Close encounters with Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott

Whining, dining and frank conversations. An editor’s look back at meetings with two very different prime ministers.

Chris Mitchell on Kevin Rudd: ‘Incredibly, the then foreign minister and I, both in business suits and ties, were to be served (dinner) in the sauna room … steam off, of course.’

Part of the increased influence of The Australian since the mid-2000s is undoubtedly attributable to my long-term friendship with one man, a former public servant I knew socially before he entered politics and who would go on to become prime minister: Kevin Rudd.

Although that friendship was strained by high office, it is worth recalling that the first two people to phone and congratulate me when news of my appointment as editor-in-chief of The Australian broke in July 2002 were Rudd and another Labor friend from Queensland, the former state secretary of the party, Wayne Swan.

Both said they were thrilled that a fellow Queenslander was to be appointed to lead the national political paper.

Both had thrived under another talented Queensland politician, former premier Wayne Goss, and all three Labor men had long believed that the political ­establishment in the nation’s southeastern corner had little understanding of life or political realities in the rest of Australia.

Rudd and Swan told me they were looking forward to working closely with me from opposition to redress that failure to understand the problems of the nation outside Victoria and NSW.

Indeed, the record does show that I was generous to both. Rudd, Swan and another Queensland Labor mate, Craig Emerson, were published dozens of times in the following five years on my opinion page, a page often branded as a fortress of conservatism that nevertheless still publishes many progressive voices.

The relationship with Rudd was constructive for the paper and for him in the following years. I was able to publish lots of good stories, and he was able to increase his profile in the same way he did later with regular breakfast television appearances.

In hindsight, there is no doubt that I allowed Rudd to get too close to my paper as opposition leader, and I probably had too much personal contact with him even before he got that job.

He was assiduous at courting media contacts, and there are no lengths he would not go to for political advantage. But politics always ends in bitterness and failure, and my relationship with Rudd soured when he was in office.

However it was in early September 2010, a few months after he had lost the prime ministership to Julia Gillard, that I received my strangest Rudd request.

He rang out of the blue, asking to have dinner and a long chat. But he could not be seen with me and needed me to agree to meet him on the top floor of a Sydney five-star hotel. We would have to go up and down in separate lifts, and he could not greet me at the lift on my arrival but would have a waiter meet me on the top floor and escort me to our appointed dining space.

Incredibly, the then foreign minister and I, both in business suits and ties, were to be served in the sauna room, which was to be off limits to all apart from us and the waiters who would look after us at the silver service table they had set up inside. Steam off, of course. We had plenty of wine and three courses. Rudd cleared the air early. He went straight to the “Captain Chaos” piece (a story written by John Lyons and published in The Weekend Australian on June 21, 2008, exposing the dysfunction in the prime minister’s office) that had been the subject of such rancour two years earlier.

Admitting that he had let his ego get the better of him over the Lyons revelations, he said he accepted now that I had published the piece to try to signal to him that he was making the same mistakes in Canberra he had made in Queensland. After apologising for that, he said he now realised that I had done what I did for the right reasons and was trying, in my own way, to give him a message his colleagues were too weak to give him.

He offered his regrets for a whole lot more before he got on to his real purpose. Rather than coming to fight with me, he had come to knife Swan. And did he ever dish the dirt. The period from mid- 2008, when Rudd asked me to Kirribilli House to discuss the “Captain Chaos” piece, until the bizarre steam room dinner rates as my most memorable 27 months as an editor for the sheer brutality and weirdness of my contact with our 26th prime minister.

The month before my retirement last December, he visited from New York. After some polite conversation in my office, which included me showing him some photos of my boys, including Riley, whom Rudd had been godfather to since 2005 — which I said he was welcome to keep but he left on my coffee table — Rudd got down to business and asked whether the paper and the company would consider supporting him as a successor to Ban Ki-moon as secretary-general of the UN.

He even asked, just as he had back in 2006 when looking for support against Kim Beazley, if I would be prepared to speak directly to Rupert on his behalf about the job. He said Therese was about to sell her European businesses and would be joining him in their New York house. He did not want to be the “commissar for shit”, a reference to his job in water resources policy chairing the global agency Sanitation and Water for All, which represents 90 countries linked to Unicef and the UN Development Programme.

He believed Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop would have little choice but to back him as an Australian former PM, especially if News was also behind him. I kept a straight face. I could not even begin to imagine a circumstance in which I would raise such a prospect with my boss. A few weeks later Beazley moved out of the Australian embassy in Washington for Rudd’s former co-guest on the Seven Network’s Sunrise, Joe Hockey. Beazley, Hockey, Rudd. Kim had been a great ambassador for both sides of politics. He would most likely have been a great Australian Labor PM. Rudd? We will never see his like again.

TONY ABBOTT

I have known Tony Abbott for 30 years and dined regularly with him since he started running ­Australians for Constitutional Monarchy in the early 1990s.

One of my first contacts with Abbott’s office after his election win in September 2013 came in his first fortnight in the job. Tony wanted to host a Saturday night dinner at Kirribilli House for ­people he regarded as important to his victory and his prospects. I declined as soon as I saw the guest list, a Who’s Who of conservative print columnists and radio hosts.

I told The Australian’s editor-at-large, Paul Kelly, that I feared Tony now thought he could govern Australia through the offices of his dinner guests, who included journalists Andrew Bolt, Piers Akerman, Paul Sheehan, Alan Jones and Miranda Devine. To me this was an early amber flashing light.

As The Australian’s editorials have noted for decades, successful leaders in this country move straight to the centre on election night, in the manner of Bob Hawke and John Howard.

Within a hundred days of his election, my paper was warning the new Abbott government that it was not making a successful transition from opposition. The 100-day anniversary editorial was the first in a series of full-length editorials warning the government that it was heading in the wrong direction. These editorials elicited ever greater support for the paper’s position from within the Abbott cabinet. On each occasion, my Saturday morning incoming texts were full of congratulations from senior ministers. Not from Malcolm Turnbull but from Tony ­Abbott’s own backers.

After a particularly pungent editorial in April 2014, in which the paper set out the government’s missteps in detail, even Brian Loughnane, federal director of the Liberal Party and husband of Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, called chief editorial ­writer Chris Kenny to say how correct our assessments were. Tony had always disregarded the paper’s view of Hockey. We had been sceptical of the former treasurer’s work ethic since early in his period as opposition spokesman on Treasury matters. Every time we suggested Abbott might do ­better moving the affable Hockey to a welfare portfolio, I would receive a laboured Saturday morning phone call over breakfast at home in Manly.

“Mate, Joe is a great guy,” Tony would say, before inevitably ­arguing that he could never move Turnbull up because as leader he could not trust the member for Wentworth.

By August 2014 there was a much sharper tone to Abbott’s phone calls. And the sharpness was obvious in his attacks on ­anyone who suggested that there was a problem with Credlin. He had no understanding that his own supporters were complaining to me and to Niki Savva and Peter van Onselen on a weekly basis.

Finally, Abbott wanted to have the whole thing out. He wanted to come to my place in Manly on a Sunday in December and discuss it one on one without Credlin for once.

I dodged and weaved trying to get out of it. Prime ministers always have a way of acting like they are doing you a favour when they impose themselves on you.

When he was opposition leader, Tony and his wife, Margie, had dined at my place several times with Ross and Lyndal Fitzgerald and Greg and Jessie Sheridan. They had been fun nights. On one memorable night, Tony even stood up in the middle of dessert to ape Julia Gillard’s walk for us all in the middle of a discussion about Germaine Greer’s Q&A critique of the Gillard derriere.

But since he had become prime minister, dinners with Tony — as with his two predecessors — had become long whinges about perceived slights.

And my previous “one on one” with him had been anything but that. He had asked me to dinner in the dead of winter in Canberra. Despite my protests that I did not need or want grace and favour dinners in the prime ministerial dining room with its splendid William Robinson painting, he had insisted we would have a long, private “nothing off the record” meal. It had started with drinks with Joe Hockey in the prime minister’s office — an obvious attempt by Tony to influence the paper’s judgment of his treasurer. And just as ­Hockey was taking his leave and we were about to enter the prime minister’s private dining room, who should enter to sit on his right side for the entire duration of our “one on one”, but Credlin?

But back to the Manly visit. He’d had talks with Greg Sheridan and Dennis Shanahan about how to handle the visit. Both told me they had urged him to avoid going down an acrimonious path, as Rudd had done years earlier.

It was the afternoon of the Bower Street Christmas party in the park across the road from my house above Shelly Beach. All my neighbours were there watching the full display by Australian Federal Police security and the NSW police service as they patrolled my garden waiting for the Abbott cavalcade to arrive. It was embarrassing. It was only to be an hour, I had been assured. In the event, it was 2½ hours and three bottles of my chardonnay and shiraz before I finally had my house back and my wife could return from the Christmas party across the road.

But to be fair to Tony, it proved a hilarious afternoon. The more he drank, the more he laughed and the more he opened up. In the end he essentially admitted that he had known the paper was right in much of what it had complained of, but most spectacularly of all he admitted that he had always known about Hockey’s shortcomings. They were apparent during the pair’s university days.

“Mate, what is it with you and Joe?” he asked. “Tony, successful treasurers are lean and hungry like Keating and Costello. Successful governments are dominated by the relationship of the political master and the economic master, the treasurer. I like Joe, but he is lazy. A big roly-poly bloke who manages to gain weight after ­having his stomach stapled needs to be giving money away. He needs to be in a welfare portfolio. I know you think I carry a torch for Turnbull, but the truth is I have ­almost no relationship with him. Like you, I don’t trust him. But he had the measure of Rudd and Swan on economics during his time as opposition leader. And you need to make him personally and politically responsible for your government’s economic success. Remember the old saying: keep your enemies close.”

Chris Mitchell was editor in chief of The Australian from 2002 to 2015. These are edited extracts from his book Making Headlines, to be published by MUP on Thursday.

I scoffed a large shiraz after my speech, and he burst out laughing. By now he was very, very loose. “You know, mate, I have always known Joe’s weaknesses.” he said. “When I was captain-coaching the Sydney Uni seconds, I would never select him for the run-on team.” “Why?” “Well, mate, you know Joe loves his food. He loves his family. He would be at a big family dinner every Friday night. He would have a big breakfast. He would sleep in. He would be late to the game. I got to select the run-on team, and I always had all those things in the back of my mind.”

“But how can he be fine to lead as the nation’s treasurer if he wasn’t fine to be the Sydney University seconds rugby prop,” I asked in absolute sincerity. Tony, never a nasty man even in the most private of settings, just laughed and left the subject.

But as his close friends and ­associates — especially Greg Sheridan — wrote after his overthrow as prime minister, Abbott is loyal to a fault. He held on to Joe until the very end when, too late, he tried to shore up his own position by offering Treasury to Scott Morrison. Similarly, after the failed February spill motion in 2015, he astounded his colleagues when, despite desperate assurances he gave in order to keep his job, he resisted moving against Credlin and simply kept her out of question time and out of the public eye for a few months. For Tony Abbott, the trip to Manly was never about hearing from me how he might change. It was only about making me feel that he had listened to me.