“Incompetent and out of control.”
They were the words used by Julia Gillard in the email she sent former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd describing the public’s perception of the Labor government back in 2010.
The email, which was sent to Rudd and his chief of staff at 9.49am on Monday, June 21, 2010, came just two days before Gillard challenged Rudd for the leadership of the Labor party and has been released to the public in the lead up to its inclusion in a book being published next week.
According to The Australian, Gillard wrote:
“To state the obvious — our primary is in the mid-30s; we can’t win an election with a primary like that and the issue of asylum-seekers is an enormous reason why our primary is at that low level.
“It is an issue working on every level — loss of control of the borders feeding into a narrative of a government that is incompetent and out of control.
“As you know I have been raising this with a great deal of anxiety and I remain desperately concerned about lack of progress.”
“I do not normally email you directly Kevin and I don’t intend to make it a habit.”
On the same day the email was sent, the Labor party’s popularity dropped to just 35 per cent (although they continued to lead the Coalition on a two-party preferred basis.)
The email has now raised questions over whether Julia Gillard had planned to challenged the leadership earlier than June 23 – something she had previously denied doing.
The book – Rudd, Gillard and Beyond by political commentator Troy Bramston – will be released soon.
Top Comments
I thank Mamamia for posting this article. I just wish when Kevin Rudd was being smeared and character assassinated by his own party for 3 years, that this was released earlier. It proves what we all suspected. She had been manipulating for a long time and white-anting Rudd to get the leadership. Maxine McKew said in her book, and she was there at his office that night - the night the leadership ballot was announced for the next morning, that Gillard had been plotting for many months. A journo for The Australian said that he had been conferring with Gillard for several months and giving her personal polling for herself, and for Rudd. It really upsets and hurts me that a good man who gave us so much, new school libraries, medical centres, organ transplant centres, kept us out of the GFC, 2 apologies etc was smeared for 4 years by Gillard's henchmen. Yet he never said a word back to defend himself. This was a man that killed off a 12 year PM in his own seat (Bennelong) and gave Australians on Senior and Disability pensions the biggest rise since pensions in Australia came in to existence. And here was this grossly disloyal Deputy, doing everything to bring down Rudd just so she could become PM because she could not wait at least one term before getting the keys to the Lodge. Then whinges and writes a 5000 word essay complaining that the same was done to her after she did it first. Rudd had that teary press conference, but after that he never said one word about the betrayal of him, in contrast to Gillard's interviews and bitter essay.
Does anyone know whether Gillard opposed Rudd's dismantling of the Howard border protection arrangements that had stopped the boats, resulted in no drownings and had no one in detention (one of Rudd's criticisms of detention facilities was that they were unused white elephants, something they certainly fixed)? There are some pretty hard headed people in the ALP and I find it almost impossible that no one realised that a predictable result of removing border protection would be a surge in boats and hundreds of drowning deaths. But I've never seen any account of what sort of internal debate occurred at the time.