Early last year, a former Rudd Government insider sat down to write about the experience. The resulting document - he called it “a reflection in all seriousness once the period of madness was over” - has never been published.
But in the current climate, where the way Kevin Rudd operated as prime minister has become the central issue in Labor’s bitter leadership contest, it makes fascinating reading.
The author, who operated in a key role and observed much of the discussion and decision making, says he would not bother to set down his recollections “except that they are such a powerful warning for future governments”.
His starting point is that “the Rudd Government was never, and could never have been, a functional government because of the man who ran it”.
Reeling from vicious attacks by former ministerial colleagues determined to finish him off politically, Rudd will see the emergence of the paper now as yet another product of what he described yesterday as “the spin machine of the faceless men”.
It no doubt serves the purposes of the former PM’s enemies, but it was created well before the possibility of a Rudd leadership comeback started to be taken seriously by anyone. And its creator is no longer on the scene.
There is a section on “the culture of blame and fear throughout the government”, claiming that Rudd’s angry treatment of staff and public servants was very calculated.
“We all knew of advisers being ‘put in the freezer’ for crossing their boss. It was childish to watch - he would refuse to look at them in meetings and simply ignore anything they said until they gave up and quit or made amends.
“In this way he ensured he got obedience, but at the cost, of course, of getting proper advice.”
The paper says Rudd was a poor Cabinet chairman who rarely arrived on time for meetings, leaving ministers and officials twiddling their thumbs. Usually he would not submit to pre-Cabinet briefing sessions so that he arrived unprepared.
“Officials and private staff would give him briefing notes for cabinet but unfortunately these very frequently were not read… he used the Cabinet meeting as a personal briefing session.
“The PM also had what can only be described as a sixth sense for irrelevant detail and would obsess about such matters for hours during cabinet meetings.
“Ministers couldn’t help but become inattentive… it became standard practice for most ministers to arrive with minutes to sign or papers to read for the long unproductive hours in cabinet.
Also, because ministers were afraid of making mistakes and incurring Rudd’s wrath, the Cabinet agenda was full of “minor regulatory decisions a minister would normally make on his or her own”.
The paper complains of too much centralising of decisions in Rudd’s office, but says a bigger problem was that he all too frequently then refused to make the decisions.
As a result, “options would simply disappear because the time for exercising them had passed”.
Suspecting staff might try to manipulate him, Rudd would decline to sign routine documents until he could study them in detail. The author notes: “Time spent checking the paperwork for government board appointments is time spent not reading intelligence material from the front-line in Afghanistan.”
Another problem, according to the paper, was that Rudd always wanted to do too many things, resulting in “policy priorities tripping over each other and too little being decided” as well as “no time to explain and sell what the government was doing”.
This came to a head in the first six months of 2010. “As the election drew closer you could see ministers becoming increasingly alarmed that the agenda seemed to be getting bigger, not smaller”.
Rudd kept raising new agendas, even though “the money was never there to buy reform in these areas, and major reprioritisations and reorganisations could not be risked in the shadow of an election. Yet these things kept being debated, with the PM and his advisers increasingly angry that ministers on one side and Treasury and Finance on the other couldn’t just square the circle.”
The author suggests that “for the PM, all this activity was a way of forestalling the need for decisions he simply found too difficult to make”. Rudd, he writes, “needed all these ancillary debates to avoid making decisions about the big things everyone knew needed to be sorted: tax, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme and asylum seekers”.
It was through the negotiations over carbon pricing that “we learnt that Kevin Rudd would never have that ability of all successful long-term leaders and that is to go into a defensive crouch and absorb a few days of punches to hold a position that would serve him well in the longer term”.
“The PM had a reflexive fear of even momentary unpopularity, so that he became an easy target for every lobbyist in town”.
It says that, despite Rudd’s reputation as a policy wonk, “this was something we never, ever saw behind closed doors. His instinct was invariably for the politics of a policy problem.
“His most common put-down of officials and his own policy wonks was ‘That’s a fine idea, but how do I explain it on Today Tonight?’.
“I suspect he simply didn’t like the way officials thought - of practicalities, long-term consequences, consistency with other policies.
“These all became an unnecessary burden in his management of the politics and the media cycle. Nearing the end, he seemed to take each piece of considered policy advice as a personal affront or thinly veiled invitation for him to commit political suicide”.
The author argues that the over-crowded agenda was the core problem in the lead-up to Rudd’s downfall. Serious time was not spent resolving climate change policy, asylum seekers and the tax review because of “the PM’s obsession with health reform”.
He says: “There was the PM’s terrifying flirtation with a referendum on the referral of state health powers to the Commonwealth. It took months to persuade him that, with the opposition and very likely at least WA opposed, such a referendum would certainly fail and not only be a terrible political defeat but also clarify the health powers for good and in the Commonwealth’s distinct disfavour.”
And the paper concludes: “By the end, what did for him was the mounting impossibility of conveying any kind of sensible advice to him through the thicket of his impossible daily schedule and an obvious personal physical exhaustion”.
Just one person’s view, of course - but someone who saw it up close.
Laurie Oakes is political editor for the Nine Network.His column appears every Saturday in News Limited papers.
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