Bill Shorten said again and again during the election campaign that he was not interested in an honourable defeat, an honourable second place. At the Moonee Valley racing club, late into the night and into the early morning, it seemed Shorten hadn’t come second, even as it became obvious that Labor could not win government in its own right.
He had, according to the booth workers and volunteers slinging back beers and party pies, achieved an impossible victory – uniting a party torn apart by the Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd years and demoralising a government that had gambled that switching to Malcolm Turnbull would crush Labor under the new prime minister’s charm and confidence.
It took until 11.27pm before Shorten, his glamorous wife, Chloe, and their neat-as-a-pin children pushed through the throng to the stage. The night had seemed to go on as long as the eight-week marathon, twisting and turning, but steadily defying the conventional wisdom that the government would be returned comfortably, even with a reduced majority in parliament.
The government wasn’t comfortable at all, the count would go on for days, and Shorten had come close to pulling off the impossible. “Shorten has done an amazing job coming from where we were six months ago,” said Jean Rau, 72. “When Turnbull came in, we all thought that was the end.”
For a man often described as needing to be liked, of yearning for approval, it was a moment for Shorten to savour. He smiled his cheesy smile and looked over the more than 300 people, his people, chanting, “Bill! Bill! Bill!” He looked as though he could go another eight weeks if he had to, 15 hours a day.
It was not an elegant speech. Shorten is no orator, no statesman. He had his usual tics – stumbling over a word or two, reading his notes at times, awkwardly bobbing his head and making a point with his hands. None of it mattered.
“Friends, we will not know the outcome of this election tonight,” Shorten began. “Indeed, we may not know it for some days to come. But there is one thing for sure – the Labor party is back.”
The faithful offered him their roar and in it was a release of all the pain of the crushing defeat of 2013, the party’s worst federal result since the depression, and all the self-inflicted wounds of the Rudd-Gillard years.
“In the past three years we have united as a party. In the past eight weeks we have run a magnificent campaign and three years after the Liberals came to power in a landslide, they have lost their mandate.”
The faithful whooped and hollered and Shorten basked in it all. If it was Labor’s resurrection, it was his too. After Turnbull usurped Tony Abbott just last September, nobody in this room thought Labor had a hope in this election.
Even though Labor’s task was huge – a net gain of 19 seats to form government – there would be little grace offered. There were murmurings in recent days that a bad defeat could mean Shorten would be remembered a stopgap leader, necessary but expendable. That idea was swept away. Tonight he was a Labor hero, a Labor saviour.
He went through Labor’s “mandate” – protecting penalty rates, the Gonski education reforms, the national broadband network, affordable housing, “real action on climate change”, same-sex marriage, equality of opportunity for women. “And we promise the Australian people that from government or indeed opposition we will save Medicare.”
The Coalition may have called Labor’s Medicare scare the “biggest lie” of the campaign, but it stirred the biggest roar among the faithful. “Bill! Bill! Bill!,” they chanted, with Shorten pausing to grin.
Shorten’s campaign was called “old-style” by some, even “class warfare” by the conservative press. Yet he ended unapologetically speaking to “all those Australians who feel marginalised and forgotten – alienated and excluded”.
“Labor will not leave you behind. We will not let you down.”
As Shorten grasped Chloe’s hand and raised his arms into the air, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Labor had won this election and he was prime minister-elect. To those in the room, it was as though they had, and he was.
