The Killing Season: the patient plotting before Labor leadership coup revealed
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Version 0 of 1. The patient plotting of Labor factional powerbrokers – including current leader Bill Shorten – to execute the 2010 leadership coup against Kevin Rudd is revealed in the second episode of the ABC’s The Killing Season. Julia Gillard and supporters including frontbencher Tony Burke talk on camera about coded conversations in the weeks before the 23 June leadership change in which each knew they were talking about her taking the prime ministership, without specifically saying so. Shorten refused to be interviewed for the project but, according to previous reports, had also had a guarded conversation with Gillard 10 days before the leadership change in which he told her she had his backing and that of the Victorian right faction. Gillard’s supporters have always described the coup as a kind of “spontaneous uprising” but the documentary paints a more complex picture. Gillard’s then adviser, Gerry Kitchener, says Gillard could have killed the plot even though she wasn’t driving it. “She listened to them. Obviously she was in a position to rule it out and she didn’t and events moved forward because of that. That’s sort of different from saying she was agitating. She wasn’t agitating at all. Other people were agitating. But she didn’t say no.” Related: Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard take up cudgels again in ABC documentary Gillard says she didn’t tell Rudd about the approaches because “Kevin was the leader and I was supporting Kevin” and she didn’t tell the plotters they were wasting their time because “my demeanour obviously was they shouldn’t be having this conversation with me and I wasn’t interested in having it, that we should just get on with the job”. Kitchener recalls taking numerous phone calls during the now-famous two-hour showdown meeting between Rudd and Gillard on the evening of 23 June, in which Rudd sought more time in the prime ministership and she eventually resolved she would challenge. Gillard had not been sure whether she would challenge when she entered that meeting, and Shorten was worried about the repercussions for her supporters (like him) if she did not. “I took maybe four phone calls from Bill Shorten. He obviously at that point was concerned that if she didn’t do it that there’d be repercussions. I think in the last phone call, he said to me ‘Gerry, we’re all fucked if she doesn’t do this,’ ” Kitchener said. When Gillard emerged from the late-night meeting resolved to mount a challenge, Kitchener recounts the role Shorten played in getting her the numbers. “Shorten was in the office, he was down the back but he throughout the evening he was bringing in MPs, a lot of MPs from Queensland, to meet with Julia. I think it is fair to say, whatever Bill’s faults may or may not be he knows how to work the numbers and he was bringing people until late into the night,” he said. But he also revealed what New South Wales right factional leader and then senator Mark Arbib thought about Shorten. Arbib had played a key role in fomenting the leadership plot. “He pulled out a ministerial list and started going through his thoughts about Julia’s next ministry,” Kitchener said. “He then went through and had a rant about Kevin Rudd and how he couldn’t be allowed in the ministry. And then he came down to Bill Shorten’s name and he said you couldn’t trust Bill Shorten, that he would do Julia in, that the one thing she couldn’t do was ever give him industrial relations cause he’d use it to solidify the union base to knock her off.” Arbib retired from politics in 2012, Rudd did eventually become Gillard’s foreign affairs minister and Shorten shifted his support back to Rudd in a move crucial to Rudd’s overthrow of Gillard and return to the leadership in 2013. Burke, now opposition finance spokesman, told of his coded conversation with Gillard several weeks before the 2010 coup. “I grabbed a bottle and took it downstairs to Julia’s office in the deputy prime minister’s room,” he says. “I left it until the very end, I wanted to make sure, neither of us were in a leadership challenge conversation, but I did want Julia to know that I believed at some point she’d be prime minister of Australia and I also wanted her to be able to deny that I’d said anything. “So I just left the final comment: ‘There’s one issue tonight we haven’t spoken about it, if you ever want to raise it with me, don’t hesitate’.” And backbenchers relate being shown polling commissioned by the NSW party about Labor’s situation – which is said to have been dire, even though the party was leading the national two-party preferred vote in published polls by 52% to 48%. Rudd is acerbic about the role played by Arbib and then NSW state secretary, Karl Bitar. “It is very easy for political operatives like comrades Bitar and Arbib – both now employees of Mr Packer’s casino empire – to say the sky has fallen in and this position is irredeemable ... anyone with any sense ... would say this was absolute nonsense.” The program confirms the numerous articles and books written about the tumultuous time – that the main plotters were little-known factional figures such as Victorian MP David Feeney South Australian senator Don Farrell and Arbib, and that the cabinet had little idea what was going on. Despite the dire consequences for Labor of the leadership upheavals, the former West Australian senator Mark Bishop described the plotting proudly. “A number of people had been working towards a change but they were patient and thoughtful men, so they allowed the ball that was rolled down the hill to slowly gain momentum, and it did ... in terms of its professional execution you’d have to say it was the best.” |