It’s five years, almost to the day, since Julia Gillard seized the prime ministership from a flailing Kevin Rudd.
Their bitterness is undiluted – and now on full, technicolour display.
The ABC’s new documentary series, The Killing Season, charts the rise and spectacular fall of both Labor leaders, tapping the venom which seethed inside the party before and since.
As it opened last night, the expletives from former union leader turned minister Greg Combet about Rudd’s lack of Labor pedigree and destabilising behaviour in Opposition were a colourful reminder that some never loved him at all.
The series takes its title from the political shorthand for the final week of a parliamentary sitting period – when leaders are traditionally most vulnerable to attack.
This three-part documentary is screening on the eve of that very season, scheduled to finish as Parliament rises for winter in late June.
It begins as Rudd and Gillard oust then leader Kim Beazley in 2006.
Gillard confirms she agreed to give Kevin Rudd two elections to win government.
He won first time, in 2007.
Rudd’s former media adviser, Lachlan Harris, describes his boss’s astute political judgment in assessing how best to fight long-time Prime Minister John Howard, correctly identifying he needed to be not an alternative, but a clone.
“Forget about being the enemy of Howard – he had to be the son of Howard,” Harris says. “The task was to organise an orderly transition from Howard to Howard’s successor. And that person was Kevin Rudd.”
Gillard’s two-term deal disintegrated with their relationship.
She accuses Rudd of “a quite bullying encounter… a menacing, angry performance” when she overruled him once on Question Time tactics in Opposition.
“That is utterly false,” he responds, stony-faced. “Utterly, utterly false.”
Despite being in what former frontbencher Simon Crean describes as a “marriage of convenience”, Rudd insists the duo “never” had angry exchanges, including on the night she “marches in” to his office to announce a coup in 2010.
Gillard says she and her eventual deputy, Treasurer Wayne Swan, formed their bond talking “about Kevin” and how to manage an increasingly chaotic leadership style.
The program deals deftly with the contradictions in Kevin Rudd’s character.
Former deputy leader Jenny Macklin describes his deep compassion for victims of the Victorian bushfires.
Asked how this could be reconciled with his blistering manner behind closed doors, she replies simply: “People are complex”.
The next episode of The Killing Season screens on ABC TV next Tuesday.
