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The Stalking of Julia Gillard
By Kerry-Anne Walsh Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2013 Kerry-Anne Walsh
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74269-595-2
CHAPTER 1
THE 'SACKIVERSARY'
15–24 June 2011
It's official. Prime Minister Julia Gillard is a dud. The first female prime minister of Australia is a shocker. Lacking in character, incapable of governing, hopeless, and a liar to boot. We know this because dozens of political journalists in Canberra, plus 'specialist' political commentators who never turn up in parliament, radio shock jocks in capital cities who never grace parliament's doors, and a grab-bag of internet amateur scribes and conspiracy-peddlers who could be anywhere, tell us so in their analysis of Gillard's one-year anniversary as prime minister.
This opportunity to consolidate what's been a relentless bagging of Gillard for months is because it's the 'Sackiversary'. And it's this event — not the economy, stupid; nor asylum seekers; nor running the country — that's consumed the Opposition and the national media for ten days now, leading up to the commemoration of the events of 23 and 24 June 2010. Acres of newsprint and hours of airtime on radio and TV, devoted to dissecting that day and the year since, have been spat out at the public in a stunning overkill analysis of Gillard's weaknesses and flaws.
But what about the good bits? Good heavens, no! She's a disaster leading a disastrous government.
The Herald-Sun's Gillard hater-in-residence, Andrew Bolt, kicks off the media sledge-fest with a column on 15 June declaring her the weakest and most incompetent prime minister since 'at least WWII, with not a single achievement to boast of in a junkyard of failure'. Hers is a 'shameful record of deceits' that 'makes her unelectable' and, just to make sure we get the message, he finishes: 'What's killed Gillard is simply a lack of character. Of gravitas. Of honesty. Dud policy can be fixed. But dud character cannot, and Gillard's tragedy is that hers has been found out.' By whom, he doesn't say.
On the weekend of 18 and 19 June, Fairfax newspapers gratuitously run a poll showing that Rudd is outgunning Gillard as preferred prime minister by two-to-one. Such polls are only designed to create mischief. The person in the prime ministerial hot seat is almost always less favoured than anyone not in it — unless they are still in the honeymoon stratosphere, which Rudd enjoyed when he first became Labor leader. As with Howard vs Costello, or Keating vs Hawke, when you line up the pretender or the deposed against the poor bunny who's having to make the hard decisions, the incumbent is always dudded, particularly if the incumbent is introducing nasties that sections of the public don't like.
When I was political correspondent at the Sun-Herald in the mid-2000s, my deputy editor Peter Lynch had the impish idea of conducting a poll of New South Wales voters about their federal Labor leadership preferences and throwing former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr into the mix. Never mind that Carr wasn't in federal parliament and had no intention of coming on down, the huge support for him as federal leader in this poll gave us a spectacular front-page splash, which only served to cast further doubts on the leadership of the incumbent, Kim Beazley. This fanciful story led news bulletins all day, and gathered legs enough to spill into the next day's newspapers and radio news bulletins. It was like a fake bomb that turned atomic, setting off the political world and chattering classes, even though there wasn't a scintilla of reality to it.
The only media outlet at the time to call it for what it was was irreverent political-junkie website, Crikey, which accurately described the poll and accompanying yarn, which I wrote, as 'egregious'. Participants in polls will often nominate anyone — a drover's dog, Donald Duck, doesn't matter — as long as it's not the person telling them they're going to get a spanking new tax, have their pensions frozen or their middle-class welfare cauterised. More fool all of us for taking these polls seriously.
For the purposes of the Sackiversary — a brainchild tag dreamt up by the Opposition, and then eagerly adopted by Gillard haters in shock-jock land and quoted respectfully in national newspapers — the Fairfax Nielsen poll works a treat. It is the perfect platform for a feature piece by Peter Hartcher, Rudd's absolute favourite person in the press gallery, who returns the affection and adulation in spades. Asked by his mate for his reflections, Rudd muses: 'At the start, you're a bit too bruised to reflect intelligently. That's being human. But after a period of time you can reflect and learn. For me it's been good to open up discussion of what went right and what went wrong.'
With whom he has held those discussions he doesn't say. But it hasn't been with Gillard or her loyal ministers, and the discussions Rudd's been having with his small mutinous band of caucus backers is about payback, not moving forward. He admits to Hartcher only three mistakes: deferring the emissions trading scheme, failing to be more consultative, and not having more 'greybeards' advising him. But, he says bravely, he's in a 'robust' frame of mind and it has really all been just one big learning experience.
But there are those in cabinet who are anything but happy at this allegedly wised-up and lesson-learned Rudd sitting in the ministerial sanctum as Foreign minister. They see him as still murderous with rage at the woman who took his job as prime minister in June 2010, despite his self-effacing reveries about life after The Lodge.
But then again, he does have God on his side. He was pondering when in Church, he told the Brisbane Times, that the main thing was not to sit around and mope. 'The key thing is to get out there and make a difference with the resources that you have at your disposal today.' He wasn't perfect, of course, he was just having a go. 'Whatever your calling and whatever your lot is in life, to take those talents and take those abilities and use them to the utmost — that is what you try and do.' And: 'None of us are perfect and we all fall short of the glory of God.' As the Irish would say: Jaysus! The glory of God does not rest, a holy man should tell the former prime minister, in a vengeful heart.
Rudd has been able to console himself in the last year by busying himself, in the process clocking up a staggering cache of international frequent flyer points as he bustles about breaking diplomatic impasses and brokering peace in our time. But those who know him know he hurts like hell. He watches, he waits, and he plots.
After all, talk of escalating leadership tensions between Gillard and Rudd — or, more accurately, reporting of talk that may or may not be happening — is cranking up nicely. The day before the Fairfax poll, Simon Benson, Gemma Jones and Steve Lewis wrote a breathless piece in the Daily Telegraph about the pair being 'locked' for an hour the preceding day in 'a tense, closed-door meeting'. (Are any high-level ministerial meetings held out in the open?)
When an article starts 'Almost a year to the day since the coup ...', but it is a good seven days before the actual anniversary, journalistic accuracy clearly isn't a priority. Unfortunately, the Tele's readers weren't told much about the meeting, except for a sniffy suggestion that it was about the temporary banning of live animal exports to Indonesia, a challenging policy issue of the day having catastrophic ramifications for breeders in Australia and abattoirs in Indonesia. This is a real policy issue with real repercussions, but the Tele doesn't give us any background.
One would imagine the Prime Minister and her Foreign minister, who are being forced to deal with Indonesian authorities over this unpopular policy, would look grim. But according to the Tele — even though it was denied by both Gillard and Rudd's office — the meeting was most definitely about leadership, because their 'body language' showed there was 'renewed tension between the two rivals'. Why? Because the pair walked down a parliamentary corridor into the meeting without talking to each other, the Tele informed us.
Here's a thought: maybe holding talks about a grave policy issue is a sombre prospect. The pair aren't exactly BFFs anyway; the parliament has been in a continuous uproar over the issue; and a pesky photographer furiously snapping your photo as you walk into a tense meeting doesn't lend itself to posing and shouting 'Cheese!'. Five photos from Tele photographer Gary Ramage's efforts accompany the online article as rock-solid proof of volatile leadership tension between the pair.
The story continued relentlessly: there were 'tremors' evident in Labor ranks, 'renewed rumblings about a Rudd comeback' because of 'shitty' polling, the authors declared. No names, no pack drill, and certainly nothing about the challenging policy dilemma of suspending the livelihoods of 17,000 cattle farmers in the Northern Territory, cutting the meagre livings of thousands of Indonesian workers in affected abattoirs, and crippling a multi-million-dollar export industry.
The authors revealed in the very last sentence why the article's premise was baseless and it should never have been published: 'But claims Mr Rudd could win back the leadership were dismissed, with faction bosses saying his support was the size of a netball team.'
This non-story — and a similar one in the Australian about 'rumours' of unspecified 'screaming matches'— sprout legs. Rudd, who on this chill June night has just martyred himself by participating in the annual Vinnies CEO sleep-out, emerges remarkably quickly once the newspapers have hit the newsstands in order to talk to ABC Breakfast. He's decked out in a humble blue and white tracksuit and sporting a wee hint of homeless stubble. Reports of a feud with Gillard were a fabrication and those speculating about it should take a Mogadon, he instructs. They'd been talking about the live cattle issue, he says. And no, he's not challenging the Prime Minister. Cue laugh out loud from the prime ministerial suite.
Immigration minister Chris Bowen also urges calm. The photos were being over-analysed, he told the ABC's AM. 'I see them working closely together, cooperatively on the matters of national interest of the day. I've seen that first hand, close up,' he says. It doesn't matter what Bowen or anyone says, the media has the bit between its collective teeth, and it ain't letting go.
* * *
Accompanying the Fairfax poll is a story by Michelle Grattan in the Age, reporting that 'rumours' of an unspecified 'row' between Rudd and Gillard are swirling about — no doubt the very same unspecified row which appeared in the Tele yesterday. Rumour becomes fact very easily these days; what one media outlet reports in vague, unsubstantiated terms becomes bible when the next journalist runs with it.
Gillard tries to put context around the poll, explaining: 'I certainly anticipated that this would be a hugely difficult period. I'm not surprised about some of the results we're seeing. We are in a phase where we've outlined principles [on carbon pricing] to the Australian people. We've been very, very frank with them about the impacts of carbon pricing on them ... and we're not at the stage yet where we can fully explain to people the assistance that comes with it.'
Sounds reasonable; logical, even. Australians fear the unknown. We're a conservative lot at heart, and we particularly don't like nasty surprises that come with a price tag. We respond well to fear campaigns, and we love a good bellyache about thieving politicians sneaking their hands into our hip pockets.
Gillard has been hounded and pilloried for stating before last year's election that her government would not introduce a carbon tax. The one and only quote relentlessly trotted out by the anti-Gillardites in the Land of the Lunar Right is: 'There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.' What is conveniently ignored is that on at least ten occasions during the campaign she committed a future Gillard government to work towards a carbon pricing scheme. In an election eve interview, Gillard even told The Australian's resident political gurus, Dennis Shanahan and Paul Kelly, that she was prepared to legislate such a scheme in the next term. She would view victory as a 'mandate' to do so, they wrote. To cries from Abbott and media critics that she'd broken a promise, Gillard responded she wouldn't play semantic word games: her proposal was a market-based mechanism to price carbon — a temporary fixed price 'hard-wired' to a cap-and-trade scheme. They would call it what they wanted.
The response then had been fast, furious and inaccurate. One of 2GB's resident Gillard-haters, Alan Jones, branded her 'Juliar'. Acerbic Melbourne Herald-Sun economics writer Terry McCrann, who finds it difficult to give a tick to anything Gillard or her government does, described her as 'both dishonest and dumb'. Andrew Bolt, another in the Herald-Sun anti-Labor stable of grumpy old men, let fly. She was a liar leading the world on climate change 'by marching off a cliff ', he pronounced. The Daily Telegraph's Piers Akerman outdid even his own consistently florid descriptions of Gillard, tossing around phrases like 'mind-numbing duplicity', 'stupendous hypocrisy' and 'pure treachery'.
John Howard performed a triple reverse somersault on his promise to never, ever introduce a GST under a government he led, and was met with no such opprobrium. Unlike Gillard, he consistently lied to the Australian people about his intentions.
In May 1995, in response to reports of comments he had made to a business lunch that he was leaving the door open to revisit the GST as Coalition policy, Howard issued a definitive statement shutting down the talk. The newly re- minted Opposition Leader declared in his press statement: 'Suggestions I have left open the possibility of a GST are completely wrong. A GST or anything resembling it is no longer Coalition policy. Nor will it be policy at any time in the future. It is completely off the political agenda in Australia.' At a media conference he repeated the lines. 'There's no way a GST will ever be part of our policy.' Reporter: 'Never ever?' Howard: 'Never ever. It's dead. It was killed by voters at the last election.'
Howard won the 1996 election and, after a horror, scandal-plagued first year that saw five of his ministers depart the frontbench, he revisited what had always been one of his tax reform favourites — probably to take the community's collective mind off what a basket case of a government he was leading. In August 1997, he coyly invited the Australian public to go on a 'tax adventure' with him, declining to say whether the adventure would include wandering down the GST path. Six months later, he announced his GST package. As for those pesky previous promises, Howard invented a new caveat. He had always said, he told parliament in April 1998 in the run-up to the October election, that he'd only ever promised not to introduce a GST 'in our first term'. Nonsense. He flat out lied, thrice. Yet the very same commentators who now hold Gillard to ferocious account over what was not a lie, hold Howard up as an example of how to go about things when in government, because he took the GST to the voters at the 1998 election. The double standards are staggering.
In Canberra's Big House on the hill, parliamentary exchanges this week have been dominated by Opposition taunts about the leadership change-over, a year ago, augmented by Liberal Party-sponsored television advertisements claiming Rudd wants his old job back. 'Has the political assassination of a sitting prime minister been worth it?', Abbott demands of Gillard during one question time. Still washing Malcolm Turnbull's blood off his hands from his own coup against his leader eighteen months ago, Abbott is brazen in his attacks on Gillard. All week, it's the same message: she leads 'the most incompetent, the most deceptive, the most dishonest government in modern Australian politics'. Question after question is peppered with accusations and insinuations about Gillard and Rudd. Labor MPs must deeply regret having 'conspired in the political assassination of an elected prime minister' is another taunt, which cutely ignores the fact that Australians don't vote for the prime minister — it's the duty of both party rooms to elect their leader, who then carries his or her party's credentials to the election. If their party wins, their leader assumes the prime ministership unless their party room decides otherwise.
Trying to ram a spear through a slight opening in their opponent's armour is a traditional pastime for any Opposition. Labor's brilliant at it, too. But when Rudd joins in, political game-playing assumes a nastier dimension. Opposition Foreign spokeswoman Julie Bishop rises to her feet and directs a question to Rudd about Australian diplomatic relations with East Timor, PNG and Malaysia in the wake of Labor's latest asylum seeker policy. Wild cheers erupt from the benches behind her: this will be fascinating. Rudd is happy to respond: he leans with lazy nonchalance on the despatch box as he extols the government's policy, while the faces of ministerial colleagues behind him are grim.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Stalking of Julia Gillard by Kerry-Anne Walsh. Copyright © 2013 Kerry-Anne Walsh. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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