The anathema that Rudd was held in by his own party shows just how hate filled and incompetant they were in government.
Rudd and Gillard will go down in infamy for their actions and Shorten's grubby factional fingerprints prints are all over the act that has destroyed Labor:
KEVIN Rudd’s offer to help reduce anger in Queensland that “one of their own had been cut down” on the eve of the 2010 election — even introducing Julia Gillard at the campaign launch in Brisbane — was spurned by a party that went on to lose seven seats in the state and surrender majority government.
Informed by Labor’s campaign committee that his removal as prime minister two months earlier was the “largest vote-changing factor” in the state prior to the 2010 election, the Queenslander says he “offered to formally introduce” Ms Gillard and submitted a speech for the event.
But in a damning assessment of the campaign, Mr Rudd reveals his offer was rejected. “Neither the new prime minister, nor the new leadership group of faction leaders who supported her election, actually thought through the electoral implications in Queensland of publicly executing a Queensland prime minister, in a state where if Labor was to remain in office we still needed to do well,” he wrote.
In a secret submission to Labor’s 2010 election review, Mr Rudd rubbished Ms Gillard’s performance as prime minister, railed against the “absurdity” of her election campaign, argued her leadership was crippled by a “stench of illegitimacy” and cast himself as the victim of “an orgy of unprecedented political violence”.
On the day Ms Gillard became prime minister, June 24, 2010, Mr Rudd said she asked him “whether (he) would serve again in the cabinet”. Mr Rudd accepted this offer but claims “several days later” Ms Gillard told him she would need to consult ministers Wayne Swan and Stephen Smith. Days after this conversation, according to Mr Rudd, Ms Gillard called him and withdrew the offer.
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Mr Rudd’s scathing critique of the leadership coup, the 2010 election campaign and Ms Gillard’s prime ministership, has been exclusively obtained by The Australian. It is Mr Rudd’s only detailed written account of these events. Ms Gillard’s memoir, My Story, was published yesterday.
Mr Rudd also wrote that Bill Shorten had an “unrequited ambition” and that after his election to parliament in 2007 urged that “he should soon be elevated to cabinet”. But Mr Rudd argued that faction powerbrokers, such as Mr Shorten, could only be elevated on the basis of “merit”, which he had not yet demonstrated.
Mr Rudd’s swipe at Mr Shorten is part of wider condemnation of the party’s factions and its key figures, including former minister Mark Arbib and Labor national secretary Karl Bitar. His contempt for factions permeates his submission to party elders Steve Bracks, Bob Carr and John Faulkner, who were co-authoring the party’s national review in 2010-11.
He said his removal as prime minister “represented a triumph of the faceless men”. Mr Rudd said Ms Gillard put the “faceless men” back in charge of the party and characterised them as “our modern day Machiavellians”.
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Mr Rudd savaged Mr Arbib and Mr Bitar for plotting to bring him down. He said they transported “the culture of the NSW Right” to “discard political leaders at random” to Canberra. And he accused them of the “abuse and manipulation” of internal Labor polling to support Ms Gillard’s elevation to the prime ministership.
Mr Rudd wrote that research on the proposed “postponement” of the ETS provided directly by pollster UMR was different to that earlier “provided to my office” by the party. He said polling conducted in western Sydney on the weekend of a state by-election that saw the party’s vote “in free fall”, and later showed to Labor MPs, was a “premeditated action” designed to “construct a climate of fear and panic” in caucus.
The detailed paper argued the leadership change “fundamentally undermined the government’s prospects for re-election” and was further damaged by “the near terminal misadventure of one of the worst election campaigns in the party’s history”. Mr Rudd said the coup “opened up potentially lethal character questions” for Ms Gillard and Mr Swan. Mr Rudd lampooned the 2010 campaign, arguing it was called too soon after the leadership change. He described Ms Gillard’s “moving forward” slogan as “vacuous” and said it “became the subject of political parody”. Her “citizens’ assembly” on climate change was an “object of ridicule”.
He described Ms Gillard’s promise that voters would see “the real Julia” as “even more vacuous” than the “moving forward” slogan. “It raised the obvious question as to whether the Julia who appeared in the campaign thus far was ‘old Julia’ or worse, ‘false Julia’?” He added that “absurdity was loaded upon absurdity”.
Mr Rudd rejected the suggestion, later made by Ms Gillard, that he was behind damaging leaks to journalist Laurie Oakes about welshing on an agreement not to challenge his position on the evening of June 23, 2010, and further leaks about her views expressed in cabinet.
Instead, Mr Rudd said Ms Gillard “warned” him that a “systematic backgrounding campaign” against his record and character in the media “was under way”. He said this was “a post-facto effort to justify retrospectively the removal of a sitting Labor prime minister”.
Mr Rudd noted the leadership coup was perceived by “many members of ethnic communities” as a “midnight coup” that dented Ms Gillard’s “legitimacy” as prime minister. “They said they’d left the countries they had come from to avoid this sort of political behaviour,” he wrote.
The submission examined the performance of his government in opinion polls, noting that The Australian’s Newspoll had Labor ahead of the Coalition by 52 per cent to 48 per cent “on the day of the leadership change”. Mr Rudd argued the government had performed “considerably better” in polls than the first term of the Keating or Howard governments, which both won re-election.
He said Ms Gillard’s repeated claim “that the government could not win the next election under (his) leadership” was untrue and that the party’s polling and public polling showed this did “not stand up to real historical scrutiny”.
He concluded by arguing that the “promised policy breakthroughs” — on the mining tax, asylum-seekers and the mining tax — to justify his removal as prime minister “failed to materialise”. “Six months after it was claimed these policy matters could be resolved with different leadership it has proven not to be the case,” Mr Rudd wrote.
