The Killing Season Uncut Read Online Free PDF Page A

Julia.
    Macklin recognised Julia’s determination.

    I knew Julia wasn’t going to stop, she would continue until she won, and I didn’t think that was good for the Labor Party.
    Greg Combet recalled his dissatisfaction.

    Here were two people coming along to displace someone of that standing and experience and maturity, with two who’d never been in a leadership role of any description, who were pretty unproven, fairly inexperienced at a number of levels. Obviously very intelligent, bright, capable and committed people, but you know, how did it work out again?
    After their win in Caucus, Rudd said Gillard wanted to change the traditional seating in Question Time.

    Julia came to me and said could she sit with me during Question Time at the table, at the dispatch box. She said, ‘This is a joint leadership ticket’.
    This was how Gillard put it.

    We had a discussion about the best way of presenting that dynamic in the Parliament, whether to shake it up from the usual look of an opposition leader at a table, I would sit alongside him at the table. The view was it was better to have the more traditional pattern.
    Gillard has often said she would have been content to finish her career never reaching beyond the position of Deputy. Some of her colleagues, like Leader of the House Anthony Albanese, saw it differently.

    I think Julia always wanted to be the leader of the Labor Party. So did Kevin. There’s nothing wrong with that and certainly it meant that they were very strong, when they were working together.
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    In her 2014 book
My Story
, Julia Gillard wrote for the first time about an incident that took place between her and Rudd when they were still in opposition. She claimed that when she was running the ALP’s parliamentary tactics committee, Rudd lost his temper with her. I asked her about that scene and she recounted it in detail, to the fascination of the media writing about the series.

    After the tactics meeting broke up he very physically stepped into my space and it was quite a bullying encounter … I mean I was never thinking he was going to physically hurt me. It wasn’t that, but it was a menacing angry performance, and caused me to assess the character I was dealing with.
    In spite of that, Gillard formed a joint leadership ticket with Rudd, endorsing him as a future prime minister. The decision to publicly revisit the incident more than a decade later seemed very deliberate.
    Towards the end of the interview with Kevin Rudd in Boston, I read out Gillard’s account of the ‘bullying encounter’. I wanted to shock him to ensure he returned for the second interview. It was a risky strategy. His response to the allegation was emphatic.

    That is utterly false. Utterly, utterly false.
    After the interview, Rudd left Boston for Saudi Arabia. He called me twenty-four hours later from a hotel in Riyadh, troubled by the assertion I had put to him. He wanted to know, was there more of that to come?

CHAPTER 2
THE VICTORY
    He didn’t just sneak into government. He stormed to government.
    Jim Chalmers
    W HEN I ENCOUNTERED Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard during preparations for
The Killing Season
, they inhabited the nether world that lies beyond political power. These were politicians who had been cut off in their prime: the two great Labor stars of their generation had put out each other’s lights. They both claimed to have moved on but it didn’t feel true in either case. Julia Gillard remained in Australia after retiring from Parliament to write the book that would stake out her version of the era. Kevin Rudd had gone more fully into exile, with no book in prospect.
    Rudd was teaching at the Kennedy School at Harvard University near Boston. The course was called ‘Politics and Purpose’. His staff had suggested other locations for the interviews—hotels in Dubai or Beijing, way-points in Rudd’s frequent travel—but they accepted our