Media ‘war’ drove Bob Carr to Kevin Rudd

THE ALP’s “disastrous” and ­“stupid” media regulations were the catalyst for Bob Carr to abandon support for Julia Gillard and back Kevin Rudd.

Bob Carr

THE ALP’s “disastrous” and ­“stupid” media regulations were the catalyst for foreign minister Bob Carr to abandon support for Julia Gillard and back Kevin Rudd’s bid to reclaim the prime ministership.

“The media package, and how it was adopted, has destroyed any confidence I could have in her ­office and instincts,” Mr Carr wrote in his diary three months before the coup that felled Ms ­Gillard’s prime ministership in June last year.

“They had been dumped on the cabinet meeting — without warning — and adopted,” Mr Carr writes. “We are committed to a wholesale war with the ­newspapers. In that pre-election phase when we should be friends with all.”

In Mr Carr’s Diary of a Foreign Minister, published this week, the former NSW premier describes telling Ms Gillard just hours before she lost a partyroom ballot to Mr Rudd that she should resign.

“It’s only 90 days left as prime minister,” Mr Carr says he told Ms Gillard. “It’s not worth fighting about … and if you fight to the end, there’s no surge of goodwill with all that can bring.”

He describes Ms Gillard, who declined to stand aside, as “selfish” for clinging to the prime ministership as she would lead the party “into a barren defile where we are going to be exterminated”. Weeks earlier, Mr Carr told then treasurer Wayne Swan that Ms Gillard should “just let Rudd take over”. Mr Carr, who was recruited to the Senate and appointed foreign minister by Ms Gillard in March 2012, writes he had to rebuff media speculation he had switched to the Rudd camp because a leadership challenge was not ready. Nevertheless, in December 2012 he wrote: “I’ll move when the NSW Right moves.”

In 502 pages of revelatory diaries, Mr Carr:

• repeatedly savages Ms Gillard’s policies and her political judgment;

• claims Mr Rudd humiliated and hectored foreign ministers abroad;

• accuses Ms Gillard’s office of subcontracting Middle East ­policymaking to the Israel lobby;

• notes a departmental paper that concluded China’s rulers saw Australia as “only slightly more important than New Zealand”;

• records Kim Beazley saying US Secretary of State John Kerry believes “Australia does not rank highly”;

• describes Labor’s election campaign performance last year as disastrous;

• imagines how Labor might have fared if he was prime ­minister.

In an interview with The Australian, Mr Carr affirmed his decision to back Mr Rudd’s return was motivated by the media reforms and the failure of Labor’s asylum-seeker policies. “Introducing a complex package of mechanisms for correcting media inaccuracies was entirely a misstep,” Mr Carr said. “It was the worst thing in the countdown to an election: pure wasted energy and effort.”

He also stressed Ms Gillard’s failure to deal with the unstopp­able rise in asylum-seeker arrivals. “I couldn’t understand why we hadn’t settled measures two years earlier to protect us from the people-smuggling racket,” Mr Carr said. “I thought Rudd announcing the arrangement with PNG was his finest moment in his second prime ministership.”

In the diaries, Mr Carr writes he told cabinet the surge in asylum-seekers was a “catastrophe” and represented the “biggest threat to Australian territorial integrity since World War II”.

In July last year, Mr Carr told opposition leader Tony Abbott at a chance encounter, “We’d lost control of our borders.”

The diaries, published by NewSouth, provide an insight into politics from March 2012 to September last year, as Ms Gillard’s authority ebbed away and Mr Rudd mounted a comeback and as Mr Carr travelled the world as part of the “Foreign Minister’s Club”.

Mr Carr discloses that in 2007, he was offered the safe federal Labor seat of Blaxland by then NSW Labor secretary Mark Arbib with the promise that he would be named foreign minister. But as Mr Rudd expressed only lukewarm support, he rejected it.

He writes endlessly about popping sleeping pills to combat “manic jet lag”, terrible airline service, the drudgery of hotels and the struggle to remain healthy.

He takes Pilates classes, lifts weights and tries Transcendental Meditation.

He avoids Chinese food “dripping chemicals”, takes protein powder and insists on eating blueberries and Mexican beans. “Must eliminate all bread: ‘no flour, more power’,” he writes in August 2012.

“Business class. No edible food. No airline pyjamas. I lie in my tailored suit; I’ll be as crumpled as Dr Evatt (Labor’s 1940s foreign minister),” he writes in April 2012.

As a Senate estimates hearing drags on and his stomach groaned for food, he had to settle for dross in the parliamentary dining room. There, he gulped fried rice, ice-cream cones and ginger pudding.

“The immobility and tedium of the day unleashed an animal force of greedy restlessness,” Mr Carr writes.

Mr Carr savages Ms Gillard’s political judgment and communication skills, says she lacked “authority” and was not liked by voters, and her government was perpetually plagued with policy “blunders” and “disasters”.

“Yes, the criticisms are there, but it takes a big step to replace a prime minister in the lead-up to an election,” Mr Carr said this week. “There were just too many mistakes.”

He says foreign counterparts recalled how they were rudely treated by Mr Rudd as foreign minister and prime minister.

“I was determined to avoid any hint of hectoring or lecturing Australian-style in which Kevin — along with his better qualities — may have been a specialist,” Mr Carr writes in May 2012.

“Each foreign minister has his own style,” he told The Australian. “At times, he (Mr Rudd) may have been too forceful. At times I may have been somewhat understated. But … Australia’s international character was enhanced by his multilateralism, his big aid budgets, his commitment on climate change, the apology (to the Stolen Generations).”

Mr Carr writes that he viewed Mr Rudd as “the least bad alternative” to Ms Gillard. But his confidence fell during the election campaign. “This is a sour campaign for us,” Mr Carr wrote in August last year. “(Tony) Abbott is ‘sleepwalking’ to his win.”

The diaries give readers an insight into global meetings and foreign policy issues and offer portraits of world leaders. He describes Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa as “super-urbane” and says Ms Gillard said he looked like Johnny Depp.

Mr Carr says he gained approval from many people and no material threatens national security. But last night Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said that the publication endangered Australia’s overseas relationships.

Mr Carr never thought Australia could win the ballot to become a member of the UN Security Council in 2012. “Doomed to fail,” he wrote in June 2012.

Australia won the seat, securing 140 out of 193 votes.

Mr Carr is frequently self-deprecating. “I’m having to face the catastrophe of wearing the same Bulgari tie two days in a row,” he writes in the diary.

Mr Carr told The Australian: “This is how foreign policy is actually made. We are a democracy. It can be a disorderly process but the need to educate and share should outweigh anything else.”