Confessions Of A Faceless Man: Inside Campaign 2010

By Paul Howes

The 2010 federal election campaign had more twists, conspiracies and betrayals than a ripping political thriller. Confessions of a Faceless Man is the day-by-day account of the campaign by one of Labor's 'faceless men'.

Paul Howes, head of the Australian Workers' Union, was accused of assassinating Kevin Rudd and installing Gillard in the top job - the King is dead; long live the Queen.

Howes writes openly about his role in the leadership coup and reveals his experience inside Labor's campaign.
In an unashamedly partisan and amusing account, Confessions of a Faceless Man chronicles the highs and lows, the stuff-ups, the leaks and the nuts and bolts of a modern Labor election campaign.

This is Howes' first book - an unvarnished, brutally honest, at times laugh-out-loud account of how Labor won 2010.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Nov 8, 2010
• ISBN: 9780522858846

Book preview

Acknowledgements

Prologue

The storm before the storm

In the end, we won. Sort of.

Although Australia has had at least ten minority governments at the federal and state levels in the past twenty years, it was dispiriting, to say the least, to have one at the end of an interminable federal election. For seventeen days we waited while three (or four, or was it five?) independents made up their minds.

Eventually, Julia Gillard’s superior negotiating abilities won out. But at what cost? A hopelessly divided electorate, a lack of a clear mandate, with the question of government left to three men who would rather we hadn’t done so, really.

I kind of know how they felt. In late June 2010, I had found myself in the invidious position of having to give my opinion on who should be the prime minister of Australia.

It was a cold midwinter’s night, and I was home early from work. As national secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union, Australia’s oldest trade union, I am rarely home early, but my wife Lucy had given birth to our third child only two weeks earlier. The phone rang and on the other end was a senior member of the federal ministry, telling me the challenge to Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership was on, and could I please make my mind the fuck up about whether we’d support it and let him know in half an hour. It was not a fait accompli that the AWU would support a challenge. ‘Support the leader’ had long been our mantra—historically we’ve always been opposed to leadership challenges. In fact, on the Sunday before the challenge, I had spent most of the day on the phone telling a number of my friends in the Caucus that I didn’t think a challenge at Tuesday’s meeting would be the best course of action. And as I spoke to colleagues to weigh up our options on that fateful Wednesday night, Lucy scrawled on a piece of paper, ‘Bad idea. Won’t fly’.

But the die had been cast. The federal parliamentary Labor Caucus was sick to the back teeth of Rudd and wanted him gone. And the key ‘plotters’, or so they have been called—the ‘faceless men’, whom I was about to join—wanted me to come on board; they wanted an outside voice, a leader of the labour movement, backing their decision to give the process an air of legitimacy. In this, as it turned out, I wholly failed. All I did was commit the cardinal sin of backroom politics—I made myself part of the story.

I still have the piece of paper that Lucy scrawled on, and as I write this, several weeks after the 2010 federal election, I know that she was mostly right—and possibly, completely right. As we discovered, the Australian public found it very difficult to accept the dumping of Kevin Rudd. But despite all the criticism that I and my fellow faceless men have copped, it seems to me that we did the right thing. And not just because we believe that Prime Minister Julia Gillard can successfully lead our newly formed minority government, and turn it into a long-term, stable administration.

But because the Rudd Government had become, or maybe had always been, completely dysfunctional. The evidence had been there, but the media had failed to see it, which is why they were so completely taken by surprise by the leadership change, so utterly pissed off by the lack of prior warning. The endless staff departures, the hastily covered-up tantrums over hair dryers and hot meals, the gaggle of inexperienced advisers, the bizarre publicity stunts with celebrities, the angry circumventing of Cabinet—it all added up to a government whose members had no power, no say.

Except, of course, they did. They had the ultimate power, and the Caucus decided to wield it.

Kevin Rudd in many ways is an impressive man, but he had no talent for leading a political party once in government. He appeared to have a complete lack of understanding of our parliamentary system. It seemed to me he had convinced himself that he was, in fact, the president of Australia, governing with the support of the Labor Party in parliament. As an outsider, a loner with no real friends in the Caucus, he had made the ultimate mistake—he had forgotten to do the numbers. And so the numbers did him. As in football, when your captain is no longer playing well, you put someone else in.

My role in the leadership ‘coup’ has been overstated in the media. Had I not gone on ABC’s Lateline program on the night of the challenge and publicly backed Gillard, she still would have won. However, by that stage of the night the numbers were unclear, and no-one in the Caucus or in the wider labour movement could have predicted the huge support among the parliamentary members for a leadership change. Gillard’s key supporters thought that the AWU’s backing might be the key to convincing a number of backbenchers to make the switch.

The AWU has always taken a stance on the question of leadership of the federal party. This was different only in that it was the first time since we’d backed Bob Hawke to succeed Bill Hayden that we hadn’t supported the incumbent leader. But ultimately, whether or not people listen to our opinion is up to them.

A quick glance through Australian political history or indeed global politics will reveal that unions taking positions on the leadership of progressive political parties is par for the course. In recent times, it has been clear that the support of the major unions in the UK delivered Ed Miliband the leadership of the UK Labour Party. And the support of large US unions gave Barack Obama the edge he needed during the 2008 primaries to snatch the presidential nomination, and eventually the presidency itself.

The Liberal Party, however, spun the line that this was something new, and many journalists, unwilling or too lazy to look at the 119-year history of the Australian Labor Party, swallowed it—hook, line and sinker.

The union that I am proud to lead has been affiliated to the Labor Party for its entire existence. In fact, it was at an AWU meeting held under a tree in the central Queensland town of Barcaldine that the decision to form the Labor Party was taken. A nationwide strike of AWU members in the shearing industry had just been brutally crushed by the combined strength of the pastoralists and the colonial governments of the day, and it was decided that a new political party was needed to provide a voice for working people.

William Guthrie Spence, who five years earlier had formed the AWU with a young shearer named David Temple, had said, ‘The working man must take his proper place in the nation’. These words continue to guide the political direction of the AWU today. They hang above my desk in our national office in Sydney, and in each of our forty-five other offices.

There were also claims that the Labor leadership change was some form of power grab by me as an individual or the union as a whole, but nothing could be further from the truth. In his book Suddenly, Last Winter, Bob Ellis writes that on that night, I ‘changed history, changed it incontestably’. Would that I had such power. The truth is, I do not. The power was in the hands of the Caucus, and they wielded it, not seeking or needing any individual’s imprimatur.

After the call from Canberra seeking the view of the union on the leadership of the party, I drove into my Sussex Street office to meet with Bill Ludwig, the AWU president and head of our Queensland branch. We discussed the pros and cons of a change with members of the federal parliamentary party, and after much agonising we decided that, yes, in our view, it was time. It wasn’t an easy decision. We knew that we would come under much criticism. But the interests of our members had to come first.

We were convinced that Labor could not win the coming election under Rudd’s leadership. Polling that we had seen from the ALP painted a very dim picture, far worse than what some media outlets have reported. The last internal party poll, taken on 20 June, just four days before the leadership change, had pointed not just to defeat, but to electoral annihilation. Based on the notional seats that Labor held after the redistribution earlier in the year, we definitely would have lost twenty-three seats, and another nine could have gone either way. The polling had also consistently shown that Labor was on a steep downward trajectory, with little hope of reversing the decline under Rudd. The feeling within the union movement and the party in the weeks leading up to the leadership change was one of utter despair.

The polling showed Gillard stood a better chance. She was not a sure thing, but at least she had a shot at victory, as opposed to Rudd, who had no hope at all. The feeling of despair was widespread across all sections of the movement, except it seemed in the Prime Minister’s office—the PM appeared to be as self-confident as ever. And as unwilling as ever to listen to those who thought the government needed to change direction to stand a chance of winning the next poll.

In the months before the leadership challenge, I had played a prominent public role in defending the government’s Resources Super Profits Tax. The RSPT was the best way to ensure that an appropriate level of taxation was applied to the booming resources industry—the same is true of its replacement, the Mineral Resources Rent Tax. This was not a new position for the AWU. For well over thirty years, our union had advocated the replacement of the clunky state royalties scheme with a profits-based taxation system for the mining industry. This would ensure the survival of the marginal, less profitable mines that sometimes collapsed due to the heavy impost of royalties, and also make sure that the more profitable mines paid a fair share back.

The proposal was first flagged with me at a meeting with Kevin Rudd at Kirribilli House several weeks before the RSPT was announced in May 2010. I indicated our support for the tax and committed to campaigning with our members in the mining industry on it. However, I had rather naively assumed that this proposal had already been negotiated with the industry, and had their general support. After all, in its submission to the Henry Tax Review, the Minerals Council had called for a profits-based taxation system. But when the RSPT was announced, it prompted immediate and feral opposition from the resources industry, and it quickly dawned on me that the government had declared war on one of the most powerful sections of the business community, just months before an election.

We held strong and did our bit. We knew that the vast majority of the claims made by the minerals industry were overblown, and that with or without the RSPT, employment in it would continue to grow. But I grew worried as I realised that the government was in large part relying on the unions to be its advocates in selling the tax. This was brought home to me when I agreed to debate the Queensland National Party figure and mining magnate Clive Palmer at the National Press Club on the tax.

I didn’t think too much of it at first. It was just part of my day-to-day work, standing up for our members in the industry and trying to inject some common sense into the discussion. Then, several days before the debate, a friend of mine in parliament rang me and told me that Rudd had gotten up in Caucus to tell the assembled MPs how important this event was, and that he wanted a good number of MPs to attend. This was nice, but clearly if the government was relying on a union ‘boss’ to sell its message, then we had pretty much lost the fight.

The union’s message on the RSPT was clear and direct: the minerals belonged to all Australians and therefore all Australians deserved to share the wealth generated from them; it was our common wealth. The government, on the other hand, was as clear as mud. Wayne Swan did a good job in cutting through to the key issues, but then Rudd weighed in and left everyone more confused than they had been before he had opened his mouth. When I conveyed that impression to ministers, party officials or staffers, their universal response was to simply shrug their shoulders and say that Rudd wouldn’t listen to anyone on this.

I was still resolute in my belief that the RSPT was the right thing to do, but for the first time in almost three years of the Rudd Government, I started to question the Prime Minister’s leadership abilities. Picking a fight of this scale just before an election was not brave, it was foolhardy. It was also symptomatic of a leadership style that switched and shifted, lacking consistency.

Many commentators and former Labor identities have had plenty to say in the aftermath of the election about why the result was so bad for the ALP. Plenty of people have laid the blame at the feet of the campaign director, Karl Bitar, or the other so-called faceless men like Mark Arbib. This is a pretty lazy and weak analysis. The actual campaign machinery that Bitar and party officials were responsible for ran like clockwork.

Former Queensland premier Peter Beattie was right when he said that the campaign itself had been well run, and that it had been the leaks that had destabilised it:

Had they not happened then Julia would’ve had a much smoother transition into the campaign itself. And if you have a look at the polls, and I’ve studied them, you can see the dip in the Labor vote once those leaks took place and once the party had to deal with them. That ugly political wrangle cost us two weeks of momentum and a big slice of the vote.

I agree with Beattie’s view, but I also think that Labor’s vote began weakening well before Rudd’s leadership started to take a hammering in the opinion polls.

Labor took office in 2007 with high expectations of the party. Its promises were big and the mood for change in the electorate was clear. But I was sceptical about some of the more tokenistic aspects of the first-term agenda, such as the 2020 Summit—I enjoyed participating in it, but couldn’t see its real value in trying to change the country. And when the problems started, they came in thick and fast. Broken promises on Grocery Watch, Fuel Watch, Japanese whaling and child care clearly had a big impact on the electorate.

For me, the beginning of the end was the refugee issue. Labor reversed many of the harshest aspects of the Howard Government’s policies on refugees, but the rhetoric was still wrong.

They took children out from behind the razor wire and allowed them to be kept in the wider community. They abolished the Temporary Protection Visa category which, while giving refugees the ability to stay in Australia, denied them the rights and protections allowed to most other people living in this country, and which are required under the UN’s 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. These were good humanitarian policies—the types of policies that Labor governments should enact. Unfortunately, they were put in place without any real conversation with the Australian people about why past federal government reactions to refugees, such as in 2001, were wrong.

When, after the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka in mid-2009, more boats started arriving in northern Australia, there were two directions in which the government could head. As Malcolm Fraser had in the 1970s, Rudd could have taken the high road. He could have shown some leadership on the issue and spent some of his massive political capital on changing the debate once and for all.

Malcolm Turnbull was the Opposition leader at the time and was cynically trying to exploit the issue, but wasn’t gaining much traction. Also, I don’t believe that Turnbull would have really hammered the issue because he is, at heart, an honourable, good man. Rudd, meanwhile, according to the opinion polls, was the most popular prime minister in the nation’s history—his personal satisfaction rating sat at over 60 per