This article is more than 5 years old

This article is more than 5 years old

Kevin Rudd says it is “entirely possible” he leaked an account of a meeting with Julia Gillard which damaged her prime ministership from its start.

The comment comes in the third and final episode of the ABC documentary The Killing Season, to air on Tuesday night.



Gillard tells the program she hoped Rudd would be “relieved” about having the burdens of office off his shoulders after the June 2010 coup.



But Rudd shot back: “Not at all, but I imagine that’s the sort of thing an assassin does say.”



Rudd says it’s “entirely possible” he told Nine Network journalist Laurie Oakes, among other reporters, about the June 2010 meeting in which he offered to stand aside for his deputy if Labor’s stocks did not improve.



“It was clearly a leak from Kevin to Laurie designed to destroy this event,” Gillard says of the live televised National Press Club event at which she was asked the question.



Ten days into the 2010 election campaign it was leaked that Gillard had opposed paid parental leave in cabinet and expressed reservations about a pension rise.



“I thought this was, you know, the election-losing moment,” she said.



Rudd tells the program he was not the leaker this time.



“Absolutely not,” he says.



Former ministers Jenny Macklin and Wayne Swan say they believed Rudd was behind the leaks.



Gillard said it was made clear to her that the only way to stop the leaks was to offer Rudd the post-election job of foreign minister, which she did.



The leaks stopped and Rudd was given the role when Labor formed minority government.



Gillard said that during the term Rudd “consistently danced right out on that line of bad behaviour” and she could do nothing because of the tight numbers in parliament.



The turning point came when a former Gillard backer, West Australian senator Mark Bishop, reached out to Rudd as the party’s public standing fell.



“She didn’t have within herself the persona or the authority that is necessary to do that job,” Bishop says.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Julia Gillard on the set of The Killing Season. She accuses Kevin Rudd of leaks designed to destabilise her government. Photograph: ABC/The Killing Season

“He [Rudd] came back to me straight away and we set up a time and we had a talk in my office.”



Rudd lost a hastily-called leadership ballot in February 2012, but the infighting continued.



In early 2013, Gillard met NSW factional boss Sam Dastyari, who had asked for the meeting to talk about the party’s falling vote in western Sydney.



“I said: ‘Prime minister, we are losing the entire migrant vote in Sydney. This is us having no base’. And she says to me, ‘Is this about Kevin?’



“And I said to her: ‘It isn’t about Kevin, but it will become about Kevin’.”



Gillard then bluntly told him: “You can’t reward a wrecker.”



Rudd said he was not going to recontest the leadership without Right factional boss Bill Shorten coming to him with an offer of the final votes needed to get him across the line, which eventually came before the June 2013 ballot.



Asked whether Shorten asked for anything in return, Rudd says: “No, he didn’t. I asked for something – that prior to the election we change the rules of the party to prevent a leadership coup from ever happening again.”