The Killing Season Uncut by Sarah Ferguson Page B

off. And Paul’s position then was absolutely correct—you knock them over one at a time and you can never assume anything in politics. Today’s crippled loser can be tomorrow’s hero!
    Rudd’s press secretary, Lachlan Harris, would have preferred Rudd to face Turnbull at an election, but in keeping with Keating’s philosophy there was only one way to deal with the embattled Opposition Leader.

    You don’t have the luxury in politics of not getting rid of someone who’s in front of you. There’s only one speed in politics when it comes to your opponents, and that is you take every gun you’ve got and you fire every bullet at them, and you don’t stop shooting until they’re gone, and there’s no alternative basically. And anyone who’s worked seriously in politics will tell you that.
    The international effort in the lead-up to the climate change conference was directed to securing a legally binding agreement. It was ambitious and there was plenty of resistance, but Rudd persisted with his efforts. Economic adviser Andrew Charlton worked closely with Rudd in his preparations for Copenhagen.

    The Prime Minister would attend weekly video conferences that occurred at midnight in Parliament House with the Prime Minister of Denmark and a number of other leaders … That is a very powerful role for a leader to play because United Nations officials can make a lot of progress but leader-to-leader conversations talking about the details are quite rare … As countries started to announce unilateral commitments to reduce their carbon emissions, there was a very strong current of activity and momentum towards action on global climate change.
    The government pushed on, trying to secure an agreement with the Coalition. Greg Combet respected Rudd’s aspirations.

    He was committed to action on climate change and he knew rightly that if he were able to go to the Copenhagen conference in 2009 having legislated an emissions trading scheme, introducing a carbon price into a fossil-fuel-intensive economy, that it would be significant. And it would have been. And it was quite right for an Australian Prime Minister to have the aspiration to go to that conference with that piece of legislation.
    Lachlan Harris recognised the risk in what Rudd was trying to do.

    We had a very complex piece of policy which we were trying to sell domestically … and it was difficult. It involved increasing prices on basic stuff like food and electricity bills, and we connected the necessity for that policy to an international conference that we didn’t control. We connected it too directly and that was the oversight.
    On the eve of the Senate’s second vote on the CPRS legislation, the conservative forces in the Liberal Party prevailed and Turnbull lost a leadership ballot by one vote to Tony Abbott.Rudd was overseas on the day of the Liberal leadership challenge but his staff watched the event unfold on television. Media adviser Sean Kelly was with Rudd’s chief of staff Alister Jordan and Senator Mark Arbib.

    We were workshopping lines on the three possible leadership candidates, Turnbull, Abbott and Hockey, and we never thought we’d need the Abbott lines. And then Abbott got announced as the Leader and we were thrilled. We were over the moon. We were grinning from ear to ear.
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    The climate change conference took place in December in Copenhagen. Inside the conference centre, it was chaotic. Press secretary Fiona Sugden was in Rudd’s entourage.

    There were no facilities. You could barely move. Once you were inside the conference venue you really couldn’t get out, and I remember falling asleep under a table at 3 a.m. in the morning one day because you couldn’t leave once you were there.
    The media was cut off from the negotiators, leaving journalists scrabbling for footage to file news stories. After a worldwide search we found a few sequences of Kevin Rudd