Bill Shorten: Man of ideas — mainly yours, if they’re any good

If you have any good ideas, Bill Shorten would like to hear them and take credit for them if they come to fruition.

That’s not to say he’ll take the blame if it all goes tits up. Just the acclaim thanks. This is the way the Labor leader operates. To date with all things considered, this approach to clambering up the greasy pole of Australian politics has been stunningly successful.

The early whispers from within the AWU and the Victorian Labor Party was there was a young man with a bright light shining above him. He had a future, a big future.

Some even gushed Bill Shorten was the next Bob Hawke. But it quickly became clear that those who offered this excitable view had never met Bill Shorten, or Bob Hawke.

Shorten entered the federal parliament in the midst of the hysteria that was the Rudd ascendancy. Shorten being Shorten, he expected a junior ministry at least in the Rudd government. Rudd being Rudd, he left Shorten to cool his heels on the backbench for the next two years before throwing him a bone – parliamentary secretary for disability services. One suspects Shorten, accustomed to cavorting on the national stage, initially sniffed the appointment with scepticism as a task below his station.

To his credit he got stuck in, and before you could say National Disability Insurance Scheme, Shorten elbowed his way into the frame, like a photobomber of Australian political history, implying he was the architect of the scheme. Not the unfunded, uncosted bits of it or the mind-numbing bureaucracy attached to it that have necessarily attracted criticism, but the good bits the majority of Australians supported as fair, reasonable and overdue.

I am not engaging in a critical analysis of the NDIS here. My point is Shorten’s MO is selective appropriation. Pick up what works, claim it as your own, dismiss what doesn’t as someone else’s problem.

A year later it was Rudd who was looking for a job, evicted from the Lodge as Shorten stood outside a Manuka Vietnamese restaurant with a mobile phone in each ear. Gillard became Prime Minister, Shorten got a ministry for his trouble and the rest (including how Shorten ditched Gillard and anointed Kevin Rudd’s return as PM for another promotion three years later) is history.

Clambering over the political corpses of one’s colleagues is another one of Shorten’s skills. Take a look around. Is there anyone in the current parliament who hurdles the political dead more deftly than Our Bill? Maybe the Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, could strap the crampons on and give him a run for his money but I’d argue Shorten has climbed higher peaks quicker. His Sir Edmund Hillary to her Sherpa Tensing perhaps.

It is often said the hardest job in politics is leader of the Opposition. I am not quite sure how this truism has come to pass. I imagine being Prime Minister is a damned sight harder and comes with a vastly more onerous set of responsibilities. The so called “hard” part of being Opposition leader is the challenge of making sufficient noise in any given day to get one’s dial on the telly for a three second grab.

I would argue the Turnbull government has made life very easy for Shorten.

The government’s obsession with Shorten is understandable. Their polling continues to tell them a) they are roughly as popular as a syphilis chancre and b) the only thing stopping people from marching into their electoral offices and setting fire to the office furniture is the lingering thought Bill Shorten might be worse.

But like punch drunk fighters Malcolm Turnbull and his senior ministers come out throwing haymakers that rarely land. Talk about your rope-a-dope. They literally can’t utter a sentence into a microphone without mentioning Bill Shorten’s name. We all know why they do this: it’s an attempt at monster creation, a bit of the old fear mongering, as if they are players in a melodrama and the audience is booing and hissing at the mere mention of Bill’s name.

This fails on a number of levels. Firstly, Shorten delights in the attention. Secondly, no one really believes Shorten is a moustache-twirling super villain from central casting. Machiavellian and conspiratorial, yes, but he ain’t no Lex Luthor. Most of all, the “mention Shorten at all costs” tactic fails because the punters expect the government to be talking about government things rather than engaging in tawdry partisan politics.

As an example, midyear, we had the PM and his Minister for Finance duelling insults with Cormann casting Shorten as a Stasi-lovin’ East German communist (which is highly amusing considering Shorten’s Victorian Labor right affiliation) while Turnbull depicted Shorten as the billionaire’s boot boy.

He can be one thing or the other but he can’t be both. So, there’s no consistency of message and, worse, no clear communications strategy.

The so-called dark arts of politics, communications — spin if you like — is really not that dark at all. More often than not it is steeped in common sense. If I was giving the government advice it would be this: spend the Christmas break not mentioning Shorten at all. Make a New Year’s resolution to mention him as little as possible. Let him make his own noise.

And who knows, if ignored for long enough, this weird Labor cat might even disappear.

This column was published at The Australian 2018.