The Killing Season – Behind The Scenes In The Rudd/Gillard Contest

Sarah Ferguson is an ABC journalist. Her TV documentary The Killing Season, on the fall of the Rudd/Gillard partnership, mesmerised viewers. This was followed up by a book version – The Killing Season Uncut – with further revelations and details that could not be included in the television series. To take her audience behind the cameras and reveal the untold stories and candid moments that didn’t go to air, Sarah Ferguson addressed the Sydney Institute on Thursday 28 April 2016.

THE KILLING SEASON – BEHIND THE SCENES IN THE RUDD/GILLARD CONTEST

SARAH FERGUSON

Thank you all for coming to listen to me talk about this book.

I love this material so much. And it was an exceptionally rare thing for me to have the chance to come back and reflect on something I had done. The big television series are done under huge time pressures. Of course, in this case, we were talking about 7 years of intense politics over 5 hours of television, three episodes in fact. That means hundreds of thousands of decisions being made about what is included and what is not included. You move very fast through that process and by the time we got to the end, we were moving extremely fast.

On the third episode we had a broadcast date. In most cases, at least at the end, you have a bit of a party with the friends that you make the series with; you watch it together, at least the first episode, congratulate yourselves about how marvellous you’ve been and then disappear off for a few days holiday. I didn’t.

Before we put the third episode to air, I’d moved into a women’s refuge in Sydney. I left the refuge for the night to go and watch the second pivotal episode, which was the episode that covered the leadership change in 2010. I went to the Rooty Hill RSL which, if you remember, was the location for one Julia Gillard’s less impressive swings – through western Sydney – which didn’t go very well. That’s where I went to watch it. Then I went back to the refuge.

I was lying on a little stretcher bed with my feet sticking out the end when I received a text from Anthony Albanese saying, “congratulations – you must be somewhere with your feet up enjoying yourself.” Now, you cannot feel sorry for yourself in a refuge, but I tell you, just for those few hours as my phone bounced around the room with text messages from people either angry or sad or happy or whatever, I did allow myself to feel just a little bit sorry for myself that I wasn’t able to engage in proper conversations about something I had spent so long working on.

So it was a real opportunity for me, once that series was done, to write a book about it. An opportunity to go back and reflect on the material that we had looked at, the material that we weren’t able to include in the series, again, because of all of those choices. Decisions that had been made meant that lots of material wasn’t included. This was the opportunity to go back, revisit the material and expand on the material – but also to think about the process of making this series, because it was a very unusual process. It was also a chance to look at the relationship that I had between myself and Rudd and Gillard at the same time. We did dance a quite extraordinary dance, all of us, during that period.

This is the real joy of the book, freed from the demands of television. Television demands great delivery. You need potent analysis but you also need people to be able to deliver well. It’s the first time I’ve done anything like this on the series. It was enormously enjoyable. And it is a very unusual thing. I’m coming across people as I talk to them and finding their curiosity about that time is not satiated because of the way it ended.

Whether you are a supporter of the Labor party or not, or had any affection or admiration for Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard, you have to admit they were two of the stars of their Labor generation. And they snuffed each other out. Their mutual ambition allowed them to destroy each other’s career, effectively, and they were finished too early. Whether or not they were worthy of the respect or at least the goodwill they were granted by the Australian public in 2007, their careers should not have ended where they ended. For many people, and certainly for me, there is an abiding curiosity about them. And it will not be satiated for that reason, because their careers ended early.

They both tried to move on, and this phrase I came to resent when I was making the series. I went to make my case, of course first to Rudd and Gillard. They were the most important, but also to the rest of the party. Yet, I kept coming across a line that I grew to mistrust deeply. It was, “I don’t want to talk about this because I’ve moved on.” The problem with that phrase is that it wasn’t true; they hadn’t moved on but simply wanted to bury what had happened, for it to be put away and never talked about again.

It’s true that attention spans in politics are getting shorter and shorter, which for my money means that media, and the ABC certainly, has as big a responsibility as ever, if not a bigger responsibility, to ensure that such moving on doesn’t happen. And, it was a curious period. By the time I arrived, the Labor Party that had lost power in 2013 and withdrawn into itself at that point, very morose and in shock at what they had managed to lose between 2007 and 2013.

Whatever your politics, what the pollsters noticed on both sides, after the 2007 election, was a huge resurgence of interest in politics. So a lot of people came to politics in 2007. And that faith that they placed in that generation of politicians was completely betrayed. That’s where I found myself. That desire they had to keep that history hidden, I thought, was wrong and I believe they owed the Australian public an explanation.

There was a sort of carpet bombing of Kevin Rudd after Julia Gillard became prime minister, but it wasn’t a proper accounting of what happened. Not least of course because Bill Shorten was one of the major players in the events of 2010 and has never really faced proper scrutiny over that. He has faced bits of scrutiny, but he’s been very clever to avoid real archive scrutiny of that period. And you’ll find, as we did, there is very little material on Bill Shorten.

Remember those pictures of Shorten on the night of the big challenge, on the phone at the Vietnamese restaurant when the numbers were being counted in the party? He went to huge lengths to say that he wasn’t counting numbers, that he was in fact on the phone to his daughter’s school teacher. He may well have been on the phone to a teacher but he was also on the phone to Gerry Kitchener in Julia Gillard’s office, urging Julia Gillard’s staff to get her out of the meeting with Kevin Rudd because they were concerned, and they were right to be concerned, that Kevin Rudd was going to turn Julia Gillard around.

The numbers men hoped to launch a challenge. The worry was that Rudd was going to talk Gillard out of it and he nearly did. It was only the intervention of Gillard’s staff that brought her out of the room to the telephone. This was one of the deeply unpalatable ironies of this period – our first female prime minister gets the job, following a phone call from the factional men of the ALP. Back she goes and tells Kevin Rudd that there’s going to be a challenge.

But those few images of Bill Shorten on the telephone that night is all we have and there are very few other answers. We went to Bill Shorten of course because we wanted to know who Bill Shorten is and what kind of prime minister he could be. This is part of his recent history, only a few years ago, and he’s never fully accounted for it. So, as we did with everybody else, we went to Bill Shorten.

I had dinner with Bill Shorten in a restaurant in Canberra, where a screen hid us from a curious public. It was one of those little private dining areas, which I thought was the perfect metaphor for Bill Shorten because he wanted to avoid scrutiny. Throughout that evening he did a miraculous pivot. Every time I asked him about politics, and obviously of course the politics of that period, he would pivot to asking me about myself, about being born in Africa, about what my parents did. But Bill Shorten, you can’t do that. That’s what I do. I’m a journalist, that’s my technique, you can’t apply that to me. But that’s how we got through the evening.

We went back to him again and again. Then he wrote a letter, at the very end, to say, “I’m now focused on the battles of the future so I’m not going to take part. I was criticised for not explaining why I was going to vote for Gillard in 2010 and I didn’t make that mistake in 2013.” Once again, there is actually no accounting for what happened. So the reasons those decisions were made by Bill Shorten, his motivation for what he did, his motivation for removing a first term prime minister, whatever that was, we don’t really know. It’s an important question for Bill Shorten, and he’s entitled to have developed as a politician, as a person, as a thinker. But we don’t know whether he has. For me, the pursuit of Bill Shorten was an important part of this and was one of the ones that got away.

But back to Rudd and Gillard because they were the twin peaks of this project and when I started neither of them had signed up. Gillard had signed up to a degree but she wanted veto over who was going to do the interviews. But you can’t do that if you’re going to put a series together, you can’t allow them to dictate who’s going to do it. And Kevin Rudd was a firm no. The interesting thing was that, for different reasons, they both had the same attitude towards the media. This was a deep distrust. Neither of them wanted to entrust their stories just to the ABC.

The ABC has done these long history series before. They did The Howard Years with the full cooperation with John Howard. Howard’s only requirement was that he be allowed to get access to his transcripts afterwards to use in writing his memoirs. It was the same with Hawke and Keating. Hawke was a willing participant, and provided letters to encourage people to take part. Keating took a little bit longer but gave ample access to the crew making Labor in Power. But when it came to Gillard and Rudd, they were very reluctant to trust their story to the ABC in particular, and to journalists in general.

In our first meeting with Julia Gillard, I was taken aback by this. I hadn’t met Julia Gillard, but I had watched her in parliament a few times when she was shadow Immigration minister against Phillip Ruddock. I’d watched her perform brilliantly against Malcolm Turnbull, when Malcolm Turnbull became leader of the opposition. She was always a magnificent performer in parliament. If you know the parliamentary chamber, that is no mean feat. It takes a great deal of not just intelligence, but also personality to be able to dominate that chamber. But that’s all I knew about her, really.

We met at the Hilton in Sydney. I was doing 7:30 at the time and we waited for her in a meeting room. She appeared at the door and was extraordinarily hostile. I was completely unprepared for that. I’d heard a lot about her great personal warmth from the colleagues who admired her and that’s what I was expecting to see. But the person standing at the door had no personal warmth, in fact no warmth of any kind, only hostility. She bristled, my colleague said at the time. She sat down as she does; beautifully erect, perfectly groomed. She said you cannot make this series if you don’t examine the role of the media in the return of Kevin Rudd. This is what this period is about, it’s the disgraceful behaviour of the media. How do you intend to tackle that?

It took a long time that day, and in the subsequent days, before we even got to a relationship which was manageable. Gillard was extremely suspicious. Now, we were not going to make a program about the media. Somebody else could make that series – we do talk about it, particularly in Episode 3 when the relationship between the press and politicians became feral. Gillard was not wrong. I’ve seen leadership changes in the UK and in the US and I’ve seen them here. It is a blood sport. But what happened between the press and the political class during 2012/2013 got completely out of hand. Australians were very poorly served. Not by all journalists. There are, of course, very honourable exceptions. But, for most of it, that pathology between politics and the media got out of hand. The leaking and the way stories were put onto the public record without really passing through any scrutiny, was a very poor moment. And I understand why Julia Gillard was angry about it.

What I enjoyed about Gillard’s colleagues in the series is they talked about the fact that they all did it. The leaking. Each of course blamed the other side for starting it. They were planting stories so frequently, and creating a narrative day to day, that I felt that the rest of us were locked out. It was a game and a race that was taking place inside parliament with their backs turned on us, not for the first time. I think we were very poorly served and I hope that doesn’t happen again.

So that was our first meeting with Gillard. What was interesting as we went along was that, for both Gillard and Rudd, their engagement with the series mirrored the way that they were in politics. Gillard was efficient, precise, effective, and transactional.  Which is the word you hear about most from her colleagues. Kevin Rudd used a completely different form of engagement. He was much more engaged, with more human contact. But, as his colleagues point out, this is one of his particular skills. He has a preternatural sense of what the media is for and he can use it devastatingly.

This is all very challenging for a reporter. You’re going to do interviews with people over many, many hours. There were interviews with John Howard over some 20 hours for his series and with Kevin Rudd it was around 16 hours and Julia Gillard some 12 hours. This is not like a 7.30 interview. This is not one piece of studio combat that you can win. Something happens over those long periods, and the camera gets to know you in a way, and it seeks out your frailties. It is about working through a narrative with someone.

Politicians are very good at the studio combat. We have extremely skilful politicians in Australia, but none of them are prepared for what happens over those very long hours during those marathon sessions. Julia Gillard never moved away from her very formal, reserved engagement with us. For her, it was something to endure. But Kevin Rudd wanted to master it. He wanted to be in charge of the interviews. I didn’t let him, but there was a lot of toing and froing.

Each of them behaved perfectly to character. That doesn’t mean they got away with it for the whole time. There it was – his rich engagement, her reserve – but all the time I would be concerned that we had to walk an extremely narrow path between the two sides. At the outset, the Labor Party was still split in two. When George Wright arrived as the secretary of the Labor Party in 2013, he said it was as if every member of the Labor caucus had either Rudd or Gillard tattooed on their heads. That was the situation we found. Some supporters are still messianic in their fervour that their version of the truth is right.

How do you deal with two such people, former prime ministers, when they know that you are also talking to the other one? They know that you’re hearing the other side. At all times I felt as if I was a diplomat in the most challenging circumstances. I had to be very careful about every word I said, about every joke I might make, and humour is extremely important when you’re trying to build rapport with people to get them to do something. I’ve used it throughout my career as I’ve used smoking and drinking and every vice there is to try get people to feel as if they’re in comfortable circumstances and they can start telling me things. But I was worried on these occasions.

I went to meet Kevin Rudd in a hotel, for example, the night before our first interview. It was late and I’d just arrived from Australia. We’d been working every day and hadn’t been taking much time off. This was a big moment; it had finally arrived. Of course, he was late because he’s always late. Julia Gillard is always on time, Kevin Rudd is always late, and he was very late.

I waited for him in the hotel, and then we went to a café at the back of the hotel. I felt I needed a whiskey thinking it would set me up. But I could not sit with Kevin Rudd in a bar at 10 o’clock at night. It felt like an act of collusion. So I had a cup of tea that I didn’t want and a piece of cake that I wanted even less and watched the very cranky waitress try to move us on. I noted Kevin Rudd doing a Kevin Rudd thing. Completely unaware of the effect he was having on the waitress, he simply refused to move. She got cross and he didn’t notice so I was trying to manage the waitress and Kevin Rudd.

The next time we met was in Sydney. I felt I’d spent enough time with him by then and allowed myself to have a drink. But I’ve never been in a situation where I felt that everything I did, everything I said, every gesture I made should be open to scrutiny and that I could defend everything I did. For example, on one occasion Kevin Rudd made a joke about Julia Gillard. It wasn’t a bad joke, it wasn’t a particularly strong joke it was just a joke. I laughed. But I immediately thought, “No, no, no, no. You can’t do that.” No matter how important humour is for building rapport as I said, you can’t get into a situation where you’re laughing along with his side of things.

I observed that both Rudd and Gillard, despite their anger with the media were looking at me all the time for signs that I was on side with their versions. So, in spite of despising the media, that that’s what they wanted. They wanted us to accept their version.

This was probably the biggest challenge of all, this idea of versions. We knew from the beginning that there was going to be no possibility of divining a single truth. But I also have great faith in the audience; that if you encourage people to speak as openly as you can, and with politicians there are always going to be limits to that, the audience can divine whom they believe. We weren’t going to be able to get a full account of what happened, but we could get the fullest we possibly could. There were always going to be more than one version of what happened. But I had confidence that the audience would be able to find it.

So we come to the question of truth and the same questions apply. How much of this, and this again is something I’ve been able to go back and look at in writing the book, how much of what they said was true? How much was mendacious? How much was just memory? These are very complicated things as these were intense times. If someone appears not to be telling the truth, are they truthful, are they lying, or do they simply not remember, or have they done what every human being does which is to shape the narrative to suit them? And not necessarily in a particularly dishonest way but just in retrospect that they have shaped those events to suit them in the best way they can.

All of these questions apply. We begin, very conscious of how every conversation we have, every letter we write, every meeting I have trying to get the members of the front bench on board, very conscious of how they’re going to tell their colleagues – what they’re going to report what I’m saying, all of them all the time trying to divine whether or not we’re taking a particular line. What I promised everybody was that this series, and this was the most important thing for me in terms of truth, would only be made by those people who showed up. This was our best claim, really. That we weren’t going to use backgrounding. We weren’t going to put unsourced material to people in questions.

So the shaping of this first television history of that period was only going to be made by those people who turned up. That meant that they would be scrutinised by their colleagues. If they weren’t going to tell the truth, their colleagues would see them. And that exclusion of off-the-record background material was very important to the way the series worked. This does mean you’re going to be limited. There are some things people won’t say on camera. So you’re naturally already saying well there are certain things that I accept we’re not going to be able to use. But far more important, with a narrative as broken and disputed as this one, the only material that you offer the audience is material that people are prepared to stand in front of.

So I had another long dance with Labor heavy Mark Arbib – meeting him in cafés, trying to persuade him to take part. He and his colleague Karl Bitar, both then ensconced at Crown, wanted to feed us material; they wanted to give us material to support the case they wanted to make. In the end, none of that material went into the series because we would not use material where the person providing it would not go on television and back up their claims. This was the only way to make a series when you’ve got as divided narrative as this.

And then there was the truth. We kept coming back to this question of truth. All the way through, particularly in the long interviews with Gillard and Rudd, I was trying to divine what tricks people use. I’m sure you all do it – we all have our ways of trying to work out what’s going on, when people are telling the truth and when they’re not. The contest between the three of us, me Gillard and Rudd, was about the winning narrative. Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard had equally fixed narratives – completely different narratives, but fixed. And they’re both very clever at laying the ground work to make those narratives make sense.

Probably Rudd slightly has the edge in terms of his understanding of the way the media works. But with Julia Gillard, I sensed her method before I understood it. Gillard is transactional, efficient, business-like. She gets through material really fast, and really well. She does not waste time. Her language is precise, except when you get to the parts of the story that she doesn’t want to talk about.

What does Julia Gillard not want to talk about? She doesn’t want to talk about her motivation. She has one narrative, one version for her motivation that I’ll come to in a second, and she doesn’t want to deviate from that. When she’s pressed on the issue of her motivation and why she took the job from Kevin Rudd, or at what point she decided to take the job from Kevin Rudd, all those key questions about her, her language suddenly becomes the language of mist and obfuscation. It’s all smoke and mirrors. I felt this, as I say, before I actually understood it. When I read the transcripts, it seems so obvious to me now. I didn’t do too badly but I can see there are moments where she started building this misty pattern.

One of her closest advisors was Gerard Kitchener. She trusted him very much. Gerard is from Victoria and was at university with Gillard. He believes she wasn’t agitating during the lead up to the deposing of Rudd, she wasn’t out there agitating but she could have stopped those people who came in such as Bill Shorten, Mark Arbib, David Feeney. These people came to her with the idea that there should be a leadership change. According to Kitchener, she could have said no but she didn’t. She let it go. Talking of that time, when you listen or read what she says, you’ll see a blur comes over her language so that the clarity is gone.

When we discussed the meeting on that fateful night in June 2010, Gillard described it beautifully. She spoke of sitting in the office with Kevin Rudd and John Faulkner. Faulkner is the honest broker who will never to speak about the role he played. Gillard heard the proposition that Kevin Rudd should have more time to stay in the prime ministership. As she recalls it, Kevin Rudd insisted that’s what happened. I think it’s pretty clear now that that’s what the discussion was and that there was an understanding that he could be given more time. Gillard describes it as a wedge of hope on the horizon. And I find that incredible. The most important decision that she would make in her entire political career, one that changed the course of Australian politics she calls a “wedge of hope”. It’s a classic example of the way Julia Gillard takes language out of the concrete and puts it into the vague. It’s her way of avoiding scrutiny on that moment.

Kevin Rudd has a different way of doing it. When he wants to obfuscate – and you know this is coming because you start hearing it – his sentences get longer, the phrases get longer, the subordinate clauses pile up on top of one another until there is no meaning left in the sentence. And that’s what he does and it’s remarkably effective.

So we’ve got these two narratives. Kevin Rudd’s narrative was remarkably consistent over time. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t betray some very interesting things about himself but in terms of his narrative about what happened, his is fixed as is Julia Gillard’s. His fixed narrative is that Julia Gillard’s decision was a moral one, not a political one. He builds that narrative throughout his interview. Now, Julia Gillard’s decision was a political one but he wants to cast it as a moral one so he constantly says that Julia wouldn’t do it because she’s a good person. All the other people in the party in the caucus who were part of that decision, theirs is a political decision but Julia Gillard’s is a moral one, and therefore she’s a bad person if she goes ahead and makes that decision.

Julia Gillard’s narrative, on the other hand, is equally fixed. The groundwork is as cleverly laid out. It goes like this – Kevin Rudd was incapable of performing his role as prime minister. There’s no evidence to support where she goes with that; it’s too extreme, no one in the party agrees with her and not even her closest supporters will put it in those terms. Very early in her interview, Gillard talked about the fact that Kevin Rudd couldn’t cope. She lays the groundwork so that when you arrive at June 2010, there is no alternative – this is what she wants you to believe.

Julia Gillard’s narrative is a path that begins when Labor gets into government and it ends when she removes Rudd in June 2010. There was, as she says, no alternate reality. Of course, there were many alternate realities. She didn’t have to do it – she could have stopped it, along with many alternative moments. There is only one moment in her 12 hours of interviews where Julia Gillard says she considered the possibility of what might have happened if she had not moved against Rudd.

Everybody knew Julia Gilard was Kevin Rudd’s successor. He would never have been easy to dislodge but none the less, for one brief moment, Gillard considered that possibility. Then her narrative closes back down. She returns to the idea that Kevin Rudd couldn’t cope. She said my friends have told me not to say this but I think Kevin Rudd had a breakdown. It was such an extreme thought, I wanted to lean over – and it’s not my job to do that – and put my hand on her arm and say, “Don’t say that. This is our first meeting and I’m forming an opinion of you right here and you’re going too far.” I didn’t do that, but I wanted to.

But Julia Gillard will stay with this narrative and develop it. For her, everything about Kevin Rudd’s engagement during the challenge is emotional and she keeps coming back to the idea. His commitment to Copenhagen is emotional, his commitment to climate change is emotional. I asked her about it repeatedly: “Isn’t it intellectual as well?” She reaffirms the emotional and what she’s doing is preparing for the period after Copenhagen when she can say the emotional blow to Kevin Rudd of the failure of Copenhagen is so great, that of course this is the point where he has his breakdown.

I expected that when we got to the interview, Gillard would backtrack from this point. That she wouldn’t go to Rudd’s lacking capacity to do his job. I had a plan ready if she did indeed do that. But she didn’t. She went further than she had in the book with Paul Kelly and continued down a path that on the day that she went to meet him in Kirribilli in January 2010, that the man sitting opposite her had no capacity to perform his role as prime minister. That is an extraordinary claim.

If it were true, that you would think that and then do nothing, tell no one, not speak to the national security committee of cabinet, speak to none of your closest advisors, share your concern that the man who is running the country is mentally incapable of doing it, but you do not tell anyone. It is part of that very fixed narrative. If she could set up the idea that Kevin Rudd is incapable, then there was nothing wrong with her taking over. It is not a matter of ambition, it’s not a matter of her desire to be prime minister, instead it is in the national interest.

I’ll just come back to Turnbull very briefly. Another reason for my so enjoying this material. We are now, again, in the position where the Liberals have done the same thing. I believed when Tony Abbott got into power was that we were going to have a grown up government. In my wildest dreams, I didn’t imagine that it could happen again. What we’re looking at now, and particularly as each day and week goes past, is the consequence of instability. The pollsters will tell you that the country has not recovered from the removal of Kevin Rudd. Of course, we know what happened. Rudd came back and removed Julia Gillard. What we are seeing now, in the Liberal Party, is connected to that earlier huge disruption in our body politic and in our society.

You take power on the wrong side of the election and the dynamics are different. Tony Abbott was unpopular if opinion polls are really valuable, and I’m not sure they are anymore. It’s true that he had been unpopular for quite a long period of time, and if you take power on the wrong side of the election we have a different expectation of how you’re going to perform. If you don’t justify that massive disruption, we judge our leaders very harshly. It starts to look like they’re in power just for the idea of being in power rather than for us, which is what we want them to be there for.

On the night that Julia Gillard challenged Kevin Rudd in 2010, after she’d been to see him, she went into Treasurer Wayne Swan’s office where Jenny Macklin and a number of other senior cabinet ministers were collected, and started trying out the lines for what she was going to say to us the next day. One line she offered was, “A good government has lost its way.”  Cabinet colleague Jenny Macklin opined, don’t use that line. Because if you say that, then we can’t campaign on the good things that we’ve done. So don’t say that.

But that is the line that they used. Tim Dixon, a speech writer to Kevin Rudd but later a supporter of Julia Gillard, said that one of the things that went wrong from that moment was that they were unable to explain what they had done; they were unable to justify what they had done. There was no great policy difference, there was no scandal. And here they were trying to find lines to explain something that was, to us, inexplicable. The link between that moment and where we are with Malcolm Turnbull is the question that interests me the most. This is not a reflection on whether or not it was the right decision to remove Tony Abbott. But whether this massive upheaval in our society is justified is the open question for our time.