The Killing Season Uncut (6 page)

KR: From the beginning I listened to Mark Arbib's advice.

SF: Did you trust him then?

KR: Trust is different, a difficult question. I always worried about him and others on this question. When people become super-acute at, let's call it machine politics, I always wonder whether they've lost their soul or are losing their soul on the way through.

Rudd's rumination on Arbib's soul was the first example of him defining his enemies in moral rather than political terms. Whether Rudd really believed this about Arbib at the time of Labor's victory is hard to know.

Meanwhile, a gallery of photographs was slowly assembled on the back wall of
The Killing Season
office. Half the wall was dominated by a portrait of Rudd, the other half by an imperious image of Gillard, their supporters arrayed beneath them. A black-and-white photograph of Mark Arbib, his face half in shadow, an image of political intrigue from Renaissance Italy, sat at the top of the ‘undecideds' column.

I think it is extremely likely that he [Rudd] was better prepared for any of this stuff than any political leader anywhere else in the world.

Ken Henry

T
HERE WERE THIRTY-EIGHT
new MPs in the victorious Labor Caucus in 2007. Watching the news footage of Kevin Rudd walking into the Caucus room in Parliament House, to a standing ovation from his colleagues, it's hard to resist the notion that the seeds of his demise were already sown. But that is a trick of perspective. In
The Killing Season
, we had to make the audience forget they already knew the ending.

Among those greeting Rudd and embracing Julia Gillard that day were Labor's high-profile recruits: former ABC broadcaster Maxine McKew and union leaders Greg Combet and Bill Shorten. Combet said he wasn't caught up in the enthusiasm.

I was very respectful of him for the energy that he put into campaigning and winning, but I was actually quite apprehensive. I thought, ‘How's this going to work out?'

The Caucus would also include a group of new Labor senators when the Senate convened the following July. Among them were factional operatives and union leaders: Mark Arbib from New South Wales, David Feeney from Victoria and Don Farrell from South Australia. The archive footage of their first day shows them being guided around the Senate, looking awkward like new boys at boarding school. Two years later, along with another new boy, Bill Shorten, they would remove the Australian Prime Minister from office.

Arbib and Feeney had both supported Rudd for the leadership; Farrell had been implacably opposed. A former union leader, Farrell wielded power over the South Australian Right. He was also one of the first interviews of the series. In a small ABC studio in Adelaide, I was struck by his nervousness and his dislike of Rudd, expressed in a halting voice that almost masked the intensity of his feeling.

He certainly had some reservations about the role of the union movement in his government, and there was a vindictiveness about him which I think ultimately the Australian public came to see and came to reject about him.

When Farrell left Parliament in 2013, he said in his valedictory speech that ‘the darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of crisis'. I asked him if he meant the Labor Party under Kevin Rudd.

That's exactly why I said that … His managerial style was completely unacceptable, the way he treated his colleagues was completely unacceptable, and the way he managed his office was completely unacceptable. He simply didn't understand what the role of prime minister involved.

Coming into office, Kevin Rudd was determined to end the influence of the factions over Cabinet positions. Confirming his economic team the previous September, he'd announced he
would choose the ministry himself, and his choices would be based on merit.

It was a deliberate choice because of what I'd said, that the abuse of union-based factional power had gone on for far too long … Julia was on board with that, and off we went. You know, we're not blind to some political realities, but you couldn't justify having people in significant positions who didn't have the ability.

His Deputy had the same view. In opposition in March 2006, Gillard had given a robust public speech at the Sydney Institute in support of reform, calling the factions a ‘cancer' in the party.

It's time to stop mincing words and to acknowledge that factionalism in the Labor Party is out of control and destructive.

Gillard said the factional system was outdated.

I thought the lines between who was in which faction really didn't make any political sense in the modern age. I generally thought they've turned into patronage machines [and] that doesn't have a meaningful politics to it any more. So I thought the leader should get to pick his or her team and I said that publicly.

The proposal went to the Caucus after the election. A few MPs resisted giving unfettered discretion to the party leader. One of them was West Australian Senator Glenn Sterle, who gave a research interview.

The rot set in the day that it was decided. We went to the voices in the Caucus. All those in favour of the leader picking his leadership team or his shadows—aye. Those against—no. I was a no. Senator Steve Hutchins was a no.

Caucus voted overwhelmingly in favour of gifting the new Prime Minister what he wanted. But according to New South Wales Senator Michael Forshaw, there were factional leaders who still resented Rudd's rise.

There were significant members of Parliament, factional operatives and union leaders, who didn't like Kevin and didn't want him as leader. In the end he won the election and they had to live with that.

Among the most powerful of the incoming union bosses was former AWU head Bill Shorten, the new Member for Maribyrnong. Rudd offered Shorten the role of Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children's Services.

West Australian Senator Mark Bishop said Shorten would have expected more.

Bill's always had a highly developed sense of his own worth. He's always had high-level ambitions … Bill was and is a skilful operator. He might have been aggrieved that he had to spend time as a parl sec.

According to Rudd's chief of staff, David Epstein, the Prime Minister was wary of Shorten.

They were both talented politicians and in essence they were like fighters eyeing each other off from one corner of a ring to the other. Kevin Rudd could see someone who was bright, who had ambition, who might be on his tail if he tripped in his political life instead of hugging his enemy closely or embracing Bill and husbanding that ambition, he thought he could marginalise him.

Julia Gillard said the final make-up of the new Cabinet was not especially divisive.

There never had been and never will be a ministry selection in any political party that doesn't leave a trail of broken hearts behind it, and that was true of the ministry in 2007, but it wasn't anxiety above the norm.

The Rudd government's first ministry was sworn in by Governor-General Michael Jeffery on 3 December 2007. Simon Crean summed up the mood of the majority.

It was looking terrific! We won. We won convincingly, defeated a Prime Minister. It was a very significant change and obviously the public had embraced that change in a big way. We had an authority, we had a support base. What we had to do was to work to justify that confidence, justify that faith.

British MP Alan Milburn, who had been part of the campaign team, wrote Kevin Rudd a note with advice on the transition from opposition into government. The advice was specific to Rudd.

It was a note about how I thought he could best run his government, given the personality that he had. The note really was about how could I save Kevin from himself. This was a guy with a steely determination, with a really forceful personality, with undoubted brilliance, but a huge ego … And that's absolutely fine to be Opposition Leader to do that, because people will forgive you everything. It's different when you're prime minister, because you've got people who are big characters in their own right and expect to be treated accordingly. And if you don't, that way lies disaster.

 

In the spring of 2014, political journalist Paul Kelly published his sweeping account of the Rudd and Gillard governments,
Triumph and Demise
. I interviewed the author for an event at a bookshop
in Sydney. I was chatting with Kelly afterwards in the history aisle when a man in a pin-striped suit approached us, a lawyer he said, and told us that Kevin Rudd's Apology to the stolen generations was a waste of time, a meaningless gesture. I wondered again at people's certainty. I had just watched the archive of the event, from 13 February 2008: the speech in the House of Representatives and the tearful faces of Indigenous people listening in the galleries and watching giant video screens on the grass outside. A cameraman had picked out an old man in the crowd, wearing a black hat with a feather, sitting upright watching a screen as a younger man next to him tenderly stroked his arm, both listening to Rudd's opening words.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

After the 2007 election, Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin resolved that the Apology had to happen early in the life of the new government.

It really became clear that people wanted the power of the first item on the first day of the new Parliament.

A week before he was due to deliver the speech, Rudd asked Macklin to find him someone who would share their story of being taken from their family. Macklin called Christine Fejo-King, who was involved in the preparations for the Apology. Her mother, ‘Nanna Fejo', was born in Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory and had been taken from her mother when she was around four years old. Christine organised for Nanna to come to Canberra to meet the Prime Minister and witness the Apology. Her story would be embedded in the Apology and the national psyche.

In late 2014, we didn't know if the elderly Nanna would be well enough to be interviewed for the series. She was: in December,
local ABC journalist Charlie King did a gentle, skilful interview with her in Darwin.

Rudd arrived with a paper bag full of mangoes for Nanna. Jenny Macklin remembered how Rudd put her at ease.

He was incredibly respectful, he was very patient. He didn't say very much. He let her talk; occasionally he'd encourage her.

Nanna looked straight into the camera, with her watery blue eyes, and gentle face, her voice breaking.

Nanna Fejo (NF): All mothers got feelings for their children and Mum fretted for me 'til the day she died. Like she was chasing that truck after when the government came and picked us up and took us, took us away from our Aboriginal families, that's right.

Christine Fejo-King: And that's the last memory you have of her?

NF: Yeah. Chasing that truck, crying. Yeah.

Rudd said that when he went to visit Nanna, he had a ‘neat pile of blank paper' where the words of the speech should have been. Rudd wasn't the only contributor to the speech, but he was its principal author and his language and values are felt throughout it.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations, their descendants, and for their families left behind, we say sorry …

To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry.

On behalf of the Government of Australia, I am sorry.

On behalf of the Parliament of Australia, I am sorry.

And I offer you this apology without qualification.

Rudd's speechwriter, Tim Dixon, remembers the power of its ecclesiastical rhythms.

What you see in the flow of language in the speech, if you know the prayer book piece, it's Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. The rhythm of the language is actually the rhythm of the way in which the Apology is delivered. It's really quite extraordinary to listen to.

Jenny Macklin had the last word on the Apology.

He delivered the Apology which people had been calling for, for more than ten years. He mended terrible broken hearts by delivering that Apology and nobody else can ever take that away from him. He did it.

 

Ken Henry said the fact that 2008 was a leap year was the only reason he could clearly recall the phone call from the Prime Minister's office asking him to join Rudd and Treasurer Wayne Swan on a flight to Gladstone, Queensland on 29 February.

Six years later, on a warm spring afternoon in a wood-panelled room at Sydney University, the crew of
The Killing Season
set up for an interview with the former Treasury secretary. For everyone who worked on the series, Ken Henry's was one of the stand-outs of the fifty-three on-camera interviews. His answers were self-deprecating (not an abundant tone among the political interviewees) and he was able to praise Rudd and also reproach him without rancour.

There are many scenes in
The Killing Season
that take place on planes and many more arrivals and departures at airports. The scene of the Gladstone flight, which lasts for one minute and thirty seconds, includes shots from five different locations filmed on two cameras over three months in Canberra and Sydney. At the Fairbairn RAAF base, from where the Prime Minister's plane departed, Louie Eroglu, Greg Nelson and Justin Stevens had thirty
minutes and a Defence Force supervisor telling them, ‘Hustle lads, hustle'. The final shot of the sequence is a VIP jet taking off into the evening sky, silhouetted against Black Mountain.

Rudd had been contemplating the implications of the unfolding subprime mortgage crisis in the US. Henry said that when they were in the air, Rudd asked the Treasury secretary to tell him how bad it could get in Australia.

The worst-case scenario is that the rest of the world simply stops financing our current account deficit, where it gets to the point where nobody, anywhere in the world is prepared to lend Australia anything. I said to him that the probability of that sort of thing is very low, but the consequence would be very big; it would be catastrophic.