Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, whose bitter rivalry sparked the most rancorous period in modern Australian Labor history, entered a secret Kirribilli-style agreement whereby he would relinquish the prime ministership to her after two terms if they won the 2007 election, a new book has claimed.
The political memoir by the former Victorian socialist left leader and senator Kim Carr details his negotiation of the prime ministerial handover deal, together with his allegation Gillard reneged by using “tricked-up” polling funded by the Australian mining industry to undermine Rudd in 2010 during his government’s first term.
Rudd and Gillard, Carr claims in his book A Long March, “had a deal”.
“This was not speculation on my part; I was the one who had forged it in 2006,” he writes. “If we won the 2007 election, which we did under Kevin’s leadership, he would remain as prime minister for two terms and in the third term Julia would take over. That was the agreement that had been struck, with me as the witness, right there in my flat in Holder, 10km south of Parliament House [in 2006]. But on 23 June 2010, when Gillard told Rudd to resign or face a party-room challenge, I came to appreciate that deals mean different things to different people.”
Rudd recalled in his memoirs that Carr had been instrumental to he and Gillard uniting to topple the then Labor leader, Kim Beazley, and leading the party to election victory in 2007. But Carr’s book has now disclosed a previously secret prime ministerial handover deal between the two after two terms in government.
Carr writes that a Rudd-Gillard pact on the planned transfer of prime ministerial power is akin to the secret “Kirribilli agreement”, witnessed by the then ACTU secretary, Bill Kelty, and the businessman Peter Abeles in 1988, whereby the then prime minister, Bob Hawke, agreed to resign after the 1990 election in favour of his treasurer, Paul Keating. Hawke famously reneged on the deal.
Gillard, who became deputy prime minister to Rudd at the November 2007 federal election, told Rudd on the night of 23 June 2010 she was challenging for leadership. Her challenge followed a protracted period of extreme caucus disquiet about Rudd’s chaotic leadership style and policy drift, and amid a $20m-plus campaign by the Australian mining industry to oust him over his government’s super profits tax on resources companies.
Rudd, lacking the caucus numbers, stood aside the next day, 24 June. Gillard was elected prime minister unopposed and ruled until Rudd defeated her in a challenge on 27 June 2013.
Gillard has consistently maintained she did not actively undermine Rudd’s prime ministership and only resolved to challenge him on 23 June 2010.
A spokesperson for Gillard told Guardian Australia: “Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard published her memoirs in 2014 and these detail how she became prime minister and her time in office.” Kevin Rudd declined to comment.
But Carr – a senator for 29 years and the longest serving member of Labor’s national executive in party history when he left politics in 2022 – contends: “Clearly Gillard’s later claim that the coup was only put together on Wednesday 23 June is contestable.”
Carr claims Gillard asked to see him in her office “two days before she walked into Rudd’s office to tell him that she was willing to blast him out if he didn’t resign”.
He writes: “In her office she showed me private polling … That polling suggested the public’s support for the government under Rudd was weakening.”
Gillard, he claims, asked him to “take the polling away and study it” and to gauge what “the feelings were within caucus”.
Carr writes in the book that he approached a leading New South Wales right factional figure and was surprised to discover the extent of the preparations to move against Rudd.
“He explained that the coup could only be done by ambush to prevent Kevin calling a general election.” On Wednesday 23 June 2010, Carr says he then asked a Labor Left convener “about the disposition of the faction”. The convener rang around and reported that “the response was disturbing: the dissemination of the private polling was having an immediate effect”.
“I later discovered that on Sunday 20 June, Julia had also discussed the special polling with Martin Ferguson, resources minister and fellow member of the Left but no great friend of hers. Also sceptical of the exercise, he was later to say, ‘All the way from Melbourne to Canberra she tried to inveigle me into her plan. She said, “If you could see the polling, you would see how much trouble we are in.”’ He told her he was confident we would get through this and be in a good position for the election.”
Ferguson declined to comment on this.
Of the polling Carr alleges Gillard handed him, he writes: “I was sceptical of her polling at the time and later was able to confirm that it had been tricked up. But it persuaded a large number of my caucus colleagues, who had been shaken by the apparent erraticism of the previous five months and were worried about their own parliamentary careers. I provided the polling to the 2010 ALP National Executive Review [of the federal election after which Gillard Labor had to form minority government]. I had been suspicious of outside interference, and some years later confirmed the mining industry’s funding of that polling.”
Carr does not reveal how he confirmed the mining industry’s alleged funding of the polling. He simply writes: “The mining industry’s engagement in Labor’s factional politics has received very little public scrutiny. A closer examination of its campaign on the super profits tax will be possible when company archives are opened.”
Accounting for his allegation that this private polling was “tricked up”, he writes: “As it was, Gillard’s justification for staging the ambush on Rudd on 23 June – that a defeat under Rudd was guaranteed based on the private polling she had earlier brandished in front of me – was gainsaid by published independent polling. The Newspoll released on 21 June in The Australian suggested a two-party preferred vote split 52 to 48 per cent in Labor’s favour.”
So what did the private polling allegedly funded by the mining industry show – and how did it compare to the concurrent Newspoll, then regarded in the federal political sphere as the most authoritative gauge of public political sentiment?
The June 2010 private polling being shown to nervous caucus members was both qualitative and quantitative. It claimed Labor faced a primary vote swing of 6% (to a then very low 32%) compared with the Coalition’s 45%. It had the Greens up two points to 16%. This translated, the polling said, to a Labor two-party preferred vote of an election losing 47% compared with the Coalition’s 53%.
“The ALP remains in very serious trouble,” the poll found. “There are four factors responsible for most of the swing.”
It identified the first as “a pronounced disillusionment and dissatisfaction with the federal government … around perceptions that it is not delivering on its promises, [is] all talk no action and when it does try to do something it stuffs it up. A majority, 55% of voters, are now disillusioned and dissatisfied with the performance of the federal Labor government.”
The second factor was “a sense of anxiety about the prime minister and his leadership”.
Third was a “concern about the RSPT [resources super profits tax]” while the fourth was identified as “a general set of frustrations and anxieties about what is perceived as wasteful [government] spending and financial mismanagement”.
The polling summary included a series of colour illustrations of Labor seats that would not be retained in the event of a 6% primary vote rout.
Carr had been on overseas business travel from 5 to 19 June. When he returned to Parliament House, distracted by ministerial priorities and, before Gillard had allegedly shown him the polling, a delegation of junior Labor rightwing MPs visited him to communicate just how “intolerable” Rudd had become and the belief in caucus “that he would have to go”.
“In retrospect, I misread the seriousness of the situation … To my profound regret, I did not have my eye on the internal ball. I was ambivalent about what I heard from them, again because it seemed so nuts. We were a first term government! I was silly enough to say a couple of things that led the plotters to redouble their efforts. First, I suggested to them that they would be jeopardising their own futures if this failed. Bemused, I also asked if they had any senior members of the government on board and they said they did not.”
They apparently misinterpreted this as Carr advising them to go and recruit ministers “which they duly did”.
“I had intended to throw a wet blanket over this group of would be insurgents, but my response had the opposite effect,” he writes.
“However, now I was caught and, as the one who had forged the Rudd-Gillard alliance, it was painful. I didn’t want to betray confidences – Julia and the sergeant majors had come to me in confidence – but on the other hand, I remained in deep sympathy with Kevin. I did not manage to put all the pieces together until later. In fact, this was an orchestrated effort to pull off a coup and Gillard was right in the middle of it.”
Throughout his own memoirs Rudd references private polling that Gillard forces allegedly used to undermine him as PM. He labels what its proponents were claiming the polling illustrated (a dire 2010 election loss with him as leader) in order to damage him as “complete bullshit”. While Rudd rails against the resources industry’s expensive campaign to get rid of him over the super profits tax, he does not claim the industry funded the polling used to undermine him.
Gillard makes little mention of Carr in her book and certainly does not in relation to the formation of the leadership “dream team” combination in 2006 when it was evident that Beazley could not win the 2007 election. She does not mention a “deal”.
“It was this that led me into discussions with Kevin Rudd about forming an alliance to become the new leadership of the Labor Party,” she writes.
“Kevin had to be the leader in our alliance because I understood that I was not what Labor needed at that point: a woman, not married, an atheist. I would not be perceived as the embodiment of safe change. In joining forces with Kevin, I accepted the probable consequence that I was unlikely to ever lead the Labor party.”
Carr writes that in his brokering of the 2006 Rudd-Gillard leadership deal and a third-term prime ministerial handover, an initial meeting took place with Gillard in his Lygon Street, Melbourne office.
“Rudd couldn’t beat Gillard and Gillard couldn’t beat Rudd. Together, they could beat Beazley. She wanted a negotiated outcome and I put it together with her approval. Kevin would be the leader, she would be the deputy, and Kevin would take the Labor Party to the 2007 election. If we won in 2007, he would be guaranteed to lead the party to the next election, which could be expected to be held in 2010.”
Carr says it was agreed that If Labor won in 2010, there “could be a timely, organised handover to Julia, if that was what the caucus wanted”.
Carr writes that the only relief for him throughout the Gillard “coup” was that he did not have to vote in a party room contest.
“It would have been expected that I would have supported Gillard in a direct contest, and I believe I would have, out of loyalty to the Left. But traces of the bad taste in my mouth from the undergraduate shenanigans I had witnessed the night before were still there. While I was disturbed by what had been done, I was not despondent. I had faith in Gillard’s political abilities. A Victorian was prime minister for the first time since Hawke, and a woman and a left winger to boot.”
Carr’s book offers an intriguing window into the below-the-surface machinations of a Labor factional operative who tended to shun publicity even though he was involved in every significant leadership manoeuvring and change beginning with Paul Keating’s usurpation of Bob Hawke in 1991.
Again, he was intimately involved in reinstalling Rudd as prime minister in June 2013 in what he writes was a “saving the furniture” move as public support for Gillard eroded and Rudd loyalists in caucus and the media undermined her.
A Long March brings another significant inside perspective to Labor’s most divisive period since the 1955 “split”, illustrating the depth of contemporary rancorous contestation that still surrounds the political history of the Rudd-Gillard “dream team”.
