The Killing Season Uncut Read online

  Sarah Ferguson is an ABC journalist. In the same year that she worked on The Killing Season, she also wrote and presented Hitting Home, the landmark series on domestic violence. She has presented the ABC’s 7.30 and worked as a journalist on Four Corners, where she won four Walkleys—including the Gold Walkley in 2011 for ‘A Bloody Business’—the Melbourne Press Club Gold Quill Award, four Logies for most outstanding public affairs report, as well as the George Munster Award for Independent Journalism and the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award.

  Patricia Drum has been a researcher for the ABC’s Four Corners and Media Watch, and a producer at 7.30. She is also a solicitor and has worked in federal politics as an adviser to Labor MP Maxine McKew. Patricia was a researcher on the ABC’s documentary series The Killing Season.

  THE

  KILLING

  SEASON

  UNCUT

  THE

  KILLING

  SEASON

  UNCUT

  SARAH FERGUSON

  WITH PATRICIA DRUM

  MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

  An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

  11–15 Argyle Place South, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.mup.com.au

  First published 2016

  Text © Sarah Ferguson with Patricia Drum, 2016

  Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2016

  This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

  Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

  An ABC News production

  Writer/presenter: Sarah Ferguson

  Series producer/director: Deborah Masters

  Producer: Justin Stevens

  Research: Patricia Drum, Anne Worthington

  Executive producer: Sue Spencer

  Front cover image design by Deborah McNamara © Australian

  Broadcasting Corporation

  Front cover photo of Kevin Rudd by Russell Shakespeare/Newspix

  Book cover design by Philip Campbell Design

  Typeset by Cannon Typesetting

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Ferguson, Sarah, author.

  The killing season uncut/Sarah Ferguson with Patricia Drum.

  9780522869958 (paperback)

  9780522869965 (ebook)

  Gillard, Julia.

  Rudd, Kevin, 1957–

  Australian Labor Party.

  Government and the press—Australia.

  Prime ministers—Australia—Interviews.

  Nonfiction television programs—Australia.

  Australia—Politics and government—21st century.

  Drum, Patricia, author.

  324.29407

  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

  Authors’ Note

  More than a hundred research interviews were conducted for the television series The Killing Season. For this book we have drawn on 144 hours of interviews and transcripts of fifty-five on-camera interviews, as well as three recorded research interviews. The majority of the material in this book is new and does not appear in the ABC series.

  Transcripts prepared for television are literal, including every breath, noise and stumble. For the book we have followed the editing style used in television: repetitions, ums and ahs and breaths have been removed from the text. Ellipses indicate that we have joined answers from the same section of the interview, as well as where longer quotations have been edited.

  Prologue

  THE ABC TELEVISION studios at Gore Hill in Sydney are full of ghosts. For fifty years, actors, performers, politicians and crews have filled the vast studios, the green rooms and makeup chairs. Now the studios are being sold, the lot is almost silent.

  A final drama is being played out in a corner of Studio 22. The cameras, lights and microphone stands are ready, but the two chairs facing the cameras are empty.

  In a green room behind the studio, Kevin Rudd is stretched out on a sofa. He looks anguished. His jacket is off, draped over a chair. The jacket we’d insisted on bringing back ourselves, for continuity, after a first interview in Boston. It had hung in our office for two months, a hostage against Rudd’s return for a second interview. As he speaks, Rudd’s fingers grip the edges of an iPad.

  I’m not coming back in. I’m not going back into your witness box.

  It had been a long morning. We’d stopped for lunch in the middle of questions about Rudd’s performance as Australia’s Prime Minister in 2010. I’d suggested he take a break, have some food, relax, but he’d scheduled a meeting instead. We’d watched as the tail-lights of his white Comcar disappeared beyond the security gate. It was hot and still on the concrete apron in front of the studio, heat rolling off the building’s large metal doors. The producers and the crew were in summer clothes; I wore a tight purple jacket, the one I had worn in the Boston winter. We sat on the ground among discarded wooden pallets and ate lunch, wondering if he would return.

  The questions I’d put to him through the morning session had been relentless, quoting the views of former colleagues on his performance. The most personal judgement was that of fellow former Prime Minister Julia Gillard. I read it out to him, keeping my voice neutral.

  I thought for Kevin so much of his engagement in politics was about the applause, the celebrity, being fêted by people. Across his life, and perhaps some of this is explained by the hardship of his early years … clearly there’s a hole that needs to be filled by applause and approval.

  Rudd paused.

  The first thing I’d say about that is, I haven’t seen Julia’s university qualifications as a psychoanalyst.

  Gillard had chosen to make her attack on Rudd personal. Rudd offered a moral critique about Gillard. I learnt listening to them that you couldn’t determine who was telling the truth. You could only put them side by side and let the audience decide.

  That morning I had gone on too long in the same vein. The rhythm of the interview had slipped away.

  When Rudd finally returned to the lot, he disappeared into the green room and wouldn’t come out. Time was precious. His minder leant against a wall, non-committal. Rudd kept asking why he was being cross-examined when he was the wronged party. His doubts about our intentions for the series returned. He was in pain, he said. He sipped his trademark tea, the blend he’d won a celebrity tea-making competition with.

  All of a sudden, Rudd stood up, grabbed his jacket and said, ‘OK, let’s go’. He walked into the studio, swinging the cushion he used to support his back, joking with the cameraman.

  Camera set.

  Sound set.

  Speeds up.

  I settled in my chair and looked over at Rudd.

  When you look back over that period, what do
you reproach yourself for the most?

  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.