Gillard became Australia's first female prime minister but it ended badly. That night she told Rudd of her intentions and the next day, on June 24, such was the stampede to oust the first-term Prime Minister, he didn't stand. Rudd's leadership was already on a knife edge and days later, on June 23, Farrell and a small delegation of colleagues visited Julia Gillard in her Parliament House office and urged her to pull the trigger. His growing belief that Kevin Rudd, too, had become unelectable, was crystallised. Farrell witnessed first hand not only an unbridled hostility towards state Labor that day, but federal Labor as well. Labor was flogged in Penrith by a then-record two-party swing against it of 26 per cent. The occasion was a state byelection for the seat of Penrith, vacated after the Labor incumbent Karyn Paluzzano resigned for lying to ICAC.įarrell was relatively new to federal politics, having entered the Senate in 2008, but the right-wing factional powerbroker was a decades-old veteran of the dark arts. Ten years ago this Saturday, South Australian Senator Don Farrell stood outside a polling booth in western Sydney trying to hand out how-to-vote cards for Labor.
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June 2023
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