Bruce Hawker - The Rudd Rebellion

BRUCE HAWKER is a leading campaign manager with 30 years experience advising leaders in business and politics. He has advised Labor in campaigns since the 1980s and worked on virtually every campaign at state, territory and federal level between 1997 and today. This included a remarkable 10-year run between 1998 and 2007 when Labor did not lose one election at State or Territory level. His blog can be found at www.brucehawker.com

This book is dedicated to my son Billa seasoned campaigner in his own right and a source of sage advice throughout the campaign. It is also for Patrick, Jess and that band of happy warriors known as Rudds travelling party. They joined up because they knew it was a fight worth having and along the way proved themselves to be worthy of the challenge.

Contents

Preface

This is a participants account of the 2013 Australian election and the preceding machinations within the Labor Party. It does not purport to be a record of every aspect of that most difficult of campaigns. It is my daily account of some, not all, of the events that make election campaigns the complex creatures they are.

The story of the Labor Governments from 2007 to 2013 will always be framed by the relationship between the two main players, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. Their association has come to be characterised as one of deep and abiding antipathy because of Gillards role in Rudds removal and his unstinting determination to take back the leadership. However, it was not always like thatthe early years of the Rudd Government were very different. In those heady days after the 2007 election, Rudd and Gillard were a team. He was the big-picture Leader who, despite having no real history as a factional player, had taken the leadership in 2006 and then steered Labor to victory after 12 years in the political wilderness. Rudds strength and wider appeal were bound up in the fact that he was not a typical Labor leader. He didnt quite fit the mould and, ironically, it was this image of him as being somehow different from other Labor leaders that convinced some voters to support Labor in 2007. For example, Rudd had no real relationship with the union movement and was openly sceptical about the amount of power and influence they wielded within the Party. But ultimately that independent quality was also his weaknesswhat the public liked about Rudd, the Party distrusted. That lack of factional and union support would cost him dearly.

On the other hand, in those early days Gillard was the deal-making poster child of the Labor Party, the Deputy who could bring the caucus in behind the Leader, even when they were reluctantfor example, when Rudd determined that the leader, not the caucus, should select the ministry. Her early success and growing power were built around an ability to negotiate outcomes that supported Rudds political ambitions. As a politician she had grown up in the heavily factional world of the Victorian Labor Party and she knew how to work with unions to get their support. It was these same skills that kept her as Prime Minister well after the electorate wanted her removed. Despite deepening public disapproval of her leadership, she managed, through her deep understanding of the power relationships within her Party and its affiliated unions, to stave off multiple moves to unseat her and reinstate Rudd. In the exercise of this power she effectively delayed Rudds return until just weeks before the 2013 elections. By then time was running out for Rudd to turn around the fortunes of his government and, as we now know, the challenge was just too great. So, by keeping her in power too long, Gillards strength was ultimately a weakness too.

But in the early days of the first Rudd Government these vulnerabilities were yet to appear. The public respected him and the Party loved her. He could woo the electorate and she could pull the caucus in behind him. They were the yin and the yang of the Labor Party. Together they were indomitable, but apart they were vulnerable: he to the faction leaders and she to public opinion.

The appeal that swept Rudd into office was never fully recaptured. The night that Gillard moved against Rudd was the beginning of the end for her and for a government that less than three years before had been swept to power on a surging tide of public enthusiasm.

What Gillard and most of the caucus saw as an act of salvation in removing Rudd as Prime Minister, Rudd and most of the Australian people saw as an act of betrayal. The slow death of the Labor Government started with that fateful evening in June 2010. Over the following three years Gillard and her caucus followers and Rudd and his public supporters were never able to reconcile their differences and mutual suspicions. By the time Rudd was finally reinstalled as Prime Minister in June 2013 it was just too late: he had run out of time to pull the Government together again. The damage that the Government did to itself over those three years was too much for the public to forgive, even after the caucus belatedly acted to restore the man who had been despatched three years earlier.

The story of the breakdown in the relationship between Rudd and Gillard and the events that followed had the elements of a Shakespearian tragedy: an alliance based on the worthiest intentions, a flawed hero, a betrayal and, ultimatelyand inevitablyan ending where neither of the main players was victorious.

My diary entries were usually made at the end of a long days campaigning, which always started before 6 a.m. and seldom ended before midnight. In fact, on more than one occasion I nodded off while writing. I did not write the journal with a view to publicationit is essentially an extract from a longer diary I have kept for some time. My discipline in recalling key events of the day came from when I was writing an account of another election in which I had participated. I realised then that election campaigns are conducted under such intense pressure that we just forget what happened from day to day, so I decided to keep a daily record of my observations of the campaign as it unfolded.

In preparing the diaries for publication it has been necessary to clarify certain events and personalities to assist the reader. In certain places, the names of people I wrote about have been removed to protect their privacy, and some content was deleted for various reasonsincluding relevance and sensitivity. However, overwhelmingly, these diaries faithfully reproduce my diary, as it was at the time I wrote it.

To the reader, I apologise for the looseness of some of my prose. With more time to write these entries my accounts would have been fuller and my language more lucid. I hope, however, that you will get a sense of the pressure, pace and complexity of an Australian election.

Of course, this was never going to be an ordinary campaign. For starters, we had just 74 days in which to try to turn around the tide of public opinion after three years of infighting and increasing public disillusionment with Labor. It was a task made all the more daunting in the face of a campaign of unrelenting hostility from the News Corp press. The challenges we faced were difficult: we knew we had to remove four major policy roadblocks that were stopping the public from coming to us. These were:

1. The Carbon Tax;

2. What sometimes was presented as an armada of asylum seekers coming from Indonesia to Christmas Island;

3. Labors internal structures, which had allowed Rudd to be removed in a swift and highly unpopular caucus revolt led by the Partys so-called faceless men; and finally