The Killing Season Uncut (13 page)

The secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Terry Moran, was well placed to have a view on this issue.

Many have said that Kevin's approach to government was dysfunctional, and it was in some respects, but in other respects a number of myths have built up around his time as Prime Minister. He was never personally rude to me, and I can recall a dinner with the most senior figures in the national security community where I said, ‘Look, has anybody actually found that Kevin Rudd has been rude to them', and they all said, ‘Well, no, not to us'.

Moran went on to suggest there were other culprits.

There were ministers in his Cabinet who were far more ill-mannered and rude in their handlings of public servants than Kevin … Some people who, on the TV screen, appeared mild-mannered and charming were, inside a Cabinet committee room, foul-mouthed and abusive. And that does not include Kevin Rudd.

Lachlan Harris worked closely with Rudd as his press secretary for four years until Rudd's removal as leader. He is loyal, but his interview was also one of the most considered of the series.

The reality is the prime ministership is like a pressure cooker, and what it does is it exaggerates your strengths and it exaggerates your weaknesses. People who think that Rudd is this wonderful person who's on
Sunrise
and is always smiling, they're exaggerating Rudd's strengths. And this school of thought that says Rudd was horrible and you couldn't work with him, they're exaggerating his weaknesses as well. He was much more in the middle of the scale, just as all the rest of us were.

 

Gillard's interview in Adelaide progressed according to its strict timetable. Gillard can be a good television performer. At its best her language is vivid: her description of Kevin Rudd's office on the night of the 2010 challenge was poetic. When discussing some of the early decisions of the government, she could explain Rudd's reasoning, but now that dimension fell away, leaving the single narrative that led to the challenge.

We broke for lunch and ate sandwiches in a room next to the studio. With the cameras and microphones switched off, I expected Gillard to relax or at least offer an observation about the experience of the interview. It never came. We talked about contemporary politics, Joe Hockey's recent performance as treasurer: safe ground.

When we resumed, Gillard continued with the theme that Rudd was ill-equipped for the task of being Prime Minister.

JG: There would be times when, you know, a Cabinet minister would be wanting to see him and he'd say to me, ‘I just can't face it. Can you do it for me?'

SF: What did he mean by ‘I can't face them'?

JG: Just, you know, ‘I'm overtired, too much to do'. It wouldn't have been an acknowledgement that ‘I'm psychologically not up to it'.

SF: But you saw it as part of the psychological problems?

JG: Yes, I did.

Gillard again was laying the groundwork for the legitimacy of Rudd's removal. As she asserted at the end of her interview, ‘Kevin was unable to hold the weight of being Prime Minister'. There was no ‘alternate reality'.

There were alternate realities, of course, those described by her colleagues. Alan Griffin, Minister for Veterans' Affairs, made the
point that if Rudd struggled after Copenhagen, it was the job of his colleagues to prop him up.

I'll use the example of Bob Hawke. It's been well documented that he had some serious personal issues. Senior people in the Hawke government gathered round him and held him up. They got him through it and I think he was one of our best prime ministers. Now when Kevin had issues, despite some cursory attempts, they just cut him down.

 

Going into the election year, according to Gillard, the backbenchers were jittery.

JG: Post the
Oceanic Viking
, the mood in Caucus, particularly in New South Wales, was very dark. Then as we moved into 2010, I think people just didn't have the sense that there was a plan. They weren't sure how as backbenchers, marginal seat holders, they should link in to the government's campaign strategy, 'cause they couldn't see what the campaign strategy was.

SF: Did you warn Rudd?

JG: Oh look, I wouldn't have put my discussions to Kevin on the basis of Caucus is unhappy. I put my discussions to Kevin on the basis of what's the best campaign strategy for us.

This was the first time I asked Gillard if she warned Rudd about the mood on the backbench. She slid off the question, not answering it directly. I asked again.

SF: You had a much better relationship [with] and understanding of Caucus than he did. Why didn't you warn him?

JG: Because the great motivator for solving these problems in my view wasn't let's fix disquiet in Caucus. The great motivator
was let's make sure government's running well and we've got a political strategy to win the 2010 election.

Is it a deputy's job to warn the leader that Caucus is grumbling? What was it about the relationship between them that made criticism of Rudd something Gillard couldn't broach?

Gillard described how she saw the government's fortunes at the beginning of that election year.

The early election prospect receded and we're there with all of this stuff—CPRS, Henry Review [on the tax system], asylum seekers, health—trying to beat it into a political plan.

Ken Henry, who had served under three previous governments, judged the reform agenda as ambitious.

It certainly looked to me that he [Rudd] was prosecuting an extraordinary number of very, very big issues, more than previous Australian governments would have prosecuted in a similar period of time.

One of the government's biggest election promises, an overhaul of the country's hospital system, was months behind schedule. Health was yet another policy debate the government had to win before they could settle their campaign strategy.

Treasurer Wayne Swan complained that Rudd's focus on health was to the exclusion of other priorities. Decisions were mounting and time was running out.

What happened, de facto, was that Kevin decided that his main priority was going to be health, [so he] put all these eggs in the health basket and pushed aside immediate consideration for what we'd [do] in terms of climate change and the CPRS, or indeed what we would do in terms of Henry [the tax review]. The consequence of that was the traffic jam that I had expected to occur came to fruition.

In March, after a long period of consultation, the Prime Minister was due to make a major speech at the National Press Club about health. His speechwriter, Tim Dixon, recalled the lead-up.

I give him [Rudd] a copy of the draft speech which has got the policy as it's been decided. You can see that he's on edge and he gets to the second page and he sees this line, ‘There'll be a significant increase', and he throws it down on the ground and he says, ‘Significant? Significant? I don't do significant. I only do first time or biggest ever', and then just stormed out of the room.

Kevin Rudd warned the states and territories that he would present a national health reform package at the Council of Australian Governments meeting five or so weeks later.

Health Minister Nicola Roxon crisscrossed the country with Rudd, visiting hospitals and clinics to sell their reforms.

We had many, many meetings on planes with bureaucrats and advisers and others sitting on the folding chairs trying to nut out something. It was often difficult to get the big-picture decision made. Kevin is really smart and he wants to know lots of detail, so he would often jump right to the detail when really we needed to make a more strategic decision.

She said she found the chaotic routine intolerable.

By the time we get into the Australia Day week where we travelled by plane from every capital city in the country doing health reform between these major Australia Day speeches, people were pretty frustrated.

Other ministers had to fit in with the Prime Minister's unpredictable schedule, including Assistant Climate Change Minister Greg Combet.

I needed to get before my colleagues in the Gang of Four so that brought me into that environment where this kind of crazy city hopping was going on … The whole group would decamp to Brisbane 'cause that's where Kevin had to go. You'd end up in the parliamentary offices in Brisbane, hanging around in corridors: this is ministers, parliamentary secretaries, secretaries of departments, other public servants and ministerial staff. You haven't brought any underpants with you or a change of shirt. You've got to go out and buy gear to stay overnight, scramble for hotel bookings, the meeting's rescheduled. You get the idea?

Rudd argued that he needed to prosecute the government's case from the front line.

The future of Health and Hospital Reform [the package] was a political debate with the premiers and chief ministers. I had to win that debate within their own turf, speaking from their own hospitals. I'm their counterpart, I'm their peer, and I'm the one with whom they'll finally do the deal and the negotiation. I did it consciously and deliberately and, perish the thought, successfully.

Roxon's own relationship with Rudd was collegial but she says he put unreasonable pressure on staff.

He was always incredibly charming to me. I mean he was demanding and I didn't mind that, but I didn't like seeing him abuse other staff … He was rude to people. He was dismissive of their work. He would tear things up in front of people and stomp around.

Lachlan Harris observed the effect Rudd's work practices had on others.

LH: Kevin put a lot of demands on people. He put a lot on himself but he also put a lot on others, and I think there were
people around Kevin who felt those demands were so great that that turned their unhappiness into a vehement dislike, a kind of hatred. Particularly people with other things in their life: families, children. It really drove them up the wall.

SF: Why not you?

LH: Didn't have anything else to do.

How do you arrive at a reasonable account of the business of government during this period? In my view, the most powerful and persuasive account came from Ken Henry.

The Killing Season
is a series characterised by its fast-paced editing style: there are in excess of 1200 shots in each episode, more than most feature films. In the middle of the series, we slowed the pace down for a long exchange with Henry. For me, it became the fulcrum of the episode.

He [Rudd] took on a lot. It put his public service advisers under a lot of pressure. He was aware of that, by the way, but he didn't think the pressure was inappropriate. Certainly with respect to dealing with the global financial crisis, nobody would've said the pressure was inappropriate, nobody. With respect to the CPRS and the Health and Hospital Reform package and the way in which the tax reform document was dealt with there were elements of discomfort, disquiet within the public service.

Henry observed that decision-making became less efficient, but typically considered whether some of the blame lay with himself.

KH: I should've been stronger on this point at the time. That when a prime minister says I need to have more on this topic and this is what I need, and it's twenty dot points of extra work and I need to see it at 7.30 in the morning, that at least on a number of occasions I should've said, ‘Well, no Prime Minister. I really don't think that's a good idea'.

SF: Did you ever say, ‘No, Prime Minister'?

KH: No, I don't recall ever saying no when the Prime Minister, or any minister for that matter, requests of a department more information, more advice. It's part of the ethos of the place. You don't say to the Prime Minister, ‘No, we're not going to do this'. All I'm really saying to you is that with the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had.

SF: Is there a particular moment that you recall where you thought it had gone too far?

KH: This was something that developed quite slowly really. I'm going to avoid using a particular phrase that comes to mind but …

SF: What is it?

KH: I just said I'm going to avoid it! But you know, one of those slow-moving catastrophes.

SF: Train wreck?

KH: You said it. Yeah, that's right.

SF: But you're not disagreeing?

KH: I'm not disagreeing, no. Didn't look like it at the time. But you know, in retrospect, that's what we were witnessing.

SF: Was government prevented from functioning properly?

KH: Well, what does that mean? No, I don't think so. Functioning properly means that they were attending to the things that absolutely had to be attended to. Those things happened. But no, this concern has more to do with the way that the big issues
that the government had identified for itself to prosecute, that those big issues were not being dealt with as well as they might.

SF: To the point where somebody needed to step in?

KH: Yeah.

SF: Does that mean there is some justification for the Prime Minister being removed?

KH: Well, that's quite an extension of this point. No, I don't think so. Well, that's not what I thought at the time. And even in retrospect that's not the question I've asked myself. The question I've asked myself is whether there shouldn't have been a deeper-quality conversation with the man about what needed to change.

I did not relish putting Ken Henry's assessment to Rudd. Henry's views could not be dismissed, like Gillard's, as ‘post-facto constructions'.

KR: The federal public service is a highly professional institution. Remember we were in atypical times. You have the global financial crisis, and by the way you've got all the pent-up expectations around the delivery of your pre-election commitments. No, not one of my predecessors since Jim Scullin has had to deal with an economic challenge of that order of magnitude.

SF: Does that mean that your behaviour was abnormal?

KR: It means that because the challenges were great, I worked very hard. I also expected others to work hard. We were not elected to be an encounter group, to act as a national association for hand wringing and hand holding. We're there as the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia in an unprecedented economic crisis.