Is the fact that Bill Shorten is the leader of the federal parliamentary Labor party a cause, or merely a symptom of its problems?

On the one hand, he’s currently even less popular than his adversary, who is the least popular prime minister in recent political history. It’s fair to assume that this is dragging the party’s numbers down a little. He’s far less popular than Kevin Rudd was when Shorten helped drag him down on the grounds that he couldn’t win the coming election.

This unpopularity may be in part because he’s the least fluent and inspiring orator and performer to lead either major party in my memory (I’ve looked over the old Simon Crean videos, and I promise you that Mr Zinger is worse).

Or it may be because he’s an archetypal apparatchik, and it increasingly looks like there’s nothing more to him. Apart from a brief stint at a Labor law firm, he’s never had a job outside a union or the ALP. Since he was a teenager, his life has been devoted to the grind of the labour movement’s internal politics; of union versus union, faction versus faction.

Ever since he came up directly against an adversary who he could not undermine from within, he’s looked out of his depth. His attempts to connect with voters are so strained and unconvincing perhaps because he is the product of a rarefied world, sufficient unto itself, with few and diminishing links to the ordinary lives and values of those he seeks to represent.

The single-minded focus required to climb the ALP’s greasy career pole means that he hasn’t done much else. Unlike Rudd or even Abbott, he’s never lived or studied in another country. The only recent Labor leader with a comparably narrow range of life experience was Mark Latham, who at least found time to write a couple of books. If Shorten wrote one, what could it possibly contain, and who would read it?

This brings us to the question of whether Shorten’s promotion, and subsequent slow-motion failure as a leader is attributable to his own weakness, or to his immersion in the culture of Labor’s movers and shakers. For while the branches may still be home to salt-of-the-earth-activists, the insight into the federal parliamentary Labor party offered by the ABC’s The Killing Season is horrifying, particularly for those like me who voted for them during that period.

What’s most shocking is not the cascade of personal and political betrayals, and the easy contempt for democratic processes, but bearing witness to a milieu completely preoccupied with itself and its own dynamics. The internal mechanisms with which Rudd was removed – partially set in train by Shorten – are refined, precise and efficient. But political professionals with such a mastery of caucus numbers and such a close understanding of factional balances apparently did not foresee that this would be the undoing of the government.

Is it because the outside world only rarely intrudes on the soap opera? Certainly, those interviewed for the documentary were heavily preoccupied with mediated representations of politics itself, and the pre-digested results of private polling and focus group summaries. In a party and a movement which is less and less representative of the broader society in which it finds itself, the public becomes a matter of abstraction.

In this hermetic context, in a culture that treats politics as a kind of real time strategy game, Shorten apparently felt justified in offing a first-term prime minister because failing to do so would have a short-term impact on his own career prospects. And he seems to have pursued the leadership and to be pursuing the prime ministership in the same spirit – with no broader or deeper moral and political purpose than self-aggrandisement, or none, at any rate, that he can convincingly articulate.

Firm allegedly paid Bill Shorten's AWU to ensure workers 'didn't disrupt' operations Read more

The chicken-and-egg question we began with is partly prompted by developments that have made Shorten seem worse than merely ineffectual. The Fairfax coverage this week about his days as an AWU boss are particularly damaging. If the allegations are true, he made deals that effectively eroded workers’ conditions while accepting large donations from employer groups. He also engaged in the practice of allowing companies to pay their workers’ AWU dues.

It’s not a story, or a form of leadership, that is particularly inspirational. Indeed we’re yet to hear an articulation of values that exceeds the desire to replace Abbott. Like the long line of Labor right politicians before him, Shorten would no doubt see this as a species of electoral pragmatism. But from outside the bubble it looks dangerous: in the absence of some modicum of progressive hope, something that marks them out from the tories, what are Labor governments and Labor leaders for?



Labor and Shorten know how vulnerable they are on “boats” and national security. They know that, despite current two party preferred polling, Abbott will campaign on these issues, and that he will likely win, despite running a largely incompetent government.

A bolder strain of progressive politics might try changing the national conversation, and reconstituting it around hot button issues like intergenerational equity, climate change, and health and aged care. Shorten doesn’t appear to have that capacity. Does anybody else in the federal Labor party?