The defenestration of Julia Gillard by Kevin Rudd as Australian prime minister

I managed to get an E book from Amazon – in advance of its release in Australia — and it is riveting and makes sense of a lot of the appalled confusion I have felt over the past three years. I shall give you a taste.

“This is my contemporaneous diary of an extraordinary time in Australian politics – that of the Gillard Government from June 2011 to April 2013. I scribbled notes, conducted interviews, chatted to people informally and kept media and personal diaries of the rolling events. Initially, my idea was to record the unfolding drama of how the government and Independents handled Australia’s first minority parliament since 1939, but it became quickly apparent that while the minority parliament was functioning remarkably well under Gillard’s leadership, there was a heaving political undercurrent being generated by a minority within the Labor caucus that kept threatening to derail its success. I noticed that as the months passed, the vast resources of the press gallery became more focused on Rudd’s ambitions for a comeback than anything the historic minority parliament had to offer.

So these are my personal observations focusing on Team Rudd’s slow-death destabilisation campaign against Gillard, the media’s treatment of it and the combined effect on the government. It’s not a defence of Gillard; I didn’t talk to her for the book, and I don’t gloss over her mistakes. This does not pretend to be a definitive account of her government. It’s an expanded personal diary of observations, if you will, about a politician who was never given a fair go, not in the media, not by Rudd, not by some in caucus.

I don’t dispute what a tough job it is chasing daily news; I did it for twenty five years in the federal parliamentary press gallery. I made mistakes and inflicted damage on politicians, and I put my hand up for taking the golden egg-beater to some yarns. I was also on the other side of the fence in the early 1980’s, trying to influence how the media portrayed the minister’s I worked for in the first Hawke government. I know what a bastard of a business politics and journalism can be.

While there are rigorous, professional and highly competent journalists reporting from the press gallery, what confounded and disturbed me as the months passed was how many more got swept up in Rudd’s power play, giving undeserved momentum to his ambitions to reclaim the prime ministership. They became players, not reporters.

There seemed to be a lack of appetite for rigorous assessment of Rudd the man and Rudd the politician, and of his motives, and the devastating impact he was having on the government. I noted how some of the best-paid journalists and commentators at News Ltd and Fairfax became Rudd’s mouthpieces in the war he raged against Gillard. He could seldom do any wrong; his antics were generally afforded benign, unquestioning prime-time media coverage. The underhanded work being done by his acolytes was respectfully kept in anonymous shadows while being given headline treatment.

On the other hand Gillard was continually cast as a liar and policy charlatan, and lampooned for her hair, clothes, accent, arse, even the way she walks and talks. If ever the deck was stacked against someone, it was Gillard.

Now three small quotes from the content. I am about half way through reading it at present. The last deals with the issue Christine raised about the legitimacy of a minority government.

A year after her ascent, the undercurrent had become so poisonous that Gillard was forced into fighting a ludicrous battle against a man who had been removed from office because he was incapable of governing, who was despised by the overwhelming majority of his caucus colleagues and whose return many feared would plummet the government into the same chaotic state that had prompted his removal. In the words of a former high-level Rudd government policy adviser who penned a personal, unpublished account of his time in the Rudd Government, the way Rudd operated was ‘a powerful warding for future governments…The Rudd government was never and could never have been a functional government because of the man who ran it’. This adviser was in a trusted position; he was intimate with the running and functioning of Rudd’s cabinet and at the centre of much of its day-to-day mayhem. For those reasons, he will remain anonymous in this book.

Once deposed, Rudd’s toxic ambition appears to have been either to return to the leadership, or to destroy both the government that had dumped him and the woman who had replaced him. In this pursuit he was abetted by political journalist who became pawns in his comeback play…..” “The oft-quoted fable that his crash in the opinion polls was the reason for his removal by his colleagues is hotly disputed by those central to Rudd’s fate. Anybody who had an ear to the ground in Canberra at the time of the leadership change knew that Rudd was in a bad way, that he’d been unravelling since the disaster of the December 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen; that his office his department and the wider bureaucracy were paralysed by a prime minister who could not make the big decisions, but who sweated the minutiae of irrelevant tasks and board appointments; that he was so obsessed with his polling numbers and day-to-day politics that months into 2010, with an eye to the election, he was designing ever more extravagant and untenable policies that would provide him with the quick fixes of media limelight he appeared to need….His mercurial temper and his appalling treatment of any member of staff or bureaucrat he considered an underling was legendary; these traits were occasionally reported when he was Opposition leader, and again, sporadically, when he became PM. In the lead-up to the events of 23 and 24 June, these tendencies bordered on the manic. Of all his ministers, Gillard and Swan most intimately knew how unhinged Rudd had become in the first half of 2010; so, too, did most of his staff. Perhaps, in his heart of hearts, Rudd knew it about himself as well. He may have possessed an overweening ambition to succeed and slick PR skills, but he did not and still does not, have that essential mix necessary to lead a political party: a steely and steady personality, the ability to be calm under great pressure and under the weight of extreme criticism and consistently clear thinking. “

“The tumult of the leaks and attacks on Gillard’s credibility helped drive Labor’s polling numbers down during the election campaign, resulting in one of the closest elections result in Australian history – seventy-two seats apiece for the two largest parties, with a gaggle of Independent and a Green making up the remainder of the 150 seats in the House of Reps. In the aftermath, the deft political skills Gillard deployed to successfully negotiate a minority government with the Independents after seventeen days of haggling should have turned around perceptions of her abilities and character. She had achieved what Tony Abbot could not, and had delivered government for Labor when many in the commentariat had written her and Labor off…..Public support for Gillard and her government started crashing in February 2011, after she announced she would introduce a carbon pricing scheme. Her critics claimed she had broken an ironclad elections promise not to introduce a ‘carbon tax’. During the election campaign she had stated: ’There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead, but let me be clear: I will be putting a price on carbon and I will move to an emissions trading scheme’. This is what she announced but not as far as those in the Opposition and hysterical commentariat were concerned….What was opportunistically never acknowledged by the Opposition, and never by the pro-Rudd and anti-carbon pricing commentariat, was that the art for a prime minister steering a successful minority parliament is to compromise with coalition partners; in Gillard’s case, the rural Independents and lone Green, all of whom had some form of carbon pricing scheme on their wish lists. It was both Labor and Liberal policy, also. Yet Gillard was flayed alive over the announcement and it dogged her days. That she made no headway rebutting attacks on her honesty and credibility says more about the campaign that was waged against her than her communicationskills, wanting though they were at the times she needed them most.

The uproar also ignored the reality that promises made by a political party before an election can only become reality in a hung parliament if the governing party can navigate their acceptance through the maze of approvals needed from the disparate Coalition partners. In the May 2010 British parliament the Conservatives, led by David Cameron, formed a coalition with the Liberal Democrats after a hung result. The wholesale redrafting of the Conservatives’ agenda as a result didn’t prompt relentless bagging of the British prime minister as a liar and a blaggard. Our political sophistication is clearly in its infancy.”

I suspect that Democracy is too sophisticated a concept for Australian society to digest myself. There is also the question of how many psychopaths are attracted to the art of politics. I find it all profoundly depressing. But this book is a must read.

Brian writes: Thanks for these interesting excerpts, Mary. The book seems to be available now, including as an e-book, from http://on.fb.me/12h9ynR.

Nor, with respect, do I agree with your own last paragraph. After a total of seven years observing Australian politics at close quarters, I would never accept that “Democracy is too sophisticated a concept for Australian society to digest”. Australian politics are certainly a lot rougher and bloodier than the UK version, at any rate on the surface; under the surface the skulduggery and unscrupulousness levels seem to me about the same. Few British commentators on UK politics generally, and our present hung parliament and coalition in particular, seem able to offer a sophisticated analysis of the implications, pros and cons, of governments whose senior party has no overall majority in the lower House. Australians seem to grasp these all too easily! But I agree that politics does seem to attract a certain kind of psychologically disturbed personality, in addition to perfectly well balanced people. Perhaps people who actively want to be politicians are by definition unsuited to practise politics, rather in the way that people who want to be prison officers or debt collectors ought to be automatically disqualified.