I tried to write Julia Gillard’s biography, but my conscience couldn’t bear it
Writers rarely spike a book and return a publishing advance, but I did with a biography on then PM Julia Gillard. The consequences would’ve been horrendous.
Writers rarely spike a book and return a publishing advance. I did several years ago with a biography of Australia’s then prime minister Julia Gillard. Countless times since I’ve been asked why. When the book was conceived, Gillard was deputy prime minister and a parliamentary performer of power and flair in the majority Rudd Labor government. She was on an upward trajectory to become Australia’s first woman prime minister, but her ascension was faster than she or anyone else anticipated, or wanted.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was intelligent, media savvy and immensely popular. Rudd’s declaration of climate change as the “moral challenge of our generation” in the run up to the 2007 election, and early moves after winning office like the Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples, justly attracted strong support.
When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, the government handled it superbly. Treasurer Wayne Swan became only the second Australian to be recognised internationally for the calibre of his economic management when named Euromoney Finance Minister of the Year for, uniquely among industrialised countries, leading Australia through the crisis without a recession. The government was seen to be achieving on multiple fronts.
So to the outside world the Rudd Government was a high performing one – and while this was true, the picture inside the government was far from pretty. Dictatorial, capricious and rude to colleagues and public servants alike behind the scenes, Rudd did not govern according to the robust but orderly cabinet process the Hawke and Keating governments did to great effect when Labor was last in office.
Instead, Rudd was a crisis manager, himself perpetually generating the crises through unpredictable and provocative behaviour about which colleagues and public servants remained loyally silent. The gap between Rudd’s positive public standing and his unreasonable behaviour behind the scenes was so big, it was judged wiser to manage and contain the situation to keep the government on an even keel.
Gillard, Swan and other senior ministers like Jenny Macklin and Stephen Conroy led internal efforts to make the government function as effectively as it could around the dysfunction Rudd created. They hoped and expected Rudd could and would deliver Labor at least one more election before that internal dysfunction broke into public view and damaged the government – something they would deal with when it happened after pocketing another election win in 2010.
Rudd charged on. Against the backdrop of his inspiring public declaration of climate policy as the “moral challenge of our generation”, he had high hopes of having a global impact at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference (COP 15) in December, 2009. He saw the Copenhagen summit, where more than 100 world leaders would gather to make a decisive, binding treaty to avert global climate catastrophe, as his moment on the world stage.
But Rudd had an unrealistically high estimation of his ability to get his fellow leaders to conclude such a treaty – a manifestation of the grandiose narcissism insiders had concluded was the essential flaw in his temperament. The Copenhagen summit failed, with world leaders kicking the climate change policy can down the road again as had happened at the previous 14 COP meetings. Rudd was uncomprehending and personally devastated.
In the wake of the Copenhagen summit’s failure, colleagues urged Rudd to call an election immediately to capitalise on the high tide of climate policy concern in Australia, and give Labor a second term in office to take decisive action on it at home. Instead, Rudd entered a protracted political paralysis. The government’s standing in the polls slid. By the winter of 2010, restless and increasingly desperate Labor backbenchers, sensing the vacuum and knowing an election had to be held that year, agitated for change.
Never one to miss a power play, factional warrior Bill Shorten got involved, and Rudd’s demise was inevitable. The preference of Labor elders, including Gillard, for Rudd to take Labor to the polls again early in 2010 and get another win was foreclosed by the slump in Rudd’s polling and backbencher agitation reinforced by Shorten. The prime ministership fell to Gillard with only a minimal “assist” from her right at the end.
Rudd and his caucus allies characterised Gillard’s ultimately uncontested succession to the prime ministership as the act of a ruthlessly ambitious political killer. It’s true that Gillard, a faction boss in her own right, was no saint. She had made thuggish moves in the past. They included throwing her numbers behind Mark Latham to oust opposition leader Kim Beazley in the run up to the 2004 election, and to oust Kim Beazley again as opposition leader in favour of Rudd in the run up to the 2007 election. When doing biographical research into Gillard while she was deputy prime minister, the guarded off-the-record comment of one junior female minister stuck in my mind: Gillard was supportive once she had broken you to her will, and you fell into line, but she wasn’t supportive until then.
Yet the idea Gillard had done for Rudd in the Lady Macbeth-like manner alleged by the Ruddites was far from the truth. It was for Rudd a self-serving trope, and for Gillard an unfair and damaging one that the Tony Abbott–led opposition seized on and exploited with relish.
So my Gillard biography began in apparently normal political times when she was a successful deputy prime minister. During the research and writing Gillard deposed Rudd and became Australia’s first woman prime minister, leading a majority government operating in a fairly normal political environment.
Then at the 2010 election, after a successful first week of campaigning, she was hit by guerrilla-style interventions from Labor’s bitter ex-leaders Rudd and Latham and, under pressure, missteps of her own, memorably the “real Julia” gambit where she promised to share with voters her authentic self.
The election reduced Labor from majority to minority government. By the time the biography neared completion, Gillard was besieged by a viciously misogynist campaign led by Abbott and backed by his colleagues and the right-wing media claque, while simultaneously being undermined within Labor’s own ranks by an embittered Rudd and his caucus coterie. The atmosphere was toxic.
Under sustained pressure from within and without, Gillard, with help from constructive colleagues, managed a large and effective legislative agenda and several significant reforms including carbon pricing, fairer school funding and the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), much of it negotiated through parliament by Anthony Albanese in his capacity as the Leader of the House. Under the dual political assault from within and without though, Gillard became a wooden performer, with brief exceptions like her spectacular misogyny speech which garnered global praise in 2012.
Both Rudd and Abbott were coming for her. Labor’s agony at the unprecedented tearing down of a serving Labor prime minister was palpable.
Anticipation surrounding the book’s release was intense and the head publicist at my publisher, Allen & Unwin, alerted me to a looming media frenzy. At the end of one last research trip, I sat contemplating this at a desk where I was staying: Melbourne’s University College, motto Frappe Fort. The college translated this mildly as, “What you do, do with a will”. A good sub- editor would have made it the snappier Anglo-Saxon, “Hit Hard”.
As I looked out at the cool wintry afternoon light it became clear to me that my biography could be used to do just that to Gillard. It could hit her hard when she and her generally meritorious government were suffering an onslaught unparalleled, in the dual internal and external nature of the attack, in Australian post-war political history – and one certainly unmatched for sheer nastiness.
It could hit Gillard hard because no biography of a human being, other than the worst pabulum from partisan supporters, could fail to include unattractive or critical elements. Human beings are flawed. They are fallible. Even the best have their lesser side. Good biographers strive to present their subjects in the round, the good and bad portrayed fairly, in context, with necessary nuance.
Gillard’s life story contained its share of lesser elements. Enemies in the opposition, the government and the media were poised to cherrypick my biography for exploitable stories. In the fevered political atmosphere of that moment, the biography could damage her, and through her the government, no matter the nuance, context or the essential triviality of the matters concerned. Whatever one’s view of Gillard, her prime ministerial performance and her government, was this fair? Was this, I asked myself, what a biography should do?
I flew home to Canberra and wrote to my publisher to say I had decided to put the biography aside and return my advance.
In the current extraordinarily fetid political environment, every crazed coalition politician and shock jock will comb the text for bullets to fire at a prime minister who – while human and therefore, like us, flawed – is doing a fair job stabilising federal Labor and getting it back on to some sort of strategic track after the Rudd disaster. ... After much soul-searching and lost sleep, I’ve concluded I don’t want on my conscience a destabilisation of the Gillard government just as it rights itself – and that’s what’s likely in this toxic political environment. The potential consequences are horrendous. Do I – do you? – want to contribute (however unfair the use of the material may be) to an Abbott government? I don’t.
The circumstance – a fragile minority Gillard government facing enemies within and without, with an especially excoriating Opposition and a media in which significant parts are behaving like jihadists – was not foreseen when the book was contracted. I think I should leave the scene of battle now, lest I inadvertently aid the black hats. The alternative is a compromised, eviscerated book and I don’t think that’s a choice I could live with.
I closed saying I was “deeply sorry about this decision, but I feel I have no other moral choice”. Allen & Unwin were disappointed but understanding, and also amazed an author would voluntarily return an advance. They supported my proposed response to questions, that “I have made this decision for what I consider to be good reasons and I have nothing further to say”.
The Gillard biography would have been my fourth book. None of the earlier ones was without its own challenges and, at times, controversy. An old friend commented while I wrote my first biography that doing so was “a kind of sorcery”, an observation I could have profitably reflected upon earlier than I did. My experience with the Gillard biography spurred me to contemplate it in earnest.
My new book, Political Lives, a study of Australian prime ministers and their biographers, is the result.
I did not intend the Gillard biography to help or hurt Gillard’s political fortunes. When I conceived it, I did not foresee its potential exploitation by “bad actors” in the supercharged political environment which developed – something well beyond the normal thrust and parry of national politics. That is why I did not proceed with the book.
What about contemporary political biographers before me? Were they alert to the risk I perceived only late in the writing of the Gillard biography, that nuanced elements of a politician’s life story could be used crudely to damage them in real time? Or did they deliberately practise a “kind of sorcery” to influence their subject’s political trajectory? Did they practise political biography as political intervention?
To gain the benefits of historical distance, I decided to confine the study to the first hundred years since Federation. I found, read and researched every biography written in the lead up to, or during, the active political careers of Australia’s 20th century prime ministers – books that could actually affect their careers. I interviewed every living Australian prime minister and every living prime ministerial biographer for that period to explore the heart of the relationship and exchange between them. My new book is an intimate history of biographers’ image-making and image-breaking in Australian national politics, from the vantage point of the prime ministers and the biographers themselves.
This is an edited extract from Political Lives: Australian prime ministers and their biographers, by Chris Wallace, NSW University Press, $39.99