Triumph and Demise: The Broken Promise of a Labor Generation by Paul Kelly

Author:Paul Kelly [Kelly, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780522867824
Google: RWX8BAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Melbourne Univ. Publishing
Published: 2014-10-22T04:33:34+00:00

You couldn’t get Kevin on the phone. Was I frustrated? Absolutely. Could I have sent Kevin a few sharp text messages? You bet. You should see some of the emails. I argued for my bipartisanship option but I distinctly remember at that meeting and on other occasions saying to Kevin this is the central judgement call of the campaign and you have to make it. There are only two options: either we get our stack hats on—and I used that term—and we fight this issue knowing we may well lose, or we mitigate our losses and move on. What we can’t afford to do is drift.40

Interviewed for this book, Gillard kept returning to her frustration over Rudd’s paralysis in the early months of 2010. Referring to climate change, she said: ‘I had a view about what the political plan should be but, at the end of the day, I would have taken any plan over no plan. I just wanted a decision.’ Rudd couldn’t decide on an election and he couldn’t decide on climate change.41

The row had been underway for many weeks and Rudd had faced competing streams of advice. The political advisers Arbib and Bitar said the time zone for the CPRS had expired; having decided against an election, Rudd had to ‘get it off the table’ because the cost-of-living negative was too great. They stood by Bitar’s February advice to bring down a renewables package.42 Gillard said: ‘Bitar wanted to kill the carbon pricing idea. He was just doing his job by reporting how he saw the electoral impact. Bitar and Arbib were saying manoeuvre out.’43

For Wong, this sort of advice was hopeless. She became impatient with the New South Wales Right. Wong asked the counter-factual: had anybody done polling asking what happens if we walk away from the CPRS? Wong felt research had become an instrument to kill good policy.

Rudd’s problem, however, was not just the decision but the manner of its release. The story was broken by Lenore Taylor in the Sydney Morning Herald on 27 April when she reported that the ETS had been shelved ‘for at least three years’.44 The leak to Taylor was devastating. Rudd was taken by surprise and left without an explanation. ‘It was a very damaging leak and hard to retrieve,’ Wong said.45 ‘It derailed our government,’ Martin Ferguson said.46

One reason the damage was so great was Rudd’s claim that the decision-making was not finished. He told the author he planned to take the SPBC decision to full cabinet. The leak, however, meant that was ‘blown out of the water’. Rudd argued further that the leak cost him the chance to sell the policy as a two-year deferral. The leak meant it was depicted as a ‘sell-out’.47

Yet if Rudd was so unhappy at the time, he could have gone to the cabinet; it would have been messy but he may have prevailed. Ministers such as Tanner, Wong, Ferguson, Kim Carr and Burke would have supported him. After Taylor’s story, Carr said to Rudd: ‘Your opponents are stripping you naked.

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