"Sometimes I think, 'well, nothing else in politics is quite like having your life threatened.'" Credit:Nic Walker Bowen has no prepared comments but knows his target - the government's failure to release costings for its business tax cuts, the centrepiece of its economic plan and bid for re-election. As his allotted time expires, he's hoarse and flagging noticeably. Pyne, the government's mischief-maker in chief, rises and grants Bowen a five minute extension of time as he has "yet to make a substantive point". Cue cries of "More! More!" from government MPs. Bowen becomes even more frenetic, his face seeming to take on the same hue as his purple tie. When he falls back on the green leather upholstery of the Opposition benches, government members jeer, his own side cheers, and any fears he was about to rupture an aneurysm in the chamber have been allayed. Pyne and the government front bench have had Bowen in their sights for months, comparing him in the House to Ben Stiller's movie character Derek Zoolander, the dim, "really, really ridiculously good-looking" male model famed for his signature "blue steel" look: pursed lips and preposterous, penetrating stare.

Bowen and his wife, Rebecca Mifsud ("He wore me down," she says of his courting technique), with their son Max, 8, and daughter Grace, 11. It's a jibe born of Bowen's recent penchant for tight tailored suits and fitted shirts which showcase his newly svelte form. But the government's merrymaking betrays its unease. Bowen - at 43, still the second youngest person in shadow Cabinet - has emerged as arguably the driving force behind Labor's resurgence in the polls. With an economics degree and of a book about Australia's treasurers behind him, Bowen commands his brief and is quick to expose government mistakes. He has been the architect of Labor's decision to go hard and early on economic policy, a strategy not seen since John Hewson disastrous stint as Liberal leader in the early 1990s. By targeting one of the great Australian pastimes—negatively gearing investment property—Bowen has butchered another sacred cow of modern politics. Chris Bowen began lobbying his local western Sydney council for civic improvements while still in primary school. Credit:Nic Walker In the second Rudd government, Bowen was the shortest serving Treasurer in Australian political history, barring a couple of Prime Ministers who briefly took the job while they settled their Cabinet appointments. Now, with the campaign in full swing and Labor in an improbably competitive position, he might just be about to make a return to the position.

-------------------------------------------- You can't change the country without possessing the mad gene ... those who have it get the big changes made. Paul Keating To describe Bowen's interest in public affairs as precocious hardly does justice to his early fascination with politics. Growing up in a fibro home in a cul de sac in Smithfield in Sydney's western suburbs, Bowen began agitating for civic improvements and writing to the local newspaper when he was at primary school. An early crusade saved the Smithfield library. Another saw Bowen write to every counsellor demanding they provide larger garbage bins, earning him a front page article and photo in the local paper. "I thought all the other councils had really big bins, and we only had these dinky ones. It's all pretty embarrassing," laughs Bowen as we talk in his Parliament House office. "Yes, I was a nerd." Bowen's father Ross worked at the NRMA on the midnight to dawn shift, in charge of dispatching help to roadside breakdowns. "He used to come home in the morning and have a scotch before sleeping through the day. So I grew up with the smell of milk and scotch over breakfast, Bowen recalls. "To this day, I still like to have a scotch before I go to bed. But that's 10.30 at night, not 7 o'clock in the morning."

His mother, Christine, was a carer, taking in kids during the week to help working parents struggling to cope. For several years, Bowen shared his bunk bed during the week with a boy, Matthew, who suffered from cerebral palsy. His parents, observed Bowen in his maiden speech, taught him "not by lessons and homilies, but by example." In Year 6, Bowen won his school's citizenship prize and was rewarded with a $10 book voucher. He went to Angus & Robertson and bought Paul Kelly's "The Hawke Ascendancy", devouring the 400-page tome on Bob Hawke's rise to the Prime Ministership. "I found it fascinating. I particularly remember the John Button letter to Hayden saying it's time to go." In the letter, Button attempts to persuade Hayden to stand aside for "a bastard like Bob Hawke", telling him it's "never been a disqualification for leadership of the party". It was quite an introduction for a boy to the brutal unsentimentality of power politics, and one that hardly deterred him from his chosen path. At 15, Bowen attended his first Labor Party branch meeting at the Brennan Park community hall. He recalls with some glee the reception when he turned up. "There were two preselections coming up and everyone looked at me and said "Who stacked this kid in?'", he laughs. "I was awestruck. I thought it was great. I thought it was fantastic. I was hooked for life." The teenager quickly decided that he wanted to become the federal member for what was then the seat of Prospect (renamed McMahon in 2010).

Bowen was a driven student and the thump of a soccer ball against his neighbour's garage was the soundtrack to his high school study sessions. Harry Kewell, the great Australian attacking midfielder, lived across the road and practised his shooting relentlessly. "We used to play street soccer," says Bowen. "He always used to win which annoyed me at the time, although I don't feel so bad about it now." By the time he went to the University of Sydney to study economics in 1991 , Bowen was totally immersed in the affairs of his local ALP branch. University politics didn't interest him in the slightest. "He regarded it as flippant, a frippery," says Robert McMahon, a close companion of Bowen's at the time who remains a friend, and is now a senior public servant in Canberra. ""Most 18 year olds we knew at university were at the Wentworth building drinking beer. Chris would take off each night to go back to Fairfield to do the numbers, make the connections and advance his career. He was very focused, almost improbably so at that age." Bowen gravitated to a small group of very earnest students of varying ideological inclinations who were passionate about government. (They still meet every few years for dinner). When Nick Greiner resigned as NSW premier in 1992, they all rushed down to parliament to sit in the public gallery and watch the drama unfold. Tom Switzer - friend of Tony Abbott, former Liberal Party staffer and conservative commentator, studied Economics 101 alongside Bowen, tutored by a young lecturer named Yanis Varoufakis, a dynamic young academic famed for his ponytail and tight-fitting T-shirts. Varoufakis later became Greece's finance minister in its left wing government, negotiating with the European Union to restructure Greece's monster debt as he railed against the foibles of capitalism. It's fair to say neither Bowen, nor Switzer for that matter, were heavily influenced by Varoufakis. A look of mock horror crosses Bowen's face when I point out the connection. "You don't have to mention that do you!"

"Chris was just really intelligent, incredibly bookish," says Switzer. "That's still the case. He reads very widely, not just his policy briefs but magazines, journals, books and takes a serious interest in all the different schools of thought. It's a very admirable trait in a politician." In the year he graduated from university, John Newman, the local NSW Labor MP, and a friend of the Bowen family, was murdered. "That was a huge shock," says Bowen, whose disquiet was compounded when he was elected to FairField Council the next year. Sitting among the five members of the ALP caucus was Phuong Ngo, the prime suspect in the Newman murder. A Vietnamese refugee who had built a formidable business and political power base around Cabramatta, Ngo had been publicly accused by Newman of links to the 5T gang that ran the heroin trade that had ravaged the suburb. "A lot of people found him charming. Urbane, sophisticated. Or they found him cunning and deceitful. I was very much in the latter category," says Bowen. "I immediately had my suspicions." Ngo brought to Bowen a plan to elevate himself to mayor and give Labor the numbers on the council. It involved changing the traffic rules to the benefit of the business interests of one of the independent councillors who would thenswitch his vote to support Labor. Three of the five Labor councillors backed the plot. "I said 'No. This is dodgy'," says Bowen. "Phuong said 'Well, I will charge you under party rules for breach of caucus because I have the numbers'." Bowen maintained that the deal was corrupt and said he would take it to the Independent Commission Against Corruption, which enraged Ngo, who confronted him in a meeting room at Fairfield Council chambers. "I will never forget this," says Bowen. "He turned to me and said 'Anyone who stops me, I will pursue them to their grave'." Bowen held his ground, but not before going home, firing up his word processor and recording what had transpired. "I put it in a draw in case anything happened," he says. (Bowen declines to let me see it.) "Sometimes I think, well, nothing else in my political life is quite like having your life threatened."

----------- At an industrial estate in Wetherill Park, the sun is rising and Chris Bowen is beginning his regular 6.15am workout at the F45 gymnasium. He is focused, even a little on edge, as he moves through the 45 minutes of "high intensity interval training", a gruelling circuit of light weights, cardio, squats and sit-ups led by his trainer Troy Pullen. One exercise involves lying flat on a dome, using your stomach muscles to propel yourself onto your feet before jumping onto a small block. Bowen does it easily. His chief of staff, James Cullen, and I flay around comically, rolling on our sides, using our hands and elbows to slowly get upright. Bowen is less impressive pushing a trolley laden with weights, a drill used by footballers trying to build up leg strength. "He has chicken legs," Pullen later jokes. "We're still working on that." Pullen says Bowen had a "lot of belly fat, hardly any muscle or tone" when he first came to see him. They set about remaking his physique in Bowen's customarily methodical manner over the next year. The idea was to broaden the shoulders, and to trim down the stomach.

The program began with lots of heavy weights to build muscle mass. After adding 5 kilos of muscle, the emphasis switched to sprint training to "shred the fat" after a few months. Bowen changed his diet and he lost 17 kilos. "He got into his greens and veggies. Chicken and tuna mostly for protein, green smoothies for breakfast." There's no doubt Bowen has pride in his new appearance. He has a habit of keeping his suit jacket buttoned up even when sitting down, a trait that amuses his colleagues. The main benefit of his new regimen, he says, is that he has a lot more energy, more focus and is calmer. Bowen's wife Rebecca Mifsud, a human resources manager, laughs as she describes her husband stocking the cupboards with nuts and seeds. The couple have two school-age kids and met in 2000 at an ALP conference, where Mifsud was a union delegate. (Mifsud was unimpressed at first; her prospective paramour, she says, "wore me down".) Mifsud was also sceptical of her husband's fitness kick. "To be honest, I thought it was a distraction from what was going on," she says. Her oblique reference to "what was going on" alludes to the most inglorious chapter of Bowen's political career: his leading role as a Kevin Rudd "cardinal" in the absurd, stillborn leadership challenge to then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard in March 2013. Having already failed once at regaining the leadership, Rudd was primed to go again, with Bowen as his chief number counter and tactician. Former Labor leader Simon Crean - a Gillard mentor - was prepared to switch to the Rudd camp. Bowen, says Crean, told him to "bring it on."

Crean did so, before a huge media pack at a chaotic press conference in Parliament's Mural Hall. Gillard promptly sacked Crean and called a leadership spill. But Rudd didn't stand, pulling out once it became apparent he didn't have majority support. The recriminations following the botched coup were vicious. Crean dismissed Bowen as "disorganised, unbelievable and shameless". The Rudd team retorted that Crean had "gone rogue", ignoring an SMS from Rudd insisting they talk before he acted and sent hours before Crean's political "suicide bombing". (Crean admits he missed the text message but says it was ambiguous at any rate.) The next day, Bowen resigned from Cabinet. "Chris was devastated," said one Labour source. "He had not only been humiliated publicly [because of Crean's savaging], he was convinced he was going to lose his seat." Polling of McMahon, the seat he had occupied for nine years, showed he was destined for a massive defeat. He survived in large part thanks to Rudd's eventual toppling of Gillard, which improved Labor's parlous polling. As Rudd's treasurer, Bowen would serve for 83 days. Colleagues half-jokingly compare Bowen to Frank Underwood, the amoral, conniving politician played by Kevin Spacey in the TV series House of Cards. (Bowen is a massive fan and happily sits down to binge watch the Netflix show.) He undoubtedly revels in scheming and plotting, and prepared to get his hands dirty in the ruthless pursuit of electoral success. As a freshman MP, in 2006, he was the first to declare publicly that then Labor leader Kim Beazley should stand aside for Kevin Rudd.

Robert McMahon, his university friend, relates how their relationship became "strained" after Bowen refused to back same sex marriage. When they were students, Bowen had shown McMahon great kindness when he came out, comforting and encouraging him. Bowen's electorate, however, had many conservative Christians from the Assyrian, Maltese and South American communities. "His argument essentially was it's not going to get up and I don't see the point in destroying my livelihood over it," says McMahon. Last year, Bowen changed his public position, giving a nod to his old friend by essentially adopting the argument McMahon had long put to him during their talks. "On my marriage certificate at home it has got the Australian coat of arms as it has on all of ours. It is our right as a citizen to get married and it is a right that should be applied equally," said Bowen at a press conference in Canberra. Bowen, for his part, acknowledges he can be a political pragmatist. I ask him how he feels about abrogating personal principles for political advantage. He is unapologetic. "I'm not a university lecturer, I'm a politician," he says. "Being an MP is partly about being a representative, partly about your beliefs and partly about securing mandates to do things." -----

Paul Keating is on the phone and waxing lyrical - as only he can - about the man he has mentored for the best part of two decades. Bowen "understands the fiscal realm", says Keating. He "sees the duality in the role of Treasurer", that "you have to be a policy changer and policy informer". "You can't change the country without possessing the mad gene; the brave gene. You understand?", he tells me. "That gene feeds imagination, confidence and courage - but principally imagination." Bowen has that gene, says Keating, and "those who have it get the big changes made". Keating was a great change agent but experienced a rare failure when he was forced in 1987 to reverse his decision to end negative gearing, which allows investors to deduct losses on their properties against other income. No politician has been prepared to touch it since, even though tax breaks for Australian property investors are among the most generous in the world and drain the budget. For the vast majority of Australia's eight million homeowners, their property is their main source of wealth. The conventional wisdom went that putting downward pressure on house prices would lead to a massive backlash.

Nonetheless, it was, says Bowen, "an idea whose time had come". Home prices have risen at six times the rate of household incomes over the past two decades and more and more people were being locked out of home ownership. Bowen considered several options, finally settling on ending negative for existing dwellings, but keeping it for newly built homes. The changes would not be retrospective. The policy also reduces the capital gains tax discount from 50 per cent to 25 per cent, a change that was arguably even more radical. In 1998, Labor's shadow treasurer Gareth Evans had proposed an expansion in capital gains tax widely seen as damaging their fortunes in the election campaign that year. "I wargamed how it might pan out," says Bowen of the political risks. Labor expected "a firestorm" of protest from the property industry and the government. To counteract the expected assault, Bowen urged Bill Shorten, the leader of the opposition, to release the policy early. "I took the view that you couldn't hold this for an election campaign because that would actually make the scare campaign more potent," he says. "We wouldn't have had time to explain it." Bowen assessed there could be an unexpected political dividend. "Malcolm [Turnbull] could run a scare campaign but in doing so he damages what is his number one positive. That is, I'm different, I'm the conciliator, the big picture guy who likes a mature, considered discussion." As it transpired, and not without a degree of fortune, the strategy worked well. As the Turnbull government went through a tortured process of developing its own taxation and economic policies, flirting with and then abandoning an increased GST, the handing of income tax powers to the states, and the withdrawal of federal funding from public education, Labor emerged looking like the party with the coherent economic policy.

When the budget came, the government didn't touch negative gearing or capital gains tax but followed Labor on other economic policies Bowen had already released: multinational tax avoidance, superannuation and the higher cigarette taxes. The government's usual supporters on the right, notably the Institute of Public Affairs, complained it had delivered a Labor budget. Meanwhile, Turnbull's personal popularity has tumbled. His claim that Labor's housing affordability package would "smash" home prices has not gained the expected traction. I ask John Hewson, former Liberal leader, why Labor appears to be succeeding where he didn't with his 650-page Fightback document, which underpinned the former merchant banker's loss in "unloseable" 1993 poll. "Some say [Fightback] was the longest political suicide note in history," he says with a laugh. "Labor has been clever not to go into as much detail but they have picked a couple of areas [to go early on] that appeal to their base." Hewson has cautious praise for Bowen. "He's obviously technically more competent than [Treasurer Scott] Morrison," he says. "He's a trained economist and he knows that in economics you can't spin for long because you get mugged by reality." ----- In his first book Hearts & Minds, a slim volume on the future of the Labor Party written when he was in backbench purgatory, Chris Bowen quotes Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik revolutionary.

In 1913, the communist hero lamented that the "the Australian Labor Party does not even call itself a socialist party. Actually, it is a liberal- bourgeois party while the Liberals in Australia are really conservative." It's a sentiment that Bowen heartily endorses. "Labor is," he wrote, "the true liberal party in Australia." Bowen - perhaps more than any other Labor politician - is philosophically on the right of the Labor movement. He's deeply hostile to the Greens, seeing its agenda as "antigrowth". He's anxious for Labor to attract more of the small business vote. He also strongly supports the offshore processing of asylum seekers, a view that crystalised when, in 2010, he became immigration minister in the middle of a surge of 50,000 arrivals by rickety boats. Hundreds died at sea on his watch. "You moral compass does point you in a different direction if you are dealing with it every day. I was much harder line on border protection coming out than I was coming in, it's fair to say." Bowen's electorate - he still lives in Smithfield, now in a handsome brick home - is the most ethnically diverse in the country. "There's a pretty good chance that anyone who walks past here at any given moment is actually a refugee," he says, sipping on Vietnamese soup in an arcade near his electorate office in Fairfield West. As if on cue, a group of Sudanese school kids walks past and give Bowen a wave. "Most of those people would have very strong pro-border protection views. They say 'No, no. Australia should take more refugees but there's a right way to do it...We want to have a clear strong system'."

Bowen buys into the notion of the culture wars. Wealthy, inner city elites who harangue him about the treatment of asylum seekers have different values to those in the suburban sprawl, he reckons. "People here have a very clear moral compass. It's pro-refugee and pro-border protection." As well as Switzer, Bowen is friends with former NSW Liberal leader John Brogden. John Howard is said to be an admirer, rating him the most impressive performer on the Labor side. Some have even compared Bowen to Australia's second longest serving prime minister. Switzer, for one, says Bowen's voracious and wide reading, as well as his temperament, reminds him of Howard. He's gone so far as to cheekily claim Bowen - a creature of the ALP since he was a pimply teen with braces - is in the wrong party. Bowen demurs and cites the founding father of liberalism John Stuart Mill's remark that governments "cannot have too much of the kind of activity [that] aids and stimulates individual exertion and development". "The big L Liberal Party doesn't get the [need for] investment in people so they can grow to their potential." This investment, he says, must go beyond basic notions of equality of opportunity. "We have to have equality of opportunity, sure. But if equality of opportunity is still leading to massive distortions in society, then the community has to step in," he says. "Just because you live in an area of low income doesn't mean you should put up with crap urban amenities."

It could be the young Bowen talking here – the one who lobbied councillors for better garbage bins, writing letters from his bedroom in the family fibro home. It was a time when, according to Irene Buckler, a former teacher of his at Smithfield Primary, the "exceptionally mature" youngster proclaimed he was going to be prime minister one day. Bowen says he can't remember making the comment, although sheepishly acknowledges it's possible he did. So what are his leadership ambitions now? As we travel in the back of his car from Fairfield to Sydney on the motorway, Bowen stares out the window as he carefully composes his answer. "It would be disingenuous if I said it hadn't entered my mind or there's no circumstances I wouldn't accept it," he says. "But, having said that, my preferred position is I would retire very happily from politics having been a long term, successful treasurer never having needed to lead the party."