Rudd’s press secretary, Fiona Sugden, ran down to Sherry’s function.
I caught Rudd’s eye across the room and I think that he knew and he walked over to me. I was like, ‘We’ve got to get out of here right now’. And just as we walked through the doors to go back into the Prime Minister’s press office, I could see members of the Press Gallery, the camera crews running down the hallways to try and capture an image of Kevin walking back into his office.
In her office, Gillard prepared to meet with Rudd and John Faulkner, whom Rudd had requested be present at the meeting. Faulkner will not go on the record about what happened in the room. I asked Gillard and Rudd if they would release him from his commitment to keep the details of the meeting confidential. Rudd said he wanted Faulkner to speak; Gillard answered by correctly asserting that he would refuse.
I asked Gillard when she made up her mind to challenge Rudd.
Not until very close to going to Kevin’s office to see him. I was feeling, it’s really almost impossible to catch it in a word. I was feeling not at all settled, very at sea, just not sure what I should do next. So I did take some time to myself before I went round to see Kevin.
Rudd, meanwhile, was waiting for her arrival, acutely aware of time passing.
There is a long time which elapses, and therefore here is the immediate practical political dilemma. You did not know at this stage whether she’s launching a challenge or not, so where’s Julia?
For Gillard the moment had arrived.
SF: Walking to Kevin Rudd’s office you had Bill Shorten and Mark Arbib and David Feeney, politicians with a lot of experience but not the top tier of government behind you, you must have felt isolated?
JG: There’s no team that you can have around you that takes away the loneliness of that moment. It comes down to you and I take responsibility for my actions. I’ve never tried to suggest that I was inveigled or persuaded or anything like that by others. You couldn’t make a bigger decision than I was required to make that day and you couldn’t have felt more lonely in the moment than I did.
…
I walked round to Kevin’s office thinking overwhelmingly this discussion was going to end with me asking him for a leadership ballot, that I couldn’t see another way forward.
We had a single fleeting shot of Gillard on her way to Rudd’s office. It is obscured by two men walking dully along in front of her, like the moment of Icarus’ fall in Auden’s poem, oblivious to the extraordinary events behind them. For the only time in the series, we had to slow the picture down.
There was very little material filmed on the day of the challenge and hours of story to tell. The challenge took the Press Gallery by surprise and by the time they had scrambled into action, parliamentary security was able to keep them corralled away from the Prime Minister’s office. From the point when Gillard entered Rudd’s office, there were no images at all. Tony Abbott allowed our crew to film in the Prime Minister’s courtyard at night; I think we used every shot.
Gillard described the scene in the room.
We were seated in the Prime Minister’s office, which is furnished with very big 1980s semicircular burnt-orange chairs. We were sitting on these very big chairs, the three of us, and in the room it felt still and incredibly tense: cut-the-air-with-a-knife tense.
The one thing that neither Rudd nor Gillard disputed was that it was a long conversation. Rudd said he sought to understand Gillard’s behaviour.
And so when she finally came to the point of saying because of where we are on the mining tax and because of where we are on asylum seekers policy, that she didn’t believe that under my leadership we could win the next election, I said, ‘We’re on 52 per cent in the polls. Have you looked at where political parties have been at this point of the political cycle in their first terms in previous governments? We’re in a better position than Howard, we’re in a better position than Keating, comparable position to Hawke’.
Julia Gillard said the conversation was about more than that.
My set of concerns was about the functionality of the government. So broader than just, oh gee, there’s been some not so nice polls, much broader than that.
She said she let the conversation go on too long.
JG: That wasn’t really the right thing by Kevin and I don’t think it was the right thing by the Labor Party.
SF: Did you feel guilty?
JG: Oh yes, you do in the same way I felt very guilty when Kevin and I challenged Kim Beazley. That came with a sense of emotional sadness, hardness, and this came with even more.
Rudd rejected the comparison with Beazley.
Kim Beazley was Leader of the Opposition. Kim Beazley had already contested a number of elections, that’s the second point. Thirdly, we were ahead in the opinion polls and the election was entirely winnable. Julia often glosses over the context of all of this. The bottom line was deep Shakespearean ambition at play and with no real idea, I think, as to how the Australian public would react. Ambition, ambition, naked ambition.
In Rudd’s lengthy but detailed recollection of how the meeting proceeded, he said he put a suggestion to Gillard, one that would give him more time.
I said … ‘If John Faulkner, a person who we both know and respect, judges by the time the election is due that based on the poll research of the party and his political judgement, that I cannot win, I will at that point step down from the leadership, and would do so willingly. We aren’t there at this point; we’re just not there at this point’. Then she began discussing the detail of how that might work and when such a judgement could be made by Faulkner, who’s sitting there looking a bit concerned at this stage that he’s going to be the person charged with the wisdom of Solomon! But it struck me as the most creative solution to a crisis which she and others had brought on.
While Gillard was in the meeting and out of reach, Gerry Kitchener said he was fielding calls from Bill Shorten and Kim Carr.
I was in the office and I took maybe four phone calls from Bill Shorten, I took maybe three phone calls from Kim Carr, wanting to know whether she had made a decision to challenge. They both expressed concern that she was going to be beaten up in Rudd’s office and that she needed to be got out of there as quickly as possible.
One of the most memorable scenes of the night was filmed by news crews in a Vietnamese restaurant in the Canberra suburb of Kingston, where Shorten was having dinner with Mark Bishop, Don Farrell and others. Shorten left the restaurant to make or take calls on his Blackberry, pacing the pavement as he did so. Shorten would repeatedly claim that the calls were to his child’s school-teacher, but Gerry Kitchener said they were also about Gillard and that, as time passed, Shorten became increasingly anxious.
Progressively as the evening went on, his phone calls became more concerned about what the result may be, and I think the last phone call he said to me, ‘Gerry, we’re all fucked if she doesn’t do this’. He was obviously very concerned now that it was out and that he was up to his neck in it.
We gave Bill Shorten many opportunities to tell his story of the night and the events leading up to it, opportunities to correct the picture drawn by others. He declined.
Meanwhile, a number of Cabinet ministers had gathered in Wayne Swan’s office, among them Anthony Albanese, who seemed to be operating as the party’s conscience that night. He was one of the very few who predicted the disastrous consequences.
I had a discussion [with] the old Beazley group: Wayne Swan, Stephen Smith, Jenny Macklin, Stephen Conroy and Chris Bowen, who wasn’t part of that group but came in as well. And I put the view strongly there that the senior Cabinet people needed to step up, that this to me seemed to be driven from outside the experienced hands. The people who were advocating this happening seemed to have in common that they were in their first term of Parliament and so weren’t experienced with opposition or how hard it was to get there [into power].
According to Albanese, Gillard’s senior colleagues were not enthusiastic about the challenge.
/> They were concerned because if it had reached a point whereby there was a challenge, if Julia lost, then what happens to her? … I remember very vividly leaving the room and saying, ‘If this occurs, we will kill two Labor Prime Ministers’ … I don’t question the motives of people who had a different perspective from where I came down, which was that this was the original sin which once committed would be a stain on the Labor Party which couldn’t be removed by one week or [a] couple of months to the election campaign.
Rudd recalled that, back in the meeting, Gillard accepted the solution that gave him a reprieve.
I reached out my hand and she shook it. I said, ‘So we have a deal’. After we’d shaken hands, the whole temperature in the room came down, not just in my mind, in Faulkner’s mind. And with her there was a degree of calm, a resolution in the room. And this was not my imagination. Hands had been shaken on the basis of an explicit proposition. John Faulkner is the witness to that.
Gillard acknowledged they talked about giving Rudd more time, but rejected his claim that she agreed. It’s a confused position. The transactional, efficient Julia Gillard seemed to have vanished for a while in Rudd’s office that night.
JG: My recollection is that there was discussion of Kevin having more time and seeing if he could fix it. I don’t recall the bit about John Faulkner being the sort of person who did the arbitration about whether or not that was possible. I do recall a discussion about Kevin having more time and I participated in that discussion and gave Kevin some false hope, I absolutely concede that, when I shouldn’t have. I mean out of everything that’s ever been said about that night, it sounds ironic for me to say it now, but I should have been more straightforward and more clinical and less discursive. Being discursive did give Kevin false hope and that’s down to me. That’s my fault.
SF: You say false hope. Did you agree with Kevin Rudd that he could retain the prime ministership, stay Prime Minister?
JG: I don’t, no, I did not agree. I can understand why Kevin felt that there was a potential wedge of sun on the horizon.
Rudd responded to Gillard’s odd analogy.
KR: An agreement is an agreement. Look, I’m a very specific person. I mean I’m the guy who [was] regularly attacked for using the term ‘programmatic specificity’, you know? I’m a very concrete person when it comes to what’s the problem, how do we fix it, what’s the resolution? Here is my proposition, do you agree with it? Yes. Shake hands.
SF: So ‘potential wedge of sun’ doesn’t cover it?
KR: She agreed. She not only agreed, but she had interrogated the detail of the formula on the way through. That’s not a wedge of hope, that’s not a impression. What Julia is doing, having been the principal player in this leadership coup, and then discovering after the event that she has blood all over her hands and the Australian public don’t like this, she’s again in the business of reinventing the historical record.
I asked Gillard, given how much was at stake, how it could be so unclear.
Well, we talked for a long time, a very long time, and we talked in a situation where I felt that Kevin was in denial and just not listening to the messages I was trying to give him … I do believe it’s possible that Kevin thought it’s all going to be okay and that’s my fault.
This was the first Australian leadership challenge with live running commentary, on Sky News, which broadcast the story through the night. Albanese interrupted the meeting in Rudd’s office.
This meeting went on for too long. I entered the room and said to them in fairly impolite terms, ‘What are you doing? The government is melting down’ … There was a whole of lot of misinformation going around. And I just said to them, ‘This meeting cannot go on. You’ve got to make a decision and it can’t continue’, and left them.
Gillard said Albanese’s message shattered the stillness of the room.
When Albo came in, that was the first sense that there was that contrast between this quiet office, two people talking, Faulkner sitting there and the chaos of outside: 24-hour TV camera people pounding everywhere, people on mobile phones getting dragged back from restaurants and all the rest of it. The contrast couldn’t have been starker.
Her chief of staff, Amanda Lampe, insisted on going into the meeting to pass a note to Gillard.
I can’t remember the exact words but it was along the lines of, basically, that it was now on TV. Her meeting had been leaked to the media and we needed to speak to her. She needed to be aware of it.
Kitchener was with Lampe when she wrote that note. He recalled that the message was short and sharp.
I think something along the lines of, ‘You’ve got the numbers. Get out of the meeting’.
The meeting broke up temporarily, Gillard leaving Rudd’s office with Lampe to make a phone call. Rudd went to the toilet.
I have a call of nature, because I’d been sitting there for a long time! So I’m off to the loo, which is out the back of the Prime Minister’s office, and there I’ve got Alister and Faulkner and Albo in deep conversation. I said, ‘We have a conclusion, we have a solution, we have an agreement, this is it. Please get the message now out to the Caucus so we can start to calm this show down and get back to the business of government’.
Albanese’s recollection was clear.
Kevin told me with John Faulkner that it had been resolved and that there wouldn’t be a challenge. I expressed some relief at that and immediately went around to my office to tell people that that was the case. I also went into Wayne Swan’s office and said that that was the case.
Gillard stepped into a smaller office with Lampe, where Gillard made a single phone call.
I called Mark Arbib and I think Stephen Conroy was with him, and I indicated to them I was still talking to Kevin and I was due to go back in the room, and I think they were amazed that the conversation was going on and on.
Stephen Conroy talked about the call between Gillard and Arbib with as few words as possible, clearly reluctant to be connected to the events of the night.
Stephen Conroy (SC): She called Mark and Mark said that from all the information he had, that the numbers were overwhelmingly supporting her, and from everything that Mark had said to me in his office, I agreed.
SF: And you told her that?
SC: I agreed with Mark’s assessment.
Amanda Lampe recalled the moment.
I think she sort of paused for a moment and thought about it and recognised that really, the challenge was occurring.
Gillard said the die was cast.
I was looking at the TV and Amanda’s view and their view was all the same and really, even if I hadn’t had those conversations, I just looked at the TV, it would have been enough. It was very clear that Labor was on the move … I went in and crystallised that, yes, I was asking for a leadership ballot. And the irony of it all is for someone who’s been accused of so much political brutality, that I actually wasn’t more frank, more quick and more potentially brutal in the moment.
There are plenty of other ironies. One of the questions for the series was whether Gillard was pushed prematurely into a contest she wasn’t quite ready for. Gillard has sought to project an image of confidence and control around the events of 23 June 2010. But how much choice did she have after Mark Arbib told her she had enough votes to beat Rudd in a ballot?
SF: Actually by that stage, if you had called it off you would have been in a lot of trouble with your colleagues.
JG: Oh I don’t think it would have been possible, yeah.
SF: Why not? You still had choices.
JG: Oh no, I mean you always have choices, but I don’t think there was any way of stuffing the genie back into the bottle.
The least palatable irony is that Australia’s first female Prime Minister wasn’t voted in by the people but seized power in a manoeuvre organised by the factional men of the Australian Labor Party.
Kevin Rudd had his own way of saying that, by that point, there was no going back: borrowing, appropriately
enough, from Julius Caesar.
Once the dogs of war are unleashed, it’s very difficult to bring them back under control.
Rudd said Gillard was different when she came back into his office.
Well, from a general sense of warmth and relief and conclusion about how we were going to diffuse this crisis, suddenly she walked in ice cold, ice cold, with absolute determination in her eyes … What she said coming back was, ‘Following consultations, I am asking you for a ballot for the leadership of the Australian Labor Party’.
Gillard’s recollection was that their handshake came after she’d asked for the ballot.
He shook my hand at that point and it stays in my mind because I do remember thinking, even in that moment, that that was a very decent thing to do under considerable pressure.
After leaving Rudd’s office, Julia Gillard went to see Wayne Swan, confident about the outcome of a ballot. She described their conversation in functional terms, as if the business of government would continue seamlessly.
I needed to go and see Wayne Swan, so I managed to slip down the corridor to his office and found him with Jenny Macklin and Stephen Smith and a few other people, effectively having watched the night on the TV, and asked him to be my deputy leader and as a result Deputy Prime Minister … He agreed to that and we talked briefly about events the next day and oh, there was a G20 coming up so he raised that with me.
The Killing Season Uncut Page 18
