The Killing Season Uncut (32 page)

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.