Free The Killing Season Uncut by Sarah Ferguson

take were going to push the Budget into deficit … I know this was a big issue for the Prime Minister and the Treasurer. This was going to be a legacy issue, no question about it.
    On Tuesday 3 February 2009, the government announced its $42 billion Nation Building and Jobs Plan, a mixture of longer-term investment in infrastructure and short-term payments to keep cash circulating through the economy. Ken Henry remembered learning the final figure.

    I wasn’t in the room for the final decisions but I was being kept informed. When one of my deputies phoned me to tell me how big it was, I did express some surprise at the size of it. But having said that, whilst I was surprised, I didn’t consider it inappropriate. Nobody will ever know whether it was the right amount or whether a larger amount would have given Australia an even better unemployment outcome. Or whether we could have achieved satisfactory economic outcomes with a smaller package.
    The day after the government unveiled the measures, Malcolm Turnbull told Parliament the opposition would vote against the package. The opposition didn’t reject the idea of a stimulus, he said, but $42 billion was ‘more than is appropriate right now’.
    US Treasury secretary Hank Paulson discussed stimulus measures with Rudd. Paulson was diplomatic about whether the Australian stimulus was justified.

    Well, of course, of course. Now you can never prove a contrafactual, okay? You can never say if we hadn’t of done this the economy would have turned down. But let me tell you, I think one thing that we all learnt in the financial crisis is you don’t want to play with financial fire. You don’t want to take arisk. I think knowing what I know of the financial system in Australia, he [Rudd] made the right decision, and no-one will ever know with certainty but I don’t think anyone in Australia would have liked to have lived with the consequences if he had said, ‘Well, I think maybe we won’t need it’, and then he’d been wrong.
    In June 2009, Australia’s quarterly economic figures were released. In a small archive miracle, Ken Henry was being filmed, seated next to Communications Minister Stephen Conroy in a Senate Estimates hearing, when a note was passed to him containing the figures. Henry showed the note to Conroy, who looked incredulous and then began to smile. In the March quarter, in the midst of the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression, the Australian economy grew by 0.4 per cent. The nation had avoided recession.
    Staffers told us there was shouting, whooping, high-fiving and general pandemonium in the offices and corridors of Parliament House. Rudd described the moment.

    We got the growth numbers and it was a genuine whacko moment, which is, ‘We’ve managed to do it’. And I’ve got to say, most of our Treasury team did not think we could, but we just got across the line.
    Ken Henry reminded us that while Australia hadn’t technically fallen into recession, there were consequences across the economy. More than 200 000 people lost their jobs, despite the government’s efforts.
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    The arrival of winter in 2009 was a turning point for Episode 1, marked by new Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull walkingacross the icy forecourt of Parliament House, crows silhouetted above him against a grey sky. Crows became
The Killing Season
’s totem: jet black and sinister, their cries punctuate the series’ soundtrack.
    With the government heading towards the long winter break, Thursday 4 June was a busy day in Parliament: debate continued on the first tranche of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation; in Question Time, Parliament acknowledged the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising; the Prime Minister informed the chamber that Joel Fitzgibbon had tendered his resignation as Defence Minister; and the Leader of the Opposition asked the Prime