The following is an extract from Kim Carr’s new book A Long March (Monash University Publishing).
Factional warlord. Dominant backroom operator. Kingmaker. Just about every time my name appeared in the media, one of those descriptions would be attached to it. Given my reputation, you might’ve expected on the most tumultuous night of my time in politics, as Julia Gillard tried to wrest the prime ministership from Kevin Rudd, that I would’ve been in a room at Parliament House, hard at work plotting and crunching numbers. There’d be spirited conversations, other factional operators dashing in and out, lists of names being drawn up, adrenalin pumping.
But no. On that cold night, just two days after the 2010 winter solstice, I was in my Canberra flat, alone. I wasn’t making phone calls. My colleagues weren’t calling me. I felt no excitement. I felt discomfort and a creeping sense of dread. How had it come to this? I was not only a senior member of the cabinet in the Rudd government; I had brought Gillard and Rudd together as a leadership team.
In 2006, Kim Beazley was back as leader and Labor was going nowhere. I believed there was a solution. Rudd, Gillard and I served on Labor’s front bench under Beazley. None of us were close to each other, but in politics it’s mutual interests, not friendships, that count. Like me, Gillard hailed from the party’s Left. She had numbers in the Labor caucus but not enough to win a leadership ballot on her own. Rudd, from the Right, was in the same boat. But combine their numbers, with Rudd as leader and Gillard as deputy, and they potentially shared a majority.
That was my proposition to them, and they embraced it. They saw off Beazley in late 2006 and a year later persuaded a majority of voters to call time on John Howard as prime minister, giving the Australian Labor Party its first federal election win since 1993.
On that calamitous night in 2010, we’d been in office for just two and a half years, an election was due in only a few months and we were leading in the opinion polls, yet somehow Gillard and a bunch of caucus colleagues had decided that the best contribution they could make to the government was to smash it up and remake it, with her in charge. For a week or so, I’d known that something was up. But it seemed too bizarre. We all knew how hard it was to win an election. Why would anyone put us further at risk with a leadership spill?
In any case, Rudd and Gillard had a deal. This was not speculation on my part; I was the one who had forged it in 2006. 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, 10 kilometres south of Parliament House. But on June 23, 2010, when Gillard told Rudd to resign or face a partyroom challenge, I came to appreciate that deals mean different things to different people.
I was aware that there were tensions in the government. The Australian, which had initially backed Labor under Rudd but had subsequently set out to destroy him and the government, had been running reports of caucus disquiet and the possibility of Gillard taking him on. The Murdoch press tone changed markedly from the time of Tony Abbott’s seizure of the Liberal leadership in December 2009. Murdoch news outlets campaigned against Labor on climate change, the mining tax, education and social programs with increasing virosity.
At first, I dismissed the stories as exaggerated because, well, I couldn’t believe it would come to that. I had texted Kevin from overseas in the previous fortnight, telling him that the drop in the published polls was recoverable and in any case we still had a majority on a two-party-preferred basis. Yet here I was being confronted with a very different proposal.
On Tuesday, June 22, after caucus — that is, two days before she walked into Rudd’s office to tell him that she was willing to blast him out if he didn’t step down — Gillard had asked to see me. In her office, she showed me private polling. (I later learnt, in 2023, that this had been commissioned by one of the Right’s biggest unions, the Australian Workers Union, but that the bulk of it was funded by the mining industry, led by BHP, as part of their campaign against the super profits tax proposal.) That polling suggested the public’s support for the government under Rudd was weakening. Gillard fixed me with a curiously emotionless gaze and declared coolly: “We’re sleepwalking to a defeat.” I found what she was doing and saying unsettling — and her analysis unpersuasive — but was willing to put it down to the deputy leader being prudent about the government’s condition.
I clearly failed to show sufficient enthusiasm for her implicit solution, because Julia asked me to take the polling away and study it. She wanted me to find out how deep the feelings were within the caucus. I approached senator Mark Arbib and was surprised to learn of the extent of the preparation. He explained that the coup could only be done by ambush to prevent Kevin calling a general election. On the Wednesday, I asked a Parliamentary Left convenor, Maria Vamvakinou, about the disposition of the faction. She did a ring around and the response was disturbing: the dissemination of the private polling was having an immediate effect.
Between June 5 and June 19, I had been overseas. Upon my return to Parliament House, a delegation of junior right-wingers had come to see me to tell me how intolerable Rudd was and that there was widespread belief in the caucus that he would have to go. In retrospect, I misread the seriousness of the situation. I was preoccupied with portfolio issues, trying to catch up after two weeks away. 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. Having heard this, I assumed their words were mostly hot air and that would be that. Instead, they took this as me urging them to go out and recruit ministers, which they duly did by approaching the treasurer, Wayne Swan.
Swan, grasping the occasion, signed on. As treasurer, he was the third-most-senior member of the caucus, and his enlistment galvanised Kevin’s pursuers. I had intended to throw a wet blanket over this group of would-be insurgents, but my response had the opposite effect. The insurgents misread the meeting; they later claimed I had endorsed their project.
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.
I later discovered that on Sunday, June 20, 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.
Clearly Gillard’s later claim that the coup was only put together on Wednesday, June 23 is contestable.
My position in the lead-up to it all was that this was something that could be fixed, but that it would not be right for me to approach Kevin to talk about it because Julia had spoken to me in confidence. I was not in the habit of breaking confidences. Because all this talk was getting around, I assumed he would hear of it. Wrongly, I anticipated that he might ring to ask what was going on. He never did. Had he asked me a direct question about any of it, I would have had to answer him truthfully. I was also not in the habit of lying to the leader and we had always been straight with each other anyway.
Regrettably, on June 23, Gillard and her supporters made their move. Having planted a fictitious story in that day’s Sydney Morning Herald that reported on an attempt by Rudd to undermine her, they put the tensions out in the open. That gave them the opportunity to start outwardly enlisting supporters and for Gillard to issue her ultimatum to Kevin. The coup de grâce was to leak the ultimatum to the ABC for its 7pm TV news bulletin.
By that time, the leader and deputy leader were in talks ostensibly aimed at reconciliation, but I can see all these years later that the leaking of Gillard’s ambush to the ABC scuttled any genuine hope of that. I don’t believe Gillard and her plotters ever genuinely countenanced a settlement. They had taken things too far for that and were simply running down the clock. That night, however, I did sit there in my flat believing that just maybe sanity would prevail.
It didn’t. The talks went nowhere. Kevin announced at 10.30pm that he would hold a caucus meeting the next day to resolve the matter. I was, by then, in deep distress. Whatever Kevin’s work habits, that didn’t justify the way things were done. The long-term consequences were too easy to predict. Worse, as a senior member of the party’s Left and a Victorian, I would be expected to vote for Gillard in a partyroom contest. The most consequential leadership eruption in my political lifetime was taking place and I had no role to play; I was just an observer.
My phone rang. One of Gillard’s advisers was calling from Parliament House. His voice surging with excitement, he said: “You’re the only one of her friends who’s not here. You’ve got to get in here, Carr, they’re all talking about the fact that you’re not here.” As the most senior member of the Victorian Left after Gillard, I concluded that I should show my face, given that she seemed set to become prime minister — the first left-winger to hold the post.
When I got there, I found a party. A lot of the characters there seemed to almost be doing an Irish jig, they were so overjoyed. I was appalled by the crudeness of the display, and I struggled to hide my disgust. Yes, the nation was poised to get its first prime minister from Labor’s Left, and its first female PM, but a Labor prime minister who had led us into office, ending almost 12 years in opposition, was being brought down. That was not something to celebrate, no matter what you thought of him. I spoke up. “You fellows are dancing on the grave of a Labor prime minister. Do you really think this is of any benefit to anybody?”
After that outburst, I became a marked man. Things would never be quite as good for me again.
I would continue as a minister for almost three more years, albeit on a road strewn with tacks occasionally placed there by senior government colleagues, including Gillard, then six years as an opposition frontbencher and, finally, three years as a backbencher. I would serve on parliamentary committees. I would argue the Labor cause and enjoy holding my political opponents — the ones who belonged to the non-Labor parties, as distinct from my opponents in the Labor Party — plus their enablers in the public agencies to account in estimates committees, or just giving them some trouble in the chamber. It was all worthwhile.
But what an opportunity for the party was lost that night. And how often such events have marked the story of the Australian Labor Party.
