Week 7: The campaign kicks off

The first week of the campaign proper was the signal for News Corp to start its own campaign against Labor. In the course of the election, veteran journalists told me that they had never before seen anything so virulent. On the Monday the Daily Telegraph led with a front-page editorial which screamed "Kick This Mob Out".

On Thursday its front page lampooned Rudd and Albanese with a headline that stated "I Know Nuthink". On Friday the Brisbane Courier-Mail had a front-page photo of Peter Beattie, the newly endorsed candidate for Forde, with a headline that read "Send in the Clown".

The next day it ran a front-page headline "Dead Kev Bounce", while the Sydney Daily Telegraph front page screamed "Albo's Air Farce" and reproduced false claims that Albanese had let 10 Virgin flights land after curfew because they were carrying politicians.

The most damaging News Corp story that week, though, was a front-page attack in Melbourne's Herald Sun on the preselected Labor candidate for Hotham. And this was just the beginning.

These attacks were well planned, often coming at critical points in the election – three of them were either directly before or immediately after one of the televised debates and served to take attention away from Rudd's successes in those exchanges with Abbott. It was also clear that the News Corp newspapers chose to mount the most aggressive attacks in Brisbane and Sydney – where the most heavily contested seats were located.

The impact of these attacks was felt in a number of different ways:

1. They served to undermine Rudd's credibility and legitimacy.

2. They fed shock-jock radio programs, which continued throughout the day following the attacks started by the newspapers in the morning.

3. They diverted attention away from the issues we wanted to discuss. For example, on the day after the first debate News Corp papers ran a front-page headline "Stop the Notes", focused entirely on the fact that Rudd used notes in the first debate. It was a major distraction from the points Rudd was trying to make in the debate. Similarly, after the second debate the Telegraph ran a story that wrongly accused Rudd of being rude to a makeup artist on the night. Again, the headline diverted readers, TV interviewers and reporters from the real issues of the debate.

4. They allowed News Corp reporters to suggest that Rudd was off message and chaotic in his dealings with the media when, in fact, the same news organisation set up the ambushes. Invariably he would spend up to half of his press conference defending or explaining what really happened; for example, with the makeup artist.

5. They allowed Abbott to stay positive virtually all the time. He didn't have to do any attacking – News Corp was doing it for him on a daily basis.

The first week, therefore, saw Labor caught in a tight and effective pincer movement, with News Corp attacking with news stories and the Liberal party's negative advertising traducing Rudd's reputation and reminding voters of the worst of Rudd's previous time as prime minister. It was proving to be effective, too – by the end of the week Labor's vote had dropped two points to 47%.

Epilogue

On 7 September 2013 a remarkable period in the history of the Labor party – and, indeed, Australia – came to an end. Kevin Rudd, a good friend and a great Australian reformer, stood down from the leadership of the Labor party. For 74 remarkable days he and his small band of advisers gave it their all as they raced against time to win the election. During that period Labor went from facing political annihilation to achieving an election outcome that saw every cabinet minister returned to the parliament.

In Queensland, Labor lost just two seats by the barest of margins and in NSW the swing was less than 3%. The swings of up to 18% that had been predicted when Julia Gillard was prime minister just did not appear. In the end Labor held 55 seats. Of course, it was not a good result – only a win can be called "good" – but Rudd did what no one else could have done in those circumstances: he saved Labor. For that alone his tireless leadership deserves to be acknowledged.

However, those 74 days also saw Labor start the process of rediscovering and rebuilding itself. For too long the party had been owned by the few, not the many. This was Rudd's other remarkable achievement: the democratisation of Labor. That process commenced, but certainly did not end, when the party caucus meeting in Labor's NSW birthplace of Balmain voted to give rank-and-file branch members 50% of the vote when electing the Labor leader.

This process of internal reform is just the start – but it's a good one. Next the party must come together to increase the rank-and-file representation at party conferences to well beyond the 50% currently enjoyed by unions. It also needs to look at giving branch members an even greater say in choosing the leader.

Right now, one MP's vote is equal to the votes of about 500 branch members – that's quite a gerrymander when you think of it. Then it should extend this nascent democratisation across all the state and territory branches and to the selection of senators. When Rudd demanded that the party embrace reform he started a fire inside Labor that will not be extinguished. If the party is to survive in the long term it has no choice but to expand its membership by giving the rank and file a real say.

The other remarkable aspect of this election was the highly partisan role played by the News Corp press. With control of 70% of the nation's newspapers, from a national daily through to weekly "throwaways", News Corp is easily the most powerful political force in Australia – bigger than the major parties or the combined weight of the unions. The fact that the swings were lowest in the states where News Corp's anti-Rudd invective was at its most virulent is a welcome reflection on the maturity of the Australian people.

However, we should not use this as an argument to downplay the News Corp influence in this election. I saw how, on a daily basis, the storm of negative stories that emanated from News Corp papers blew our campaign off course. Rudd and his advisers were constantly forced to deal with stories that had nothing to do with the issues either Labor or the Liberals were pursuing.

This was the real damage those unending negative headlines in the Daily Telegraph and the Courier-Mail inflicted on our campaign. In fact, research commissioned by the Labor party during the campaign showed just how biased the News Corp press was after Col Allan returned from New York to take over its stable of newspapers. For instance, the review found that the Daily Telegraph published twice the volume of unfavourable coverage of Rudd and Labor than the Sydney Morning Herald.

This is not to say that our campaign would otherwise have been flawless – far from it. A case in point is the disastrous press conference in the second last week where Rudd and his colleagues used incorrect technical assumptions in their attack on the opposition's costings.

That error had nothing to do with News Corp and everything to do with poor policy work. In a similar vein, the three years of infighting within Labor was all our own work. The Australian public drew their own conclusions about Labor's disunity and in doing so chose to punish us and reward an opposition which managed to remain, on the surface at least, a united and disciplined machine.

So the election has been won and lost and now we look to the next generation of political leaders and activists to take Labor forward. I know better than most that electoral success and failure is cyclical – between 1998 and 2008 I was not on one losing campaign for Labor at a state or territory level. I also know, however, that this cycle can be shortened dramatically if a disciplined opposition takes the fight to the government. Now is not the time for Labor to descend into another round of recriminations – it's time to get on with the business of winning again.

• This is an edited extract from The Rudd Rebellion: The Campaign to Save Labor by Bruce Hawker (MUP), published 4 November