They were two extraordinary politicians. The great sadness of this time was that they were both in the same generation with the same ambition. Together they should have been invincible.
Penny Wong
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In January, Julia Gillard was toying with a radical idea - announcing the date of the federal election seven months in advance. She tested the idea on Labor's national secretary, George Wright. His initial reaction: It's your decision, prime minister. The following weekend he wrote her an email. He'd changed his mind. It was a terrible idea.
Australia was fed up with politics. It wanted an end to the angry noise and the eternal instability. Gillard wanted to change the mood. She thought that by announcing a September election in January she could depoliticise the atmosphere, reduce the noise, and concentrate on governing.
"It should be clear to all which are the days of governing and which are the days of campaigning", as she would put it ultimately in her announcement.
She had a second motive, too, and it was a product of minority government, as many aspects of her prime ministership were.
Peter Slipper had resigned as Speaker, but remained in the House as a vote Gillard could rely on to support her in a crisis. But there were doubts about whether he would remain in parliament.
Gillard worried that she could lose her tenuous grip on the House in the weeks and months to come. By fixing the election date now, she calculated that she could improve her chances of hanging on. Other independents, and especially Bob Katter, would be more likely to support her in a no confidence motion in the House if an election date were already set, she reasoned. She'd be in a stronger public position to argue that she should stay in office.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard arrives at the National Press Club of Australia in Canberra on Wednesday 30 January 2013 to announce the election date.
On thinking it over, Wright decided that her motives were right but her method wrong. By announcing the election she would send the exact opposite message to the one she intended.
It would actually intensify the politicisation. Calling an election was the most political act of all. It could not succeed to convey the signal she intended, Wright told the prime minister. The party secretary has a lot at stake in such a decision - he's responsible for running the election campaign. It was still the prime minister's decision and he would back her in any event.
Gillard did not reply. She was committed. She appeared at the National Press Club the following Wednesday, January 30, and gave a high quality speech about economic management. Then, abruptly, at the end of her speech she announced the election for September 14.
"I do so not to start the nation's longest election campaign - quite the opposite," she told the audience. "Announcing the election date now enables individuals and business, investors and consumers to plan their year."
In one way, this proved true. Voters firmed their plans to remove the Labor government. "The announcement made people focus on the election and it crystallised their decision," says a key Liberal strategist. "It was a big mistake." Wright came to the same conclusion: "It finished us off," he has remarked to colleagues.
Ice Ice Kevin: The Rudd Man cometh. Anthony Ackroyd
It also allowed Kevin Rudd and the Caucus to plan how much time to give Gillard to see if she could salvage the government's position. She had now put a deadline on her own prime ministership.
It was a move no other Australian prime minister had ever made. But there had not been a prime minister leading a minority government in 80 years.
The hopeful signs of late 2012 had been extinguished by January 2013. Labor had enjoyed a steady recovery in the polls from July 1 as the country breathed a sigh of relief over the carbon tax. The sun still rose, despite Tony Abbott's fearsome forecasts.
But Labor's recovery had peaked: "The Labor vote increased from June to about October or November and then it started to go the other way," observes the Nielsen pollster, John Stirton. Gillard's misogyny speech had no discernible effect on the polls: "The speech came towards the end of the rising trend so you can't say it triggered an upswing."
Or as George Wright interpreted Labor's research data to confidants: “The speech opened up an opportunity for a moment of connection. It became a cause celebre of the educated professional classes but we needed women with three kids working part-time to pay off the mortgage in the outer suburbs - 'What does that mean to me? I'm still getting up at 6am to make the sandwiches.'
There was no point of connection with her. That was the problem.
The 2012 budget had been aimed at so-called "battlers", and the $1.1 billion schoolkids' bonus in particular was designed to establish a connection with lower-income "working families". But, if it did, it was not enough.
The polls told the storyScroll right to discover
Another ominous note had sounded at the end of 2012 when a delegation of NSW MPs asked to see her. Six MPs representing western Sydney, all members of the Right faction, attended Kirribilli House for lunch.
They were all feeling premonitions of electoral death. The delegation sounded an SOS. There is a serious problem in western Sydney and we need a reset.
The message from Chris Bowen, Tony Burke, David Bradbury, Jason Clare, Ed Husic and Michelle Rowland was that the people were not listening to Labor. The carbon tax and the rising number of asylum seeker arrivals were huge political problems. Above all, the people sensed no connection of their values with Labor's. The delegation was accompanied by the NSW general secretary, Sam Dastyari. With the history of NSW secretaries as the executioners of Labor leaders, this carried a hint of danger for Gillard. But the news of the delegation did not leak. It was an exercise in good faith on both sides.
The prime minister responded by saying that she would come up with a plan. She would develop a suite of measures for western Sydney and she'd announce them during a tour of the area in the new year. Sydney week was born.
But Gillard's campaigning week in western Sydney in early March, dubbed her "western Sydney sleepover," only succeeded starkly in showcasing her unpopularity. It was a debacle.
Of the six MPs who had appealed to her, five were already counted as Rudd supporters. By the end of the experience, the sixth, David Bradbury, had also abandoned her.
Rocco's choice
All the monkeys on her back from 2010 were still clinging on. Carbon policy was still a political liability, and so were asylum seekers. The reworked mining tax was failing to deliver any meaningful amount of revenue and the budget deficit was continuously blowing out. And Kevin Rudd was still looking for an opportunity to strike.
In the seven weeks after Gillard's election announcement, Craig Thomson was arrested, ICAC revelations of corruption by former ministers in the NSW Labor government returned to the front pages, Labor suffered a serious defeat in the WA State election, and Gillard endured western Sydney week. Labor's polling was falling sharply. And then Simon Crean detonated.
The sheer amateurism of the Crean-led attack on Gillard, and Rudd’s abandonment of "Suicide Simon", appeared to be terminal for Rudd's prospects. And he started to resign himself to never returning to the prime ministership.
Yet Rudd craved restoration. He had suffered a historic humiliation. He was the only first-term Labor prime minister to be unseated by his own party. He ached for historic vindication. The polls still showed that he was preferred as Labor leader over Gillard by two to one, a constant for years. He could not tear himself away so long as there was a chance.
But he was loath to strike at Gillard in the same way she had struck at him. He did not want to be seen as the aggressor. He wanted to be seen to be returning to the leadership by acclamation. He sought blamelessness. He did not insist that he would only challenge if election victory were guaranteed; he told his most senior supporters, the so-called Cardinals, that he was prepared to run if Labor had a 30 per cent chance of winning the election.
Sophie Mirabella and the men in blue ties, Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey. Photo: Penny Stephens
Midyear approached. Rudd had neither the numbers nor anyone willing to start a challenge in the hope that the numbers would follow. There were no more suicide bombers available after the caucus had seen the fate of the first.
Gillard was unassailable. And Rudd had less than four weeks left when all of the Caucus members would be in the same place at the same time. After Parliament rose on June 27, there would be no opportunity for a Caucus ballot. Gillard would lead the government to the election. Rudd would never be restored.
In the days when Rudd's prospects were bleakest, only two or three of his staunchest supporters were unwavering. Curiously, two of them had been key allies of Gillard. Kim Carr and Martin Ferguson had been indispensable to Julia Gillard's rise. Now they were committed to her destruction. They were the only permanent optimists in Rudd's inner circle. Rudd's inner circle of supporters had dubbed itself "the cardinals" when they sat waiting the result of a ballot, like cardinals awaiting the puff of white smoke in a papal election. The third cardinal was Bowen. The fourth was the man dubbed by the Gillardistas as the "secret cardinal", Dastyari.
As June progressed, however, the cardinals were granted something approaching a miracle. The solid bloc of pro-Gillard MPs from the Right faction in Victoria started to disintegrate. A drumbeat of dire opinion poll results for Labor in their State tested their loyalty to the breaking point.
"The Victorian view was, ‘Things are bad, but not in Victoria'," remarks a member of the NSW Right. "When they realised their seats were in danger too, it broke the floodgates."
A spotlight fell on the intentions of Bill Shorten, a power in the Victorian Right. He was a subject of great suspicion by both Rudd and Gillard. Rudd had considered Shorten to be in his camp twice in the preceding year, only to leave again. The Cardinals didn't trust him.
But neither did Gillard. In late April, Shorten set off alarms in the prime minister's office with his comment to on Sky News when asked for his view on Gillard's opinion of Peter Slipper: "I haven't seen what she's said, but let me say I support what it is she said." Blind loyalty or a parody?
The end for PM Gillard
The party was in a state of mayhem. The government whip, Joel Fitzgibbon, a fierce Rudd partisan, took farce to a high point when he went on TV and laughingly pretended to be reading out moronic talking points distributed to all caucus members by the prime minister's office:
"It says I should say polls come and go and the only poll that counts is the poll on election day."
Responsible for enforcing party discipline, the whip had become the poster boy for mischief-making.
The Gillard defenders started to meet twice a day, morning and evening, during the sitting weeks in June to keep vigil on her numbers. Stephen Conroy, Craig Emerson, Don Farrell, Gary Gray, Brendan O'Connor, Warren Snowdon and, occasionally Wayne Swan, each closely monitored the MPs to whom they were closest. Conroy was assigned to keep watch on Shorten.
Two of his fellow Victorian Right-wingers had already defected. Richard Marles and David Feeney, one of the original faceless men who'd installed Gillard, carried influence with Shorten. They spent time persuading him to switch.
Some 10 days before Gillard's fall, his pro-Gillard Victorian colleagues noticed a change: "Bill spoke to me about his doubts about Julia the week before the challenge", which took place on Wednesday, June 26, says one of his close allies.
"He told me in the week of the challenge that he would support Rudd." He started to advocate a move to Rudd among the MPs close to him.
Outwardly, however, he steadfastly declared loyalty to Gillard, until he called reporters to an announcement at 6.30pm, half an hour before the caucus ballot, that he would vote for Rudd.
He is on the record telling reporters as late as 1.42pm, only five hours before his public declaration for Rudd, that “my position has not changed.”
The Rudd group was not confident of his vote until the day before the challenge. "Bill was always going to put himself on the winning side," says a Gillard defender.
Finally confident he had the numbers, and on the very last day the calendar would permit, Rudd set aside his preconditions and struck at Gillard. She did him the great favour of announcing her departure from politics and refraining from any further comment.
Returning to Kirribilli House, Rudd immediately removed the brightly coloured lounge covers that Gillard had had made for the prime ministerial sitting room, and set about throwing off some of her key policies. He declared new policies on carbon, asylum seekers, and a federal intervention to clean up the NSW branch.
Five-year-old Joseph Kim steals the show as Rudd campaigns with Bennelong candidate Jason Yat-sen Li. Photo: Andrew Meares
The opinion polls briefly drew even, 50:50, as the electorate looked at Labor anew. But Rudd was unable to sustain the support. He ran a madcap, frenetic election campaign.
The man who was notorious for his deep immersion in the fine detail of complex policy threw all rationality to the wind and scattered wild policy ideas - a special low tax zone for the Northern Territory, the relocation of the Navy base in Sydney to Brisbane for no strategic advantage but at least $6 billion in costs, policies to snatch votes in marginal electorates but with no prospect of being delivered.
The swing against Labor's primary vote was 4.5 per cent; the Coalition picked up less than half, 1.8 per cent, in spite of everything. The rest went to minor parties. Australia had decisively abandoned Labor, but only tentatively embraced the Coalition. It proved the old adage that oppositions do not win elections, governments lose them.
Illustration: Ron Tandberg
Before the 2010 coup against Rudd, Anthony Albanese had presciently warned colleagues: "If you do this, you will destroy two Labor prime ministers."
Penny Wong adds this postscript: "They were two extraordinary politicians. The great sadness of this time was that they were both in the same generation with the same ambition. Together they should have been invincible."
If there were any Labor winners, Bill Shorten, who was instrumental in the coups against both prime ministers, was the chief beneficiary. The new Labor leader offers a reflection on a key lesson learned: "Individuals aren't bigger than the team. No one is smarter than everyone else."
Will the rest of Labor now do as he says, or do as he did?
They used to love me. By Rocco Fazzari and Denis Carnahan
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