A dance hall on a busy street not far from Sydney’s Central Station has for decades done hard yards in the service of experimental theatre and standup comedy. One night in March, Guardian Australia rented the place for a forum on equal marriage. The platform was crowded with campaigners, comedians and politicians. Turning out for the event was every letter of the GLBTI alphabet. Shorten was there with his wife, Chloe, who cut a vivid figure even in that crowd in a leopard-skin raincoat. Shorten was entirely at ease.
He has brought the party a long way. I remember sitting with Julia Gillard’s dour tactician John McTernan in early 2013 as he tried to convince me Labor could beat Abbott by campaigning as the modern party. “What about equal marriage?” I asked. McTernan was silent. The issue was already totemic, a pointer to which century a political party was operating in, but the branch of the Catholic church known as the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association had used its great muscle to stack parliament with men and women prepared to die in a ditch for traditional marriage. Shorten changed that. Behind the scenes at the Labor conference in Melbourne in 2014 he bluntly told the shoppies equal marriage was going to happen. No rebellion followed. Meanwhile, the Coalition was tearing itself apart on the issue. Turnbull might once have been on the dance-hall platform in March with Shorten and the leader of the Greens, Richard Di Natale. Not now. Backtracking on equal marriage has done the prime minister great damage in middle Australia. Labor’s strategic dream in 2013 has become reality in 2016: in this contest, Shorten is leading the modern party.
Busybodies
He had a story for the rally. That morning at an RAAF wreath-laying ceremony he had been accosted by a little old lady who cried, “God will damn you for your position on marriage equality.” Then she slipped him a note: “And your child’s undisciplined too.” In language you don’t expect Labor leaders to use, Shorten gave busybodies a spray.
People judging lesbian or gay or bisexual or transgender relationships are actually judging more than just those groups. They are judging the single parents; they are judging the people who have got divorced. I live in a blended family. I have stepchildren who I regard as my own children. So this is the point I think that we are seeing: the face of what constitutes a family is changing. Good luck to people who have never been divorced. But do you know what? If you’ve been divorced, you’re an equally worthy human being.
And children are raised not just by same-sex couples but raised in blended families. The good news is – and this is why there is change in the Labor party, quite significant change in a relatively short time – that we know now that families come in all shapes and sizes. I bitterly resent when I hear some people judging other relationships. Until you are in that relationship, until you are raising those children, get out of my life. I don’t want your opinions … I represent a whole lot of Australians who in the last 10 years have started waking up and thinking about it and being touched by personal stories. The good news is that the religious right no longer owns the definition of what a family is. And they can’t win.”
The bookies aren’t betting Shorten can win either. That he might emerge this year as prime minister hasn’t gripped the national imagination. No one is asking the Labor leader what he will do in his first 100 days. But in late summer, as the polls swung back in Labor’s favour, even hostile commentators agreed: Shorten can’t be ruled out. They had been wrong so often, as blow after blow failed to knock him out. He survived Dyson Heydon. He survived the rise of Malcolm Turnbull. He survived the last polls of 2015 that put the Coalition’s two-party-preferred vote at 53% and Labor’s at 47%. By late February, Newspoll and Essential had the parties level-pegging. Shorten admits he didn’t predict this. “But I didn’t predict I was going to be wiped out either.”
‘The government has crumpled inwards’
“I thought that when Malcolm Turnbull took over that politics would be harder for us, but politics might be better overall and it would be an opportunity for everyone to lift their game,” says Shorten. “When you play a better or a smarter opponent, it forces you to work harder, doesn’t it? … what has surprised me is that the government has crumpled inwards.”
Shorten found himself facing an opponent easier to grapple with. “Abbott is a master at turning a stick into a club. He is a puncher. Turnbull talks too much, doesn’t focus enough. I don’t know if he’s match-fit. I don’t get the impression he’s clear what he wants to do.” While the government talks housekeeping – shifting the tax mix, attending to the deficit – Labor is talking policy. It may be crazy brave. Billions are at stake backing Gonski and the National Disability Insurance Scheme in the years ahead. But fading fast as Labor’s policies come under attack from the government is the old image of Shorten as a shapeshifter interested only in power.
Playing strongly to his advantage is Turnbull’s shift away from the constant wedging of Labor on national security. The humiliations Shorten accepted to prevent his party being branded as soft on terrorism seem – at least for the moment – a thing of the past. He looks more like a leader as a result. These days the rule-of-law arguments he might have raised in defence of Muslim Australians, refugees and whistleblowers, he now deploys to defend unionists who might fall foul of a re-empowered Australian Building and Construction Commission. “The ABCC should deal with ordinary industrial laws, not criminal matters. But the government’s given it extraordinary coercive powers on the back of Dyson Heydon’s royal commission … powers more draconian to deal with tradies on Australian building sites than for police or courts handling ice trafficking or terrorism.”
Shorten cuts a different figure these days. The body language is not as exaggerated. He has abandoned his most irritating pose: faux-thoughtful. His brows are no longer theatrically creased for the cameras. The serious face he presents now looks like his own. He’s looking for his old voice, the one he had before he went into parliament. “What I’m trying to do is talk to people and make sure our polices are speaking to their future. I’m very clear now. I feel I have a clarity of purpose that has been two and a half years in the making.”
Nine hundred and counting
We’ve met on a hot Sydney autumn afternoon at roughly the 900-day mark of his leadership of the opposition. He’s fond of the figure, which crops up again and again in our conversation: “We’ve spent 900 days working on what we think we should do ... ”
I observe it’s a strange sort of a job being leader of the opposition: whoever has it wants desperately to be rid of it. Shorten cuts me off: “It’s the job before the one you want, but in my opinion the only way to get to the job you want is to do the job you’ve got.” There’s something of the flavour of Xavier in the way he talks up the value of the long grind of opposition. “You can’t know what this job is on the first day. What you learn about being an opposition leader is acquired over time, from scars, with lessons, with talking to people, with what governments do, how your party organises its ideas. To anyone who came to me and said, ‘One day I’d like to be prime minister,’ I would say to them, ‘First you must be opposition leader, because the lessons you’re learning now will make you a better prime minister.’ I can’t say I’ve enjoyed every day of opposition, but I can say that I think I’m a better leader for every day I’ve had.”
Australian politics are said to be volatile. Really, they’re repetitive. The same stories are told, the same scenes recur again and again with only a switch of cast. It’s as if the system itself is incapable of learning. We find ourselves in so many ways where we were in Gillard’s time. An opposition leader not much loved faces a prime minister under attack from within. There was at least an argument last time that restoring Rudd might revive the fortunes of his party. Not a skerrick of such hope attaches to Abbott. The government is restive. The opposition is disciplined. Again the country wonders if an opposition leader can rise above the narrow politics that brought him to the top. There’s no doubt Bill Shorten would have made a fine premier of Victoria. But can he scale up?
“I look forward to demonstrating that,” he says. “I know what the nation should look like in 10 and 15 years’ time and it’s up to me to tell that story to the nation. My job isn’t to convince Malcolm Turnbull or News Limited that they should vote for me. My job is to convince Australians I have a plan for the future.”
• Faction Man by David Marr is published by Black Inc on 18 May priced $22.99
