Health policy was in chaos under Rudd, says Roxon

It was a Sunday and Kevin Rudd had summonsed the then health minister, Nicola Roxon, deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard, Treasurer, Wayne Swan, the Labor national secretary, Karl Bitar, and senior staff.

In the end Mr Rudd did not let the staff in, so they spent hours playing football on the lawns.

Mr Rudd was under pressure and he wanted a decisive announcement. Mr Bitar briefed on internal polling showing an announcement that Labor was ''taking over'' health - making good on Rudd's 2007 election promise that ''the buck would stop with him'' - would be extremely popular.

According to a frank account by Ms Roxon, Mr Rudd wanted to announce that he was holding a referendum at the time of the 2010 election. He had spoken to her about the plan during the week before. He wanted to take it to cabinet the next day, Monday. He wanted to announce it publicly on Tuesday.

According to Ms Roxon, she, Mr Swan and Mr Gillard pointed out a few flaws with the idea. To start with, without the support of the states, the referendum would certainly fail.

''He accepted privately that we would lose the referendum but he said it would still give us something that was popular to campaign with in the lead-in to the 2010 election,'' Ms Roxon told the Herald.

''Also, we had no legal advice about our powers to do what he was proposing, and no chance of getting it in his time frame.''

In the end Ms Roxon said she, Ms Gillard and Mr Swan had talked Mr Rudd out of the idea in the six-hour meeting.

It was the second time that Mr Rudd had tried to press the idea of a referendum. On a previous occasion, after another late-night meeting at The Lodge, Ms Roxon had told her staff if she was not able to persuade Mr Rudd, she might have to resign.

Ms Roxon rejected Mr Rudd's assertion yesterday that the watered-down health reform deal, eventually struck by Ms Gillard with the states, did not go through a proper cabinet process, but had been discussed only at ''a bit of an oral briefing''.

There were 14 cabinet submissions on the issue, and at one of the last meetings Mr Rudd stomped out and said he could not agree with what the government was doing. Only the final discussion, immediately before the health deal was put to premiers, had involved a verbal briefing rather than a full submission, Ms Roxon said.

Mr Rudd objected to the fact that the government was abandoning his goal of majority federal funding for hospitals. He has said in recent days he thought the Gillard government had ''squibbed'' real health reform.

The Herald reported at the time that Mr Rudd had ''stormed out'' of the meeting. Mr Rudd denied the claim and said he had just been late to catch a plane.

Yesterday Mr Rudd accused ministers of going public in order to, ''after the event, justify their actions in the [2010] coup by then demonising the guy who ran the country up until that point''.