The Killing Season Uncut by Sarah Ferguson

did.
    Treasury secretary Ken Henry’s recollection was different.

    SF: Who was driving the inclusion of the roof insulation scheme?

    KH: The Prime Minister, yeah.
    Over four months, four young men were killed installing insulation and a number of house fires were alleged to be linked to the program. Rudd acknowledged responsibility for the deaths, but not with the same obvious pain expressed by Greg Combet, who was brought in to clean up and eventually shut down the failed scheme.

    It was an absolute fucking nightmare. For people whose homes had been insulated and who were fearful of a fire, can you imagine how terrifying that was for them? But most of all, the profound tragedy of young men being killed during the process of installing insulation, and others being injured, in some cases very severely. The tragedy for those families, I felt that really was bad.
    In focus groups, ALP market researcher Tony Mitchelmore noticed a new narrative emerging about Kevin Rudd and government.

    So you had BER, you had batts, you had debt escalating, and then you had boats and this
Oceanic Viking
. It was just another dot that started to create a picture of Labor as not able to run things, as not able to control things, as Kevin Rudd a little bit out of control, and everything he’s touching isn’t seeming to go quite right.

CHAPTER 6
BIG DREAMS
    Focus groups, shmokus groups. I mean they come, they go.
    Kevin Rudd
    T OWARDS THE END of 2009, Kevin Rudd was engaged in an international effort that he hoped would lead to a successful outcome at the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.

    There’d be midnight teleconferences with the Secretary-General of the United Nations, with the chairman of the conference, with the Danish Prime Minister, with [British PM] Gordon Brown and with others … trying to work out where we could land this thing. Remember in March of that year we’d managed to do this on the global financial crisis. This is about November, December of the same year and what we were trying to do is to harness the same enthusiasm within the G20 group to actually bring about a deal.
    I asked Julia Gillard what she thought about Rudd’s ambitions for the conference.

    Let’s think about the best way of putting that …
    Gillard paused.

    I think Kevin dreamt big dreams for his role at Copenhagen …
    No-one would dispute that. Gillard continued.

    I think he would’ve liked to have been seen internationally to play a pivotal role. Now would you call that vanity or would you call that focused on the task of getting a global climate agreement? Well, in the way of political leadership I think it’s a bit of a mix of both.
    I listened closely to Gillard’s account of Kevin Rudd in the lead-up to Copenhagen. Her assessment of him after the international climate change conference was where she went furthest in her critique, alleging he lacked the capacity to perform his role as Prime Minister. An early clue was her description of Rudd’s attachment to the conference as ‘emotional’.

    SF: Why emotional, not intellectual?

    JG: I think it’s both. I think that there’s a sense of connection that’s an emotional bond as well as an intellectual bond. I mean here is a man who could’ve chosen from dozens of other potential professions. He chose to be a diplomat because it’s meaningful to him.
    I thought there was an artfulness to Gillard’s narrative. I observed her laying the groundwork to justify later conclusions. In this case, if Rudd’s connection to Copenhagen was emotional, it explained an emotional collapse afterwards.
    Â 
    The government’s response to the GFC kept people in jobs and the economy out of recession, but they had expended considerable time and money doing it. The Rudd government was left carrying the burden of promises they had made coming into office.
    Rudd explained the government’s