She claimed her progress was stifled by the party's powerbrokers.

I did it find it frustrating. Kim [Beazley] had this sort of set of confidants who were surrounding him. I was obviously the new girl on the block, but as I got more and more senior I felt like I wasn't being given the kind of access that one would have wanted.

Rudd was more direct.

I think we both felt as if we'd been pretty brutalised by factional processes within the Labor Party, in particular some of the right-wing boyos of the Labor Party.

Rudd singled out the Australian Workers' Union (AWU), accusing them of keeping him and Gillard out of leadership contention.

The AWU, they hated both of us in those days. Julia, she was, from the AWU's perspective, way beyond the pale … they regarded her as this evil force from the Victorian socialist Left. She certainly knew that she was loathed by them.

Gillard denied she ever held that view. Rudd said it was what brought them together.

I think that's where we genuinely bonded partly because of the experiences of being brutalised by the right-wing factional boyos of the AWU in the leadership contest after Mark Latham stepped down.

Former head of the AWU, Paul Howes, who played a role in the 2010 challenge, rejected Rudd's description.

This notion that somehow having a view and being opposed to someone is brutalising someone is ridiculous … In terms of brutalisation and bully boy tactics, it's not the way that the organisation has ever run. Frankly it's laughable for him to categorise that union in that way considering his own behaviour.

One of the most powerful AWU-aligned members of Parliament at the time was Wayne Swan, a former friend and close colleague of Rudd. He was frank about his efforts to thwart Rudd's rise.

I worked very hard during that period, when he [Rudd] was setting up his challenge against Kim Beazley, to try to convince people right across the party that this was going to be a difficult outcome …

I interviewed Swan for the series at the ABC studios in Brisbane in October 2014. The cameramen were setting up in a boardroom when I walked in to find Swan in his underpants, changing his trousers for the interview. He handled it more coolly than I did.

Swan was generous with his time throughout the making of the documentary but his antipathy towards Rudd suffused every aspect of the story he told. Rudd's view that Swan betrayed him over the leadership challenge in 2010 produced some of the most intense drama of the series. Although it is a documentary,
The Killing Season
drew its inspiration from television drama, and drama thrives on ambition and betrayal. To understand the claim of treachery, you have to revisit the men's original friendship.

Swan worked with Rudd in Queensland politics when Swan was a party official and Rudd was Premier Wayne Goss' chief of staff, the three of them known as ‘the troika'. Their families were friends; Rudd was godfather to one of Swan's children. They fell out in federal politics. Factional and personal loyalties, and the Labor leadership, were at the heart of it.

Swan maintained their friendship deteriorated as a result of Rudd's ambition.

As time went on we grew distant, and I did come to form the view that he was putting his own personal interests ahead of the Labor cause. I formed that view particularly during the various leadership tussles that took place in the early 2000s … I can't say at that stage I'd formed the view that his Labor values
were as shallow as I subsequently found them to be, but I began to have grave doubts about him, about his approach.

Rudd said it was the assault on Labor leader Simon Crean in 2003 that drove a wedge between him and Swan.

When they went in my view outrageously over the top, he [Swan] and Stephen Smith and Stephen Conroy, to destroy Simon Crean's leadership, they were at me to go out and make similar declarations and I just refused to do it. They regarded that as a breach of solidarity and I think that was a turning point in our relationship.

 

Rudd couldn't rely on a media profile alone to drive his bid for the leadership. Lachlan Harris recalled that through those years in opposition, Rudd was everywhere.

This is a person who literally put their life aside in the pursuit of the prime ministership for a very long period of time. Even in opposition I can remember Rudd would be turning up to the opening of a branch meeting in Wangaratta, a fundraiser for the local councillor who was trying to get onto the Baulkham Hills Council, and you don't do that unless you have energy levels like a superhero.

Bob Carr was the Labor Premier of New South Wales.

Others who might have been considered credible alternatives weren't working that hard. They weren't turning up, they weren't knocking on your door. You ended up thinking he [Rudd] was an inevitability. He made himself inevitable as Labor Party leader.

Swan watched Rudd build support among the party's powerbrokers.

He identifies very methodically the sort of people that he needs to have contact with, what influence they may have, and then works very hard night and day to cultivate all of those contacts. He is probably one of the most effective networkers I've ever encountered or seen in operation.

New South Wales state secretary Mark Arbib was one of the most influential people in the party. He would go on to play a decisive role in Rudd's rise and fall. ALP strategist Bruce Hawker knew him well.

Mark was a very serious player inside the Labor Party … Kevin knew that he actually had to have a relationship with the biggest branch of the party in the country if he was ever going to be the leader, and so he worked meticulously at that. He worked hard to demonstrate that he had what it took … People like Mark—young, ambitious—needed somebody who was going to show that they were bigger than the party they led.

One of the puzzles of Rudd's self-portrayal was the way he depicted himself as a political naif.

I think my critics would legitimately say there's a level of naivety about me concerning the deep machinations of the factional system of the Australian Labor Party. I think that's true because I tend to take people at face value until I have evidence that you cannot trust them.

Rudd suggested he was operating above the factional structure within the party.

SF: You couldn't have built the support that you did build in Caucus without a perfectly good understanding of the factions and how they worked.

KR: The bottom line is the reason they chose in the end, that is the Caucus, was because they'd simply got tired of losing, and this guy, beyond faction land, had what they concluded to be a rapport with the Australian people.

SF: I'm taking issue with you saying you don't understand the factions because I think you understood those power groups perfectly well …

KR: … The bottom line is, I think, most of these guys ultimately had doubts as to whether I was one of them. And what can I say? Their doubts were well founded.

There are different views about the importance of Labor's factions in the leadership disputes. Wayne Swan said that by 2006, the operation of power had already become less rigid.

I don't see this in factional terms. Anyone who tries to describe the jockeying in the parliamentary Labor Party through the 2000s and onwards purely in factional terms doesn't understand what is going on. When Kevin challenged Kim Beazley, he won elements of all factions. Strict factional discipline had broken down well before these leadership battles came along.

Throughout 2006, the polls continued to suggest that victory for Labor with Kim Beazley as leader was uncertain. In the polls that year, Labor was close to the Coalition and sometimes ahead on the two-party-preferred vote. But on the preferred prime minister indicator, Beazley was consistently 20 or more points behind Howard.

Rudd believed he could be the difference.

I remember one day looking around the Caucus room and asking myself, ‘Who can take us to political victory?' I couldn't see anybody. I really couldn't, for different reasons and different cases, and I couldn't see it happening under Kim.

Rudd didn't have strong historical ties to the union movement. The trade unions were Beazley's largest support bloc and his staunchest allies. Critically, the AWU, headed by Queenslander Bill Ludwig and Victorian Bill Shorten, kept faith with the leader.

In the scramble for votes following the departure of Labor leader Mark Latham in January 2005, neither Rudd nor Gillard on their own could gain a sufficient number to take the leadership. Gillard described how she and Rudd came to form a joint ticket.

During the course of 2006 we individually, increasingly, became concerned that we weren't going to make it in 2007. I and Kevin talked about those things conversationally and then those conversations became more structured. They started to involve [Victorian Left powerbroker] Kim Carr who was tick-tacking back and forth between me and Kevin, and that ultimately developed into a political accord that the best way forward for Labor was for us to form up as a team and to challenge Kim Beazley.

Gillard had visited Mark Arbib to sound him out about the leadership.

I went and spoke to Mark Arbib and within the first fifteen seconds after, you know, ‘Hello. How are you? Do you want a cup of coffee?', Mark said, ‘Whatever you're here for, you need to understand this. The New South Wales Right is not going to support you as leader. They're going to support Kevin Rudd.

 

Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) secretary Greg Combet, a Beazley loyalist, was deeply offended by the attempt to oust the Labor leader. Combet gave one of the most passionate interviews of the series: candid, outspoken and enriched by an earthy invective. He decried with more passion than anyone the culture that overtook the Labor Party during those years.

If anything, this tragedy of Labor in this period is about that, the humanity of it, the poor judgements that are made, the ambitions, the egos and the darker arts that some people are drawn to, the backgrounding, the leaking and the backstabbing. Awful things that I'd like to exterminate from Labor conduct.

We met Combet on the twenty-fourth floor of Sydney's Chifley Tower. With its sweeping views of the CBD and the harbour receding into the distance, it felt a long way from the barricades. Just before we began, producer Justin Stevens recalled that I had told Combet that the series' timeslot allowed some leniency in our use of language. Early in the interview Combet responded to the threat Rudd and Gillard posed to Beazley.

After the 2004 calamity where the Caucus saw fit to install Mark Latham and Labor lost both houses of Parliament, the Senate and the House of Reps, I thought, you know, fuck this, to be frank about it.

Combet was aware of the destabilisation campaign being run against Beazley.

I remember doing my block when I became aware that polling was being touted around Victorian union officials as an attempt to undermine Kim and install Kevin … It had become standard operating procedure in the Labor Party by that time.

I asked Julia Gillard if that was how leadership challenges worked.

Ah yes, you know, it is …

Gillard stopped, perhaps realising the implication of what she had said. She started again.

I can understand Greg's perspective. He was leading the trade union movement and the movement was rolling out an
incredibly sophisticated campaign about WorkChoices, so for there to be any moves and changes within the Labor Party was something that would cause Greg a great deal of anxiety.

Other key figures saw the political landscape differently to Combet. Then Shadow Minister for Finance Lindsay Tanner had supported Rudd's leadership ambitions since Latham left the leadership.

Prior to Kevin Rudd being elected as leader there was a mood of trepidation. There was a lot of affection for Kim Beazley, including from me, but it was his third time around. He wasn't getting the kind of traction that people would have liked, and once you've been in opposition for a long time it really eats away at you.