Bill Shorten is looking for a new chief of staff as he tries to regroup after a damaging political fortnight and prepares for the possibility of a federal election before the end of the year.
The former Rio Tinto executive Ken Macpherson joined the opposition leader’s office as chief of staff in October 2013, soon after Shorten won the Labor leadership ballot.
Macpherson has suffered ill health for several months and intends to leave the demanding job. Labor’s staffing committee, headed by the frontbencher and former national secretary Gary Gray, and the current national secretary, George Wright, are searching for a replacement.
The change comes as the former New South Wales political staffer Ian McNamara – a former adviser to the former premier Kristina Keneally and the former NSW MP Joe Tripodi – joins Shorten as strategy director, as Labor tries to sharpen the leader’s performance.
Shorten warned his MPs this week that Tony Abbott could call an election before parliament resumed in August. Asked about the possibility of an imminent election on Thursday, the prime minister said people expecting one should have “a Bex and a good lie down”.
The Labor leader has had a bad final fortnight of the budget parliamentary session, admitting in response to revelations in the ABC documentary series The Killing Season that he had made “a mistake” in 2013 when he emphatically dismissed leadership talk just days after he had in fact met Kevin Rudd to discuss replacing Julia Gillard as prime minister.
The series highlighted how Shorten met with Rudd at Parliament House on the night of the Midwinter Ball on 19 June 2013. Shorten told the 3AW interviewer Neil Mitchell two days later that he had not been asked to review his support for Gillard and that he would not review his position.
Shorten has also been summonsed to appear before the royal commission into trade union governance and corruption on 8 July.
As the government and the media intensified questioning over Shorten’s time at the head of the Australian Workers’ Union, and before that as the head of its Victorian branch, his lawyers wrote to commission staff asking for his scheduled appearance to occur during the winter parliamentary recess in July rather than the originally earmarked timeframe of August or September.
