The Rudd Rebellion: The Campaign to Save Labor

By Bruce Hawker

This is a fascinating account of one of the most challenging political campaigns Australia has ever seen. From the detailed war-gaming of potential political outcomes to the nail-biting lead-up to the polls. . . what really happened on that campaign trail? How did Rudd resume the prime ministership? Did his ultimate push come too late, or was saving the furniture the best the ALP could hope for?

These diaries reveal the sense of urgency and the size of the hurdles to be overcome in the remarkably short time that Team Rudd was given to try to turn around the Government’s fortunes. They are a rare insight into the complexities of running a campaign—the strategic and tactical decisions that challenged the team every day as they tried to snatch an unlikely win.

Framed by a prologue and epilogue to set the scene and to analyse the election wash-up, this is a candid, blow-by-blow account of what really went on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Nov 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780522864502

Book preview

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 Bill—a 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 Rudd’s ‘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

The Rudd Removal

In Between Times: 2010 to 2013

The 2013 Diaries

The Rudd Return

Week 1: Getting Started

Week 2: Settling into Government

Week 3: Laying the Cornerstones for the Campaign

Week 4: Carbon Tax Axed, but FBT Rears Its Head

Week 5: The Party Is Reformed

Week 6: Final Preparations Before Calling the Election

Week 7: The Campaign Kicks Off

Week 8: Ill Discipline in the Campaign

Week 9: News Corp Turns Up the Heat

Week 10: The Campaign Focus Turns to the Costing of Promises

Week 11: Rudd Finishes the Campaign Strongly, but …

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Preface

This is a participant’s 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 Gillard’s role in Rudd’s removal and his unstinting determination to take back the leadership. However, it was not always like that—the 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. Rudd’s strength and wider appeal were bound up in the fact that he was not a typical Labor leader. He didn’t 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 weakness—what 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 reluctant—for 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 Rudd’s 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 Rudd’s 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, Gillard’s 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, ultimately—and inevitably—an ending where neither of the main players was victorious.

My diary entries were usually made at the end of a long day’s 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 publication—it 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 reasons—including 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. Labor’s internal structures, which had allowed Rudd to be removed in a swift and highly unpopular caucus revolt led by the Party’s so-called ‘faceless men’; and finally

4. A strong public perception that Labor was mismanaging the economy, despite the fact that Australia had one of the best-performing economies in the world.

Dealing with these four challenges became the key to Labor’s fortunes at the election. Kevin Rudd had to develop politics that would address these four issues. In the first five weeks after he was elected we effectively put in place three of the four cornerstones required to remove these roadblocks. Rudd announced that:

1. The Carbon Tax was to be replaced with a market-driven Emissions Trading Scheme.

2. An arrangement had been negotiated with the PNG government that would effectively neutralise boat-borne asylum seekers as an issue.

3. A process of Party democratisation was to begin, starting with rule changes to give rank-and-file members a say in the election of the Leader.

Rudd also began to sell the government’s achievements as economic managers and pressed the case that Abbott’s deep spending cuts would destroy jobs and damage the economy.

The five weeks between Rudd’s return to the leadership and the time he called the election was a very short but exciting period for Labor. The Party-reform agenda was particularly challenging but ultimately very rewarding. In fact, it may yet prove to be Kevin Rudd’s most significant legacy as Labor Leader. This reform process, I believe, has only just started; in time we will see further empowerment of rank-and-file members and a reduced role for unions in the decision-making of the party.

As we know, there were two attempts to reinstate Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister—in February 2012 and March 2013—before he finally made a successful challenge against Julia Gillard in June 2013. Had the Labor caucus moved earlier to restore Rudd to the leadership, then Labor’s task, though still formidable, would nevertheless have been less challenging. As these diaries show, the short time we had to turn around Labor’s fortunes played a significant part in the way the campaign was conducted. The criticism that policy was made ‘on the run’ in the course of the election—and similar observations—sprang partly from this: time was our constant enemy.

Even for experienced campaigners the election was a task of unprecedented complexity. I came into the Rudd team in 2013 as a veteran of more campaigns than I could readily recall. I had over 30 years’ experience as a Labor Party member and campaigner. After working as a staffer in Government and Opposition for nearly 15 years between 1982 and 1997, I then established Hawker Britton, the first Labor-affiliated company that specialised in political campaigns. My partner, David Britton, and I took the successful campaign model developed when we were working for Bob Carr in NSW and helped apply it to Labor campaigns around the country. This was a particularly successful period for Labor at the sub-national level. For example, between 1998, with the election of the Beattie Government in Queensland, and 2008, with the defeat of the Carpenter Government in Western Australia, Labor won every state and territory election it contested. Hawker Britton played a central role in nearly all those campaigns. At a federal level, though, the story was much less impressive until 2007, when Kevin Rudd led Labor to its first win in 12 years. Hawker Britton helped Rudd before and after he became Opposition Leader in 2006 and then in his successful 2007 campaign.

Over the years I have been involved in some very complex elections. Peter Beattie’s win in 1998, when he was fighting both the Liberal National parties and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, was a case in point. Mike Rann’s against-the-odds win in 2010 was another. Along the way we helped Clare Martin form the first Labor Government in the history of the Northern Territory, and Morris Iemma pull off an unlikely win in 2007 in NSW after Labor had been in power there for 12 years.

However, none of these elections came within cooee of the 2013 federal campaign for the sheer size of the challenges we had to confront and for the brief time we had available to us. Normally, preparation for an election begins up to a year before polling day. As the reader will see, though, we had just weeks to move from the highly defensive campaign that was being planned for Gillard to one where we would be trying to win seats from the conservatives. In that time new policies had to be prepared and an entirely fresh advertising strategy adopted. All this was on top of the four reform cornerstones we had to lay before we could even call the election. Since the election, some writers have sought to describe this short time in Labor’s revival as ‘chaotic’ and to some extent that is true. However, the size of the task and the brief time we had to do so many things may in part explain this impression. We were racing against time to save the Labor Party. Our own polling and the published polls said the same thing: before Rudd resumed the leadership we were on the edge of a political abyss. Until he took over we looked like holding perhaps just 30 seats in a House of Representatives with a membership of 150. This is my story of how we went about trying to turn around Labor’s fortunes in those 74 days. It is, of course, seen through the eyes of a partisan player and as such is a highly subjective, but I believe frank, account of a most difficult and important election in recent Australian history.

I hope this diary gives the reader a feeling for what it is like to be in the eye of a political storm, and perhaps encourages a young activist or two to set out down this hard but ultimately rewarding road.

The Rudd Removal

Wednesday 23 June 2010

Sometimes it’s exciting to have a ringside seat when history is being made and other times it’s just ugly. Tonight I witnessed the political execution of a man who just 30 months earlier had led Labor to a historic victory after 12 years in Opposition.

I have known Kevin Rudd since 1989, when we were both chiefs of staff to Opposition leaders. He had started running Wayne Goss’s office in Queensland and I had been working for Bob Carr for a similar period. It was inevitable that we would come together to collaborate on areas of mutual benefit to the Queensland and NSW branches of the Labor Party. Over the years we had assisted one another in election campaigns—commencing in 1989, when Goss won his historic victory for Labor, ousting the National Party from office after 32 years of unbroken rule. We became friends in that campaign and have remained so to this day.

I have been working in his office for several weeks. It has been a time of severe stress for Kevin, his office, the Parliamentary Party and the National Secretariat. We had been used to winning the public debates with the Liberals but things had changed. Tony Abbott had replaced Malcolm Turnbull as Opposition Leader and was proving to be a formidable, if divisive, leader. Climate change, the cost of an Emissions Trading Scheme and the Mining Tax were Abbott’s chosen battlegrounds, when they should have been our issues. The mining industry had launched a series of devastatingly effective ads, made by the same man who had put together the Kevin 07 campaign—Neil Lawrence. He was given carte blanche by his clients to run a multimillion-dollar campaign. On the other side, the Government was forced to go through a tortuous process to make a number of heavily qualified and ultimately counterproductive advertisements to explain why a tax on the profits of mining was being introduced. It was a horrible one-sided fight that we were never going to win. I found myself in the midst of this turmoil in Canberra trying to help put the Government back on an even keel.

There had been a series of strategic and tactical failures on Labor’s part in the lead-up to this point—but they were, in my opinion, quite manageable. I had been asked to join the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) on a temporary basis to help do three things—first, to assist in getting the ship back on course by working on an improved communications strategy; second, to build some bridges between the ALP National Secretariat and NSW powerbroker Mark Arbib and the PMO; and, third, as an old friend, to act as a support and sounding board for Kevin in a particularly difficult time. These tasks had been spelt out to me by Kevin’s young but extremely capable Chief of Staff, Alister Jordan, and the National Secretary, Karl Bitar.

Mark Arbib was also an old friend and had played an important role in Kevin’s accession to the leadership in 2006. This had been followed by a period of intense work with Kevin in the lead-up to the 2007 election, in which Mark, Karl and I had jointly been involved. Since then, however, the relationship between Mark and Kevin had deteriorated and everyone recognised the need for a rapprochement.

From the outset it was difficult to make much headway working in the PMO. My attempts to suggest significant structural, strategic and communications changes were not always well received. While the Prime Minister was keen to look at other ways of doing things, his staff sometimes seemed more intent on managing him than the issues. For example, I wanted to see Kevin become less reliant on the Canberra media pack—the Press Gallery—to sell his stories. I wanted to see him reaching a wider audience using the broader capital-city media, talkback, FM radio, and regional outlets when he was travelling. This never really happened, although it was the approach subsequently taken by Tony Abbott. It is an effective tactic and reaches a wide audience without going through the Canberra Press Gallery’s rather cynical filter.

Some of my proposals were more successful. We knew that women of all ages, backgrounds and political outlooks were disturbed by Abbott’s conservative attitudes regarding women—particularly their role in society and the right to control their own reproduction. The evidence supporting Abbott’s attitudes to women was voluminous, but many Australians were unaware of it. I had sat in on focus groups where Abbott’s pronouncements about women not being temperamentally suited to some jobs, his attempts to ban the abortion drug RU486 and many other of his assertions were read out to women. Their reaction was always intense. However, when I sought to have them given prominence in parliamentary debates, the response of many female ministers was to stand back.

I also pressed for greater focus on Abbott’s front bench, their probity and their attitudes on various issues. Some of these stories were just starting to show signs of flowering. Similarly, we were beginning to have some success in campaigning at a local electorate level explaining the Government’s achievements in areas like computers in schools, the National Broadband Network (NBN) and GP Super Clinics. Communicating these achievements should have been straight out of the politics playbook. However, I suspect the Government was simply doing too many things, not preparing the ground well enough and then moving on to another issue before the public had time to digest the last offering.

All in all, though, I felt that my work in this area was often falling on deaf ears. For example, I was only ever invited to one planning meeting and that, ironically, was at the insistence of Julia Gillard. I enjoyed a good relationship with her office, having previously worked with her Chief of Staff, Amanda Lampe, and her Deputy, John Whelan. I felt at the time that there was real enthusiasm from Julia and her office for the Government to be much more aggressive in