The Killing Season Uncut (31 page)

Albanese also viewed the public brawling from the voters' perspective.

It was self-indulgent, as if the outside world didn't matter, and I think we were doing a great deal of damage regardless of who won.

The lack of respect for a former Prime Minister angered Chief Whip Joel Fitzgibbon.

I was livid, and I made sure people understood how I felt. Whatever they thought of Kevin, at the end of the day he's a former Labor Prime Minister and other than Billy Hughes, I have never heard either current or past serving parliamentarians talk about a former Labor Prime Minister in that way. In doing so they were enormously damaging the brand.

Even AWU leader Paul Howes, one of Gillard's most loyal supporters, called it blood lust.

John McTernan thought the public humiliation of Labor's former leader was an unqualified success.

In politics there are some problems so big you can't go round them, you've got to go through them, so it had to be said. It wasn't said in 2010. It had to be said at some point. Was it damaging? In the end it didn't damage the party brand. Didn't damage the government's brand … It gave a freedom, a lightness of step afterwards.

On 27 February, Gillard defeated Rudd, seventy-one votes to thirty-one. Rudd's supporters had predicted he would do better. Chris Bowen explained what happened.

SF: He said he had forty votes. Why didn't they materialise?

Chris Bowen (CB): Well, in politics there's such a thing as a winner's surplus, I think. When somebody's going to win, they tend to collect more votes because people like to vote for the winner.

I asked Rudd if he thought about quitting.

I'm made of sterner stuff than that. If the intention of Julia and Wayne Swan and those around [them] was to carpet-bomb me
into oblivion, then I think I'd proven by then I'm a resilient individual …When you have a whole bunch of people rolling in the door straight after that leadership ballot saying, ‘For God's sake, don't go anywhere because this party is in for the shellacking of the century come the next election', that also weighs on your conscience.

 

In the aftermath of the failed challenge, Mark Arbib, one of the key figures behind Gillard's elevation to the leadership, announced he was resigning from Parliament.

Rudd said Arbib came to see him on his way out. There was no rapprochement.

He said, ‘I just thought we should have a chat'. I said, ‘So do you admit that you got it wrong?' He said, ‘No, no' …It became clear why he wanted to be there, because within twenty-four hours it had been briefed out to the media by Arbib that we had a reconciliation and a meeting.

Rudd then delivered one of his best lines.

You spin your way in, you spin your way out. There goes the heart and soul of the New South Wales Right … Off to casino land, the moral epicentre of that particular factional grouping!

He left a theatrical pause.

Was that too harsh?

Arbib was replaced by a stalwart of the New South Wales Right, former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr. It looked like a deft move at the time, bring much-needed experience into the ranks of the battered parliamentary party. For
The Killing Season
, it brought a lucid and entertaining interview. Carr also inspired the sequences
filmed with the key players, starting with a series of Bob Carr stretches against the wall of his office library. We added scenes with Griffin, Fitzgibbon, Swan and Burke in the corridors and offices of Parliament House, and the notorious shots of New South Wales Senator Sam Dastyari on his iPhone in Melbourne, a gift to the close observers who informed us it was the wrong iPhone model for that year.

Julia Gillard discovered Bob Carr's ultimate loyalty was to the party, not the leader.

I gave him the opportunity of a lifetime. What I found was firstly, as Foreign Minister, he found the workload very telling. Despite the fact that I supported him, got him the position—he wouldn't have had the position if it wasn't for me and my decision-making—ultimately he was not loyal or supportive.

 

Whatever satisfaction Gillard drew from success in the spill, it was short-lived. Like Albanese, Greg Combet looked on in despair.

It was absolutely terrible. I'd get into my office early and I'd look at the papers and here it is, front-page splash—the
Herald Sun
,
The Australian
… forgive me but they usually were News Corporation papers—more shit on Labor all provided by unnamed sources within Labor, and day after day after day of vicious backgrounding by people from within our own government. It's deeply dispiriting and I looked at my staff and I apologised to them. I felt ashamed at times.

Tony Burke said how hard it was to get the media to focus on anything other than the leadership.

It was like when you're trying to tune a TV and the static's there the whole time. I'll never forget announcing that we'd finally
signed off on a Murray-Darling Basin plan. This had been a Federation debate raging for more than a hundred years and we'd resolved it. Gave a speech at the National Press Club, went to questions from the media, could hardly get anyone to ask me a question about the reform because they had to ask about leadership. It became a complete brick wall to communicating to the public.

Burke accepted it wasn't all because of Rudd.

Kevin can't be expected to take responsibility for the Craig Thomson stories or the Peter Slipper stories. You never get static-free government. But there ended up being almost no space left for us to win arguments within the community.

The hung Parliament presented particular challenges for the country's first female Prime Minister. Despite Tony Abbott's commitment to a ‘kinder, gentler polity', the forty-third Parliament was toxic.

Tony Windsor recalls overhearing conversations about Julia Gillard.

There were people in the Parliament, in general discussion, but within earshot, that would quite often make derogatory comments about Prime Minister Gillard. Her attire, her body shape. I've never seen a circumstance where an individual man, woman or dog was treated like Julia Gillard was, particularly in the press, but also by members of Parliament. There was a constructed campaign to disassemble this particular person.

The issue of sexism became entwined with the tawdry twin sagas of Craig Thomson and Peter Slipper.

In November 2011, Labor Speaker Harry Jenkins resigned the office and the Coalition's Peter Slipper was appointed as his replacement. Anthony Albanese said elevating Slipper to the
speakership gave the government ‘flexibility', improving the voting margin from one to three. Slipper became embroiled in sexual harassment proceedings brought by a former staffer. The case was later abandoned, but not before its lurid details became part of a parliamentary numbers game. At the same time, backbencher and former union official Craig Thomson was under investigation for misuse of union funds, including using a union credit card to pay for prostitutes.

In April 2012 Slipper stepped aside while the case went to court, and Gillard suspended Thomson from the ALP. As the Slipper saga played out, Gillard had to endure one of the lowest attacks in Australian political history.

In a particularly moving piece of archive from September of that year, Julia Gillard emerged from the APEC summit in Russia, having just learnt of her father's death. Her eyes swollen with tears, she walked quickly towards a waiting car. Who could fail to be moved by her grief in that moment or her obvious regard for her father?

Shortly after her return to Australia, broadcaster Alan Jones was recorded at a Liberal Party function mocking her father's death. Trade Minister Craig Emerson had been with the Prime Minister in Russia.

When you get a radio host such as Alan Jones saying that her father died of shame, I just can't describe the horror of that, and I don't understand how people can think that way and have that in their hearts. There … was so much hatred for her being a female Labor Prime Minister.

Julia Gillard felt there was no boundary that couldn't be crossed.

I had to steel myself throughout my prime ministership, but particularly in this period of time. It did seem to me like tomorrow you could wake up to anything if this is how far we've gone. There just are no rules anymore.

Health Minister Tanya Plibersek said the party was too slow to respond.

I think because we left it, the sexism got worse over time, and perhaps if we'd called it earlier, the people who were so quick to engage in it might have had pause for thought.

In October 2012, the release of lewd text messages in Slipper's court case caused a furore. Tony Abbott moved a motion of no confidence in the Speaker. He repeated the infamous phrase used by Alan Jones.

And every day the Prime Minister stands in this Parliament to defend this Speaker will be another day of shame for this Parliament and another day of shame for a government which should have already died of shame.

Gillard said she was ready to ‘give it back hard'. Her speech, which became known as ‘the misogyny speech', was one of the defining moments of her parliamentary career.

I rise to oppose the motion moved by the Leader of the Opposition. And in so doing I say to the Leader of the Opposition, I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not. And the government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever … If he wants to know what misogyny looks like in modern Australia, he doesn't need a motion in the House of Representatives, he needs a mirror. That's what he needs.

In the Prime Minister's office, Sean Kelly watched Gillard's speech with his colleagues.

Oftentimes people watch Question Time out of the corner of their eye. That day everybody stopped to watch the speech.

At the end, people applauded. It was an amazing moment of enormously high morale in an office where low morale had become the governing principle.

Asked what he remembered of Parliament that day, Rudd said this.

Peter Slipper had been Julia's choice of Speaker. It didn't take a Rhodes scholar to work out where the Liberal Party would go with that. So I think in terms of flawed political judgement, this was not the smartest call.

He went on to praise the speech.

I thought it was a brilliant speech, and the reason I thought it was a brilliant speech was that she effectively named the then Leader of the Opposition for what ultimately was his view of women. I congratulate her.

The speech was watched around the world, but at home with the voters, the impact didn't last long. ALP market researcher Tony Mitchelmore said the response was as much about their dislike of Abbott.

It did resonate for about a month there. There was more-positive feedback, especially from women. People cheered her on again and said, ‘That's the feisty, witty, intelligent Gillard that I remember'. You've got to remember that Tony Abbott was never popular, so while she wasn't popular during that period, when I'd talk to people about Tony Abbott, it was equally negative.

The polls seemed to reflect Mitchelmore's observations. In a late October Newspoll, Labor's primary vote was up 3 points to 36, and they were equal with the Coalition on the two-party-preferred measure. But it didn't last. As Parliament resumed the following
February, Labor trailed the Coalition 44 to 56. It was the start of an election year and the polls were pointing to a landslide defeat.

Gillard was not prepared to relinquish the leadership.

I would have said it to almost anybody who had the conversation with me, that it was inconceivable to me in terms of the long-term future of Labor's cultural norms and internal values, that the kind of anti-Labor work that Kevin had been involved in, the destabilisation, the leaking, would be rewarded by the leadership.

Kevin Rudd's position hadn't changed. He was waiting to be drafted.

My position to media folks who ask me, and my position to the Caucus colleagues was a consistent one: where's the overwhelming majority? Haven't got one? See you later.

Anthony Albanese could see no resolution to the impasse.

He wanted it to happen, but he also was saying that he wouldn't challenge. I was of the view at that point in time that it was two immoveable objects, that Kevin wouldn't challenge and Julia wouldn't resign, so there wouldn't be a change.

The Parliament wasn't big enough, the Caucus wasn't big enough, for both Julia and Kevin.

Anthony Albanese

O
N 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.