The Killing Season Uncut

Sarah Ferguson, Patricia Drum

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780522869965
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Australians came to the ABC's The Killing Season in their droves, their fascination with the Rudd-Gillard struggle as unfinished as the saga itself.Rudd and Gillard dominate the drama as they strain to claim the narrative of Labor's years in power. The journey to screen for each of their interviews is telling in itself. Kevin Rudd gives his painful account of the period and recalled in vivid detail the events of losing the prime ministership. Julia Gillard is frank and unsparing of her colleagues.More than a hundred people were interviewed for The Killing Season —ministers, backbenchers, staffers, party officials, pollsters and public servants—recording their vivid accounts of the public and private events that made the Rudd and Gillard governments and then brought them undone. It is a damning portrait of a party at war with itself: the personal rivalries and the bitter defeats that have come to define the Rudd-Gillard era."The making of The Killing Season matched the drama on screen and that's a story we wanted to tell. And now we have a place for the episodes of rich material we could have put into a 5-part series." — Sarah Ferguson

CHAPTER 1

THE PITCH

If you’re looking for love, don’t go into politics.

Lachlan Harris

WEEKS FROM BROADCAST on the ABC in 2015, the three-part documentary series on the Rudd–Gillard governments had no title. Everyone working on the series called it ‘the Labor doco’. Series producer Deb Masters burst into the room where I was writing. ‘What about “The Killing Season”?’ she said.

I smiled. She didn’t need to explain. The title had been staring at us for months in the opening lines of the series:

The last week of Parliament: in politics they call it the killing season. Labor leader Kim Beazley is about to be overthrown.

The lines described the turmoil inside the Labor Party in December 2006 as Kevin Rudd prepared to challenge Kim Beazley for the leadership. Former Trade Minister Craig Emerson claimed credit for the phrase.

I was the person who coined the phrase ‘the killing season’. There’s a time for every purpose under heaven, or under Kevin. If there was to be a challenge it would have to be in that sitting fortnight.

We went straight to Google. ‘The Killing Season’ had been used once before for a movie about veterans of the Balkan War (appropriately enough) played by Robert De Niro and John Travolta. The film was terrible and disappeared from view; the title was ours.

None of our colleagues liked it. The executive producer, Sue Spencer, said it was provocative; the ABC wouldn’t approve. ‘Go ahead and make the title sequence’, she said. ‘Just don’t tell anyone.’

When we finally made it public, we got a one-line email from Kevin Rudd’s staff: ‘“The Killing Season”? Wow’.

It wasn’t a compliment.

Long before it became The Killing Season, the series was the story of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. It couldn’t exist without them. When they are next to each other onscreen, the tension crackles. But when the project began, neither former leader was a willing participant.

Work had begun on the series in mid 2013 when Labor was still in government, following the pattern of Labor in Power, the ABC’s landmark 1993 series. The difference was Bob Hawke was an enthusiastic participant; he provided a letter for potential interviewees with his strong endorsement of the project. Paul Keating was Prime Minister when that series was made. Producer Sue Spencer remembered how much Keating liked the series’ writer, Phil Chubb. Keating’s interviews were done over a day and a half at The Lodge and at Parliament House (hard to imagine that happening now). Spencer and Deb Masters went on to make The Howard Years in 2008 with the encouragement of its subject. John Howard placed no conditions on his involvement except access to his transcripts to help him write his memoir. He trusted the ABC to tell his story. Newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave the ABC generous access to the PM’s offices to film Howard’s story.

The Killing Season, by contrast, had few supporters. Researchers Anne Worthington and Trish Drum were in Canberra in late June 2013, the week Kevin Rudd was returned as Prime Minister, and few significant players would commit to on-camera interviews. Rudd was a non-starter, Gillard was willing to take part, but both refused to be interviewed by the journalist who started the series. The project drifted. After the election loss to Tony Abbott’s Coalition, the Labor Party withdrew further into itself, morose and incredulous at the collapse of everything their election victory in 2007 had promised.

The Abbott government faltered early. Their first Budget was a disaster. Labor began to think the unthinkable, that Abbott might be a one-term Prime Minister. The prospect of a series laying out Labor’s immediate ugly past became even less appealing. By mid 2014 the project had stalled.

I arrived at the cramped, airless office where the Labor doco was housed. Shelves along one wall were crammed with yellow boxes of taped archive material, and above them in rows, the first round of books, manifestations of the history war already underway. Downfall, Shitstorm, Sideshow, Power Failure, The Stalking of Julia Gillard—the tone of the period was loud and divisive. Greg Combet, Wayne Swan, Paul Kelly and Julia Gillard all had books to come.

How do you find a truthful history when almost every event is disputed? Do you look for a single truth or accept there are many? Most facts in political reporting are elusive, like apparitions that take flesh and then fade away.

I was sure of only one thing: the series had to be built around the Labor leadership change in 2010. Everything flowed towards and away from that cataclysmic event. Before it happened to Tony Abbott in September 2015, it had seemed like a once-in-a-generation phenomenon—a bloody regicide according to Rudd’s supporters which, unlike the Liberals’ version, came without notice. How and when did it start? Was Gillard pushed or did she jump? Was it folly or a rational response to a dysfunctional government?

Setting out on the narrative, we trod a path through no-man’s-land, talking to Rudd and Gillard’s supporters: some messianic in their devotion, most convinced their version of the story was the only truth. Rudd and his supporters called the main event ‘the coup’. Gillard and her allies called it ‘the leadership change’, which sounded more orderly, less brutal. We learnt to let go of certainties, sometimes swinging wildly between the different versions, usually determined by the last person we’d interviewed.

The division at the top of the party spread all the way down to the most junior backbenchers and most of the staffers. Kevin Rudd inspired intense loyalty and intense hatred. What was true about him and what was recollected in bitterness? Julia Gillard, on the other hand, was opaque. I had learnt how she slides off a question, giving an answer to something you have not asked. We had to start from the beginning with every event they were involved in.

We also shut the door on the opinions of the outside world. People seemed to be obsessed with trivia: did Rudd really have a tantrum over a hairdryer on an overseas trip? They were also fixed in their views. I wondered where they got their certainty from. In the worst cases, they urged me to look at Rudd and Gillard’s private lives. I met those suggestions with a blank stare.

For the series to proceed, I needed to secure full cooperation from Rudd and Gillard. In this I had one advantage, shared with Deb Masters: I didn’t work in the Canberra Press Gallery. Neither of us had reported on Rudd and Gillard. We were cleanskins.

The business of persuasion is a fraught one for journalists. Persuasiveness is one thing, bullshit is another. You have to understand your subject intimately and what their purpose is in speaking on camera. I prefer candour but it’s not enough by itself. And you are not friends, although it can appear that way. The line you shouldn’t cross is usually only visible when it’s behind you.

I barely knew Kevin Rudd. We had met once when he was Prime Minister. All I remembered was a lively argument about the political contest in Reformation England. It was an event at Kirribilli House, the Prime Minister’s home in Sydney. On a sloping grass lawn overlooking the harbour, Rudd mimicked training a pair of binoculars on the home of then Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull, across the water in Point Piper. Rudd laughed at his joke.

I had two preliminary phone calls with Rudd before I joined the series, in my garden because the mobile reception inside my house is patchy. My dog followed me around, barking. The small pool in the yard had a broken pump: as it reached the surface, it made a gurgling noise like an animal being slaughtered. I pushed the pump underwater with my foot, trying not to drop the phone.

In these conversations, Rudd frequently returned to the theme of his mistreatment by the media, especially the ABC. He was wary of our intentions. I was careful, not promising much beyond an open mind. Where Gillard is reserved, Rudd is labile. The temptation is to adjust to his mood. It was safer to be blunt. I told him this was his best, maybe his only chance of getting a fair hearing and he should seize it.

Our third conversation was short. He agreed to the interviews. Afterwards I sent a short, hubristic email to my colleagues: ‘Rudd’s in’. Our long on again, off again relationship had started.

At the time we were talking to Rudd, we were also talking to Gillard. Someone recently suggested that making The Killing Season was like being Switzerland during World War II.

We met Julia Gillard for the first time at the Hilton Sydney. A small bedroom had been booked for us, which would’ve been awkward, perched on the edge of the bed together. We found a meeting room and waited. Gillard arrived on time with her right-hand man, amanuensis and bag carrier Bruce Wolpe. She walked into the room immaculate and hostile—‘bristling’ was the word Deb Masters used later. We were taken aback. She sat opposite us, erect in her chair, hands crossed on the table. Young hands, I noticed, manicured and with bright-red nail polish.

I had seen Gillard in person once before, from a distance in the House of Representatives when she was Deputy Prime Minister and Rudd was overseas. She faced the new Leader of the Opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, across the dispatch box. I watched from the public gallery, impressed by how she dominated the vast space; she provoked Turnbull into making a mistake, and he left the chamber followed by laughter.

At the Hilton, Gillard’s first question was how we proposed to examine the role of the media. She told us we couldn’t make the series without an analysis of the Press Gallery during her prime ministership. She was contemptuous of the media’s role in pushing Rudd’s case, naming individuals whom she said had been coopted by Rudd.

We listened, using the time to scan her face, close up for the first time, with its astonishing creamy complexion. Her eyes are narrow and give little away, whereas Rudd’s face is easier to read. Months later we watched the archive of a scene at the National Press Club where political journalist Laurie Oakes asked a bombshell question about Gillard’s actions on the night of the leadership change. On the podium, Gillard’s face was immobile but her eyes flickered. By that time we were expert at watching her and Rudd for small gestures that revealed truths; for now, we were novices.

Early on in the conversation Gillard raised the topic of Rudd’s mental state, though her friends, she said, had told her not to. ‘I’m no medical person’, she said, before questioning Rudd’s mental capacity when he was Prime Minister. I thought it was a misjudgement, the act of someone trying to justify their actions. I wanted to lean over and say so.

Gillard’s other focus was the book which she was bringing out later that year. She wanted to protect its exclusivity. Unlike Rudd, she had already begun shaping the perception of her story. It seemed to me that in the contest to define the history of the era, she had the upper hand.

I was struck by how different Rudd and Gillard’s approaches were in those early meetings. Their engagement with the series mirrored their styles in politics. Gillard was punctual, efficient, precise—the word most often used to describe her by her peers is transactional. Rudd was usually late, less efficient, but also given to more engagement. Gillard was private; Rudd wore his heart on his sleeve.

In one of the earliest interviews for the series, Kevin Rudd’s press secretary, Lachlan Harris, reflected on how those different personalities had created such a successful combination in 2006.

Rudd was all energy and emotion and Gillard was all discipline and delivery, and together they were an incredibly formidable force … He was incredibly good in the media; he was likeable, he had the kind of big picture stuff. Gillard was much more straight down the line, much more disciplined, in the weeds of the hard draft of policy.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The interviews with Rudd and Gillard had been agreed to in principle but were still many weeks away; the negotiation with Rudd over the location of his interview hadn’t even begun.

On the day I began working on the series, I picked up the episode briefs and read a scathing assessment of Kevin Rudd, provided off the record by a backbencher. I knew we couldn’t accept as final judgements the views of unknown backbenchers. They had a role, but we needed Rudd and Gillard’s Cabinet peers to tell their stories, and many of them were still saying no. I was also uncomfortable about the number of off-the-record interviews. This series would have no unsourced material. Anyone who wanted to shape the narrative had to appear in it, in full view where their colleagues could judge them and the truth of what they were saying.

We created detailed files on the ‘hold-outs’; we wrote new, more frank letters. I went from office to office in Parliament House. I got myself invited to book launches so I could bail up the recalcitrants. The pitch to everyone was the same. We had three episodes to tell the story o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Authors’ Note
• Prologue
• 1. The Pitch
• 2. The Victory
• 3. The Precipice
• 4. A Hard Interview
• 5. Gillard’s Story
• 6. Big Dreams
• 7. Train Wreck
• 8. Blood and Guts
• 9. The Long Game
• 10. The Challenge (Part I)
• 11. The Challenge (Part II)
• 12. The Long Shadow
• 13. No Boundaries
• 14. No-one Escapes Blame
• Acknowledgements