THE night before he turned against his prime minister, Wayne Swan went to Kevin Rudd's office for a drink and congratulated him on defending the newly announced mining tax, a new book reports. As Julia Gillard's challenge unfolded the next day, the man Mr Rudd had appointed Treasurer lacked the courage to tell him he was abandoning him: "In the case of Wayne, I did not even receive a telephone call advising me he had decided to withdraw his support from me and back Julia as replacement prime minister," Mr Rudd tells the former Labor MP Maxine McKew in her new book. "I had to telephone him myself." Mr Swan was responsible for bungling the introduction of the mining tax, and Mr Rudd called in the Resources Minister, Martin Ferguson, to fix the mess, McKew writes in Tales from the Political Trenches, to be published on Monday.
But while Mr Rudd had defended Mr Swan, the Treasurer did not reciprocate: "In response to my question on the Wednesday afternoon," the day of the coup, "when I asked him 'What's happening?', he replied he would be 'voting for change'," says Mr Rudd. Advertisement "It was only later that I discovered that an arrangement had been put in place to make him deputy prime minister" in a Gillard government. "But the core point was this: at no stage did either Julia or Wayne say to me that, unless I undertook change x, y or z, there would be a challenge to my leadership. So did I feel let down and indeed betrayed? Well of course." McKew offers a tough verdict on the leadership coup against a first-term prime minister: "It's never happened before in our party. It was engineered and executed by a small group of people intent on indulging their own political vanities." She is referring to the factional lieutenants and union chiefs who led the coup, the so-called "faceless men." But she also reports that Ms Gillard herself was using internal research to undermine Mr Rudd days before the coup as part of a "conspiracy". Ms Gillard has maintained that she refused any part in any plotting and only made up her mind to challenge on the day of the coup itself. Until now, Mr Rudd has largely been blamed for the mishandling of the mining tax. The announcement of the tax in its original form in 2010 provoked the big multinational miners BHP, Rio and Xstrata to fund a vigorous $22 million ad campaign against the tax. It was used within the caucus to argue that Mr Rudd had gone to war with the business community. But McKew holds Mr Swan squarely responsible: "Rudd trusted his Treasurer."
