The Killing Season Uncut (9 page)

Julia Gillard

I
N OCTOBER
2014, ahead of our interview, copies of Julia Gillard's memoir arrived in our office. The producers and I each grabbed a copy and began searching for her account of the leadership change in 2010. Gillard had never given a full account of that event. Now we expected to hear the whole story from her point of view. The book was entitled
My Story
after all.

The room was quiet except for the sound of pages flicking backwards and forwards, and producer Justin Stevens tapping the search function on his iPad. I looked up and said, ‘Where is it? Has anyone found it?' The book was oddly structured and I assumed that in my haste I had missed it.

There were a few pages about the leadership change in the first chapter, ‘Becoming the First', but with significant omissions. There was no more detail. Gillard had elided the facts of the most significant moment of her career and one of the most significant moments in contemporary Australian politics.

At the same time, she was unsparing in her personal assessment of Kevin Rudd and those of her colleagues who had gone on to support Rudd's return in 2013. Her former friend Simon Crean was depicted as a buffoon. Bob Carr, her choice as Foreign Minister, was a gossipy dilettante overwhelmed in the job. Even her close colleague Greg Combet was compared unfavourably as physically weak with a robust Gillard.

It reminded me of the advice she said her friends had given her, about not discussing Rudd's mental state, which she had ignored. She chose to put into print her ‘deep reflection' on his flaws:

The difficulties of his childhood had produced a man who craved attention and the applause of the crowd … There was never enough applause, approval, love.

Gillard's strategy in winning the narrative battle was superior to Rudd's but perhaps this draft was too early: a better book might have come with distance. At least for us, the terrain of the leadership change was not exhausted.

 

The arrangements for the interviews with Julia Gillard, in contrast to those for Rudd, were straightforward, but managed at arms-length by Bruce Wolpe. The main interview was scheduled to take place over two days at the ABC studios in Adelaide. It wasn't enough time, especially compared with Rudd's, but the request for more was initially refused. In the lead-up to the interview, her interaction with the series felt like something to be endured. I hoped during that time we would get to see a different side of her.

We hired a makeup artist who had worked with Gillard at Parliament House, and who was devoted to the former Prime Minister. When she came to do my makeup at the hotel, she noticed a book on my bed: a copy of
Tales from the Political Trenches
, the memoir of former Rudd supporter Maxine McKew. She frowned
and questioned why I would read it. As she worked, she relayed anecdotes about Rudd's bad behaviour when he was Prime Minister, urging me to agree that he was awful. It seemed no-one who worked in Canberra during that period was untouched by the schism.

I remembered Gillard before she became Prime Minister. I'd read some of her speeches in Parliament. I'd even copied out one of her best lines and kept it on a note above my desk for years. I knew how funny she could be. I wanted to see that Gillard, not the self-justifying version in the memoir.

A journalist needs to be able to build rapport quickly with people. By that I don't mean a sort of sleazy overfamiliarity but the ability to reach moments of genuine exchange without the benefit of a long acquaintanceship. I observed Gillard's easy complicity with the makeup artist in the green room before we began, and I hoped to see more of that relaxed demeanour onscreen.

The set in the main studio was lit like the one for Kevin Rudd in Boston. The only difference was the ‘direction'; that is, where Gillard and I sat in relation to the cameras. Gillard would appear on the right of frame to intercut with Rudd on the left of frame. Bathed in a dim light in a corner of the studio, Deb Masters watched the interview on a monitor. Bruce Wolpe was somewhere in the shadows, looking at his watch. The atmosphere was tense. It was a mood that never went away throughout those two days.

Gillard found it easier than Rudd to praise her former colleague and criticise herself. Her early responses were efficient but also thoughtful, as if she was making an effort to answer in the best way she could. I recalled the fey tone in parts of Gillard's book, which was completely at odds with the forthright person sitting in front of me. Her thoughts were more organised than Rudd's. We progressed quickly, but as we moved into more-contested territory, I noticed her language changing. I felt it before I understood it, a sense that meaning was receding. She liked the word ‘unpack', as in ‘I wasn't going to unpack all that detail'. What she meant was, she wasn't going to say what really happened.

The first hint of what was to come was in Gillard's assessment of Rudd's governing style in their first year in office. This was the beginning of her narrative of Rudd's dysfunction leading inexorably to his removal.

Before the global financial crisis really hit, already there was some concern amongst the colleagues, and I shared these concerns: that Kevin had kept a lot of the operating style from the days of campaigning in opposition and it wasn't fitting well in government. Now those concerns, how acute were they? All governments take some time to settle and get in the groove, so we were in that mode. Then the global financial crisis hits and it's a crisis where centralised command and control-style decision-making was called for and Kevin excelled at it.

Rudd's Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, said the global economic crisis had interrupted the adjustment to steady governing.

This was one of the things that ultimately was deadly for the Rudd government. Just at the time when you would expect that transition would be made from the manic habits of opposition into the more measured approach of governing, the global financial crisis comes along and suddenly we're in crisis mode.

As Minister for Education, Gillard had the task of overseeing the rollout of one of the government's biggest stimulus measures: the $14.7 billion Building the Education Revolution (BER). Deb Masters looked through hours of news stories of Gillard on the road, on construction sites, opening new school buildings. After days of this, she drew my attention to a feature of Gillard's behaviour I had not seen before: the way she teases and jokes with her male
colleagues. She is surprisingly tactile. In one scene, she asks Senator Mark Arbib laughing if he will climb a pole for her. I wondered if it was a mechanism for dealing with the male-dominated world of politics.

As the BER was rolled out, it came under sustained attack from the media, led by News Limited, which alleged the program was beset by widespread rorting and waste. The criticisms followed the attacks over stimulus spending and put the government under real political pressure. Gillard said they struggled to communicate the positives of the education program.

We kept trying to sell it but you couldn't get a positive story up about the Building the Education Revolution for love or money … I think selling the government's achievements both when Kevin was leader and when I was leader was not Labor's strongest suit. We were always restless for the next thing, that's inherent in reformers, and the patient, methodical work of doing the selling of them gets left behind.

In the archive of this period, Gillard was often accompanied by Mark Arbib, her junior in the education portfolio. It is a practice of television makers, knowing the final outcome of the drama, to select scenes that point to that ending. If Rudd's demise was predetermined, as in a Greek tragedy, the early scenes with Julia Gillard and Mark Arbib seem shot through with meaning.

Gillard formed a high opinion of Arbib's ability.

The thing that I came to know about Mark in that period was some very deep passions on the policy front. People would put and did put Mark into the class of being a party functionary and apparatchik who'd come into Parliament. I actually came to see more of him than that.

It was Kevin Rudd's decision to have Arbib work closely with Gillard.

My fault in politics, and I've said this repeatedly, is that I am naive to the extent that I tend to trust people at first blush. As of then, I had no cause to distrust Mr Arbib. I had no cause to distrust Julia. I was not to know that they'd become something of an internal cabal within the operation and [would] then work actively on the process of … changing the leader.

Rudd's chief of staff, David Epstein, said trust was a big issue with Rudd.

Part of the reason why trust is very important to Kevin Rudd is he trusts very, very few people. I would say deep down, you know, it would be his family, four or five close personal friends and a couple of political advisers. Kevin, I think, is someone who's felt that he has to be very self-sufficient when it comes to trust and as a result he's very, very economical about who he trusts.

Greg Combet was much less trusting of Arbib. He knew the culture of New South Wales Labor and their propensity for using polling and dispensing with leaders.

He's certainly practised in the dark arts, and I think it's fair to say that he brought New South Wales Labor Party culture with him to the federal parliamentary Labor Party, and I don't think that was a great contribution.

One of Julia Gillard's staffers, Gerry Kitchener, described the significance of Arbib and Gillard working together.

In the context of him ending up backing Julia to become Prime Minister, the comfort of working with her was hugely significant—a pretty major decision, being someone from the New South Wales Right backing so strongly a woman from Victoria from the Left.

Kitchener was a puzzle to me. He was one of only two people who volunteered to take part in the series, ringing executive producer Sue Spencer in the early days of production. Gillard and Kitchener had known each other since their university days, and Gillard had invited him to join her parliamentary staff. Another adviser described Kitchener as her closest friend, but he was not among the people Gillard recommended we speak to. I rang around, including asking Bill Shorten, to see if there was any background about him I should know. No significant information came to light, so we went ahead with an interview.

Kitchener said Gillard's relationship with the New South Wales Right developed beyond Mark Arbib.

Julia had appointed a chief of staff who had a strong relationship with the New South Wales Right. There was also a strong relationship with Karl Bitar, the national secretary of the Labor Party, and so on all these levels I think that there was a day-to-day working relationship that involved Julia showing off the skill sets that she had to people who may not have come across it so directly.

Karl Bitar and Mark Arbib were so close their colleagues nick-named them ‘Karlmarx'. Gillard's senior press secretary, Sean Kelly, explained their relationship.

Mark was very, very close to Karl Bitar and between them they had access to focus groups and to poll results, and those things were important to Kevin as well … He would pay special attention to the language that Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar put forward.

David Epstein said Kevin Rudd was sometimes cautious about Arbib's advice.

He was wary that Mark's advice may sometimes be too short term. Sometimes Mark, not being experienced in the federal
arena, knocked on the door too much, cried wolf a bit too much. Some people used to call Mark the red cordial man. They used to say that he just gets a little bit too excited, like someone has swallowed some red cordial and has had a sugar hit.

Arbib was central to Kevin Rudd's story, but he's a natural back-room operator who doesn't interview well. He didn't want to talk on camera. I asked to meet with Karl Bitar in the hope that if Bitar agreed, Arbib would follow.

Bitar and Arbib both left politics to work for Crown, the Packer casino empire. At the Packer headquarters on Park Street in the Sydney CBD, the decor felt cheap, with the faux plushness of a casino best seen by night. Bitar's was a corner office with an unspectacular view of city buildings and traffic. It had a bare wooden desk, a round table, some unremarkable prints on the wall and empty bookshelves. There, the softly spoken, polite Bitar told me he didn't want to do an interview because he had moved on. I came to dislike that phrase, not least because in most cases it wasn't true.

I had a favourite children's book,
The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr Benn
. At the beginning of each story, in a costume shop, the shopkeeper would appear, ‘as if by magic'. Mark Arbib suddenly appeared in Bitar's office, like the shopkeeper, as if by magic. He greeted me pleasantly, as if surprised to find me there.

My line to Arbib and Bitar was that both men had been depicted as the ‘wrecking balls' of federal politics. If the truth were otherwise, I wanted Arbib and Bitar to say so. The narrative, as I pointed out, would belong to those who showed up. By this stage we already had Greg Combet's view on camera.

All these political smarty pants. Where are they again now? Did they make sound judgements for Labor? Arbib certainly should take responsibility for a number of the events that occurred both in New South Wales and federally. This idea that you just revolve the leadership is a failed idea and demonstrably so.

Arbib and Bitar said no to interviews, but I told myself these were early days.

 

Gillard continued with her critique of Rudd's management style. This was one of the central issues of
The Killing Season
, the one at the heart of the rationale for the first leadership change. We'd accepted there could be no definitive truth, only the subjective experiences of each of the players. In Gillard's version, she was left with no choice but to act in the best interests of the nation. In the same way, Rudd tried to reduce the events of 2010 to a single base instinct, Julia Gillard's overweening ambition.