The tragedy of Kevin Rudd can be traced to a personality flaw

The tragedy of Kevin Rudd

ONCE in office, Kevin Rudd defied the orthodoxy and engaged in the most centralised, novel and risky experiment in prime ministerial power since Gough Whitlam. Rudd had two critical weaknesses — managing people and running a government. In opposition he was a master but those skills did not translate easily into office, a story that perplexed the Labor Party and sent it on a voyage ending in panic.

The Rudd prime ministership is a truly tragic tale of a leader with the potential to become a great prime minister brought undone by his flaws. The explanation lies in Rudd’s complex personality. Kevin was a brilliant solo player but not an effective team leader. This was the heart of the problem. It is the best explanation for the extraordinary saga that saw Kevin transition in just 2½ years from Labor hero to repudiated prime minister.

It is a unique fall.

A leader cannot succeed in the nation unless he or she succeeds with their party. At the end of Rudd’s career, former ALP operative Graham Richardson would say: “I have been a member of the ALP for 47 years and I have not known a more hated figure.”

From her position of proximity, Julia Gillard identified the problem: “In his organisational style, Kevin was unable to adapt to government. Opposition suited him to a T.

“Kevin’s absolute forte is management of the media agenda, quick tactical decisions. Nobody will ever work harder than Kevin, so he might be in Sydney for a meeting and then see a tactical advantage in being in Darwin tomorrow and jump up and go there.

“In opposition, you can operate like that. But that is not what government is about and Kevin never shed that organisational style. It is not just about your own time management. It is the sense of using the full power of government and he never got that.”

Rudd failed to deploy cabinet power to solidify his own position. This management flaw was multiplied by his erratic personality. Over time Rudd saw his relations either decline or degenerate with nearly every major institutional figure in the system: Gillard as deputy, Wayne Swan as treasurer, Terry Moran as his departmental head, Karl Bitar as party national secretary, Mark Arbib as his sole Praetorian guard and even Quentin Bryce as governor-general.

A convenient but unhealthy Rudd-Gillard process developed: Gillard did the cleaning up after Rudd, a fact that became notorious across the government. When Rudd was overseas and Gillard was acting prime minister — and that happened a lot — ministers and officials got a host of delayed decisions and paperwork done. The word spread: Gillard, unlike Rudd, could make a decision.

Gillard said: “Kevin’s operating style was dysfunctional. It was a great pity. Kevin is a highly intelligent man. If you wanted to talk to someone over dinner about the geopolitics of the region for the next 20 years, then you couldn’t have a better companion than Kevin Rudd. But Kevin’s fatal flaw was that he couldn’t delegate, he couldn’t manage his time, he couldn’t plan strategically as opposed to plan tactically.

“Under pressure he was a great prevaricator. His reaction to not being able to decide was to ask for more and more briefs and more and more paperwork that would never get read. Then he felt the pressure more and more; there was more paper and more chaos. It would get worse, not better.”

Gillard would joke about Rudd’s operational dysfunction. She would take home 200 briefs on the weekend. The system began to look to her. “I was clearing briefs and correspondence in a routine way,” she says. “People would say: ‘Have you done all those briefs? It’s only 11am.’ It was as though I’d turned water into wine.”

Senate leader Chris Evans said: “Julia spent the first two years of government running around cleaning up the mess, day after day. She was not given enough credit for that.”

This was a highly unsatisfactory modus operandi, guaranteed to strain personal relations and lead to trouble. It meant Gillard lost respect for Rudd.

Greg Combet was promoted under both Rudd and Gillard. He offers a practical yet alarming view of Rudd’s style: “You’d have to say the government had become dysfunctional. Rudd’s approach to governing was the real reason he was replaced. That’s not often appreciated.

“Rudd failed in his management of his colleagues on any assessment. He tried to take it all on himself. He was terrified of leaks and wanted to keep everything tight; colleagues were not engaged, cabinet processes were not followed. The SPBC system (the strategic priorities and budget committee, or “gang of four”, consisting of Rudd, Gillard, Swan and finance minister Lindsay Tanner) led to very poor process.

“Ministers were travelling around from city to city trying to get an audience with the SPBC; as a minister that’s where you had to go. So Rudd would have a full day in one city, then all the SPBC members, all the public servants, the deputy secretaries, the advisers would be rushing out to buy underpants and toothbrushes because they were now staying the night, then we’d decamp the next day to yet another city in the hope of getting in, waiting all the time for huge decisions to be taken.”

When their relations died, Swan revealed some of his concealed views about Rudd, once one of his closest family friends. He became Rudd’s sharpest critic: “The central problem with Rudd is that he didn’t listen to people, he treated people badly.

“His tendency was to be unfocused, jumping from issue to issue, handing down dictates to people, not consulting, overreacting, trying to run a 24–hour news cycle. This really started to emerge after we came out of the global financial crisis from June-July-August in 2009. He got smashed by the Oceanic Viking at that stage.”

Swan had known Rudd longer than any of the ministers. He said he was unsurprised. Interviewed for this book, he said: “The problem, to be extremely frank, is Kevin is not suited to lead a team, if you want to sum it up. He had neither the temperament nor the interpersonal relations. And it is a pattern of behaviour that has been repeated in his career.

“It is one I chose to ignore for a number of years. But, you know, anyone who has worked closely with him is acutely aware of it. And it doesn’t matter who you are talking about, whether you are talking about the former premier of Queensland (Peter Beattie) or political colleagues or public servants. It is the same pattern.”

Tanner was far closer to Rudd than Gillard. Yet Tanner’s restrained assessment of Rudd’s style by one of his strongest supporters conceded Rudd’s “slightly manic habits” and suggested a cabinet system bordering on chaotic: “By the beginning of 2010, the SPBC process was deteriorating. Meetings were called, rescheduled and cancelled with great regular­ity, so that I lost the ability to schedule diary appointments any more than two or three days in advance with any confidence.

“Individual matters of middling importance were left unresolved for extended periods, and ministers and public servants were sometimes kept waiting for hours before getting a chance to enter an SPBC meeting to discuss their particular issues.”

Despite these concerns, Tanner rejected the idea that Rudd’s flaws justified his removal.

This summarises the views from inside the gang of four. They range from moderate critique to excoriation. To an extent, their lens is distorting. These are retrospective judgments made after Rudd’s removal. The truth is that for most of their time in office Rudd, Gillard, Swan and Tanner worked well together. Yet this period was too short. The problem is that Rudd fell out with his two most senior ministers, his deputy and his treasurer.

Because the Gillard-Swan crit­ique originated in Rudd’s personality they decided it was incurable. Swan didn’t buy the argument that the cabinet could have reformed Rudd: “Having known him long enough, I knew he wasn’t going to change the way he operated.”

Gillard made the same point as Combet: the real reason for Rudd’s removal was his failure of governance. Since she launched the challenge, she must know.

Asked if Rudd’s problem was the character issue, Gillard replied: “I think that is absolutely right. If you genuinely like someone you will forgive them more than someone you don’t like. Kevin had treated so many people so badly for so long that there was no bond. When things get bad there is no shield to protect you. He never got that. It broke his relationships with people and with ministers.”

The heart of the Gillard-Swan critique is Rudd’s fusion of poor process with his difficult personality. In the end Gillard, like Swan, decided that Rudd wouldn’t change.

The head of the Prime Minister’s Department, Terry Moran, had a different assessment: “By June 2010, Kevin’s private office was disliked. But Kevin should have been given the chance to mend his ways. There were problems in the way he governed and the sensible course would have been to raise them with Kevin. I am sure he could have changed things.”

Rudd took to dizzy and unsustainable heights what is best called the cult of prime ministerial governance. He gave priority to his personal office over cabinet, a cardinal mistake for a prime minister. One of his press secretaries, Sean Kelly, said: “Kevin liked the idea of being courted and he ­enjoyed having young people around him.”

The chief of Rudd’s office until late 2008, David Epstein, offers a chilling account of the prime minister’s habits: “Kevin Rudd’s work pattern was erratic. He would push himself to the limit. Convinced he needed little sleep, almost seeing this as a badge of honour. But he would get over-tired, his temper would fray, then he would need a day’s break to recover.

“His office was chaotic. Briefs would just pile up and be arranged across the floor. He would commission multiple briefs and then not read them because other issues became more pressing.”

The cabinet had talent but it was pathetically weak as a unit. It bowed before the exceptional authority that Rudd had established as opposition leader, a level of authority unparalleled in ALP history. Senate leader Chris Evans said: “We gave Rudd complete licence as opposition leader and that set the pattern.”

As Combet put it: “Rudd had beaten Howard, a huge achievement. He was accorded tremendous authority.”

For Rudd, the most dangerous instance of exclusion was with the minister for agriculture, Tony Burke. Burke stuck his neck out in 2006 to back Rudd against Kim Beazley. He found himself quickly marginalised. “I probably only had three or four calls from him in three years,” Burke said. Rudd stopped taking his phone calls “very quickly” after becoming leader. “I kept hearing stories of him furiously bagging me,” Burke said of the period in government.

“I approached him on three separate occasions. It was hard to ever get him one-on-one. He’d say: ‘No, there’s no problem.’ This idea of trying to make people feel they weren’t secure — that’s certainly how he operated with me.”

Burke sensed it was high-risk to discuss such sensitive issues. “If you stepped out of line, you’d be gone in an instant,” he said. Eventually, Burke gave up on Rudd: he cultivated Gillard, whom he hardly knew, and influenced her to challenge.

There is universal agreement about the erosion of the cabinet process. Anthony Albanese said: “This was a busy government. It had a lot on. You had the SPBC and it continued after the global crisis to make decisions effectively as an inner cabinet. It had too much power for too long. And that annoyed ministers.” Moran identified the flaw: Rudd thrived amid the global financial crisis, with its urgency, adrenalin, and late-night and early-morning briefings. Rudd, Swan and the “gang of four” were in overdrive.

Moran said of the SPBC process: “It took decisions in real time in a rapidly moving situation. Kevin seemed enthusiastic about the process and became keen about it as an approach to governing. He understood the issues and made his late-night phone calls to other leaders. It was what he loved doing. After that, he couldn’t easily return to normality.”

It is the core insight: Rudd couldn’t return to normality. He thrived on urgency and emergency and would engender such atmospherics when they were unnecessary. The Rudd government never settled: it had no normality. It had, instead, three phases: adjusting to office, the global financial crisis and then the drift to dissension and paralysis.

Stephen Smith confirms the point: “Kevin thrived on the sense of crisis, the 24-hour media cycle, requests for immediate advice, urgent phone calls and briefings. The GFC decision-making format came to define the government permanently. We never reverted to orthodox decision-making.”

In short, there was no normal. Rudd had become an addict; his drug was crisis. He could never let go.

This is an edited extract from Triumph and Demise by Paul Kelly (Melbourne University Press, $49.99), published this week, available at mup.com.au and all good bookstores.