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With voters Down Under poised to take a left turn, Chris McLaughlin profiles Bill Shorten, one of Labor’s ‘new bloods’

IN JUST under two weeks, Australian voters go to the polls to decide whether, after almost 15 years of right-wing conservative rule, they want change. The Labor Party is poised to bring a crushing end to Prime Minister John Howard’s hopes of a fifth successive electoral term for his Liberal Party, with opinion polls showing the clearest lead for Labor in 30 years.

With a booming economy, record low employment and a general “feel-good” factor buoying up the mood of the younger, middle-class affluent urban voters, Labor leader Kevin Rudd has been accused of trimming his party’s policies to avoid scaring an electorate that wants to keep the good times rolling but with a different, younger, leadership.

Rudd wants to cash in on the desire for change while promising to keep the economy strong, leading to criticisms in his party that policies have been watered down, not least on Howard’s restrictive employment laws.

Parallels have been drawn with pre-Gordon Brown Britain. With the polls tumbling away from him and paying the electoral price – although to a much lesser extent than Tony Blair – for sending troops into Iraq, Howard, 68, refused to hand over to his younger deputy, Peter Costello, before calling the general election in mid-October. He was forced instead to say that he would stand aside halfway through the next term. Voters do not seem impressed and Howard has resorted to scare tactics, warning that 70 per cent of Labor’s candidates on November 24 will be former trade union officials and therefore a de facto threat to any economic stability.
Contrarily, Rudd, a boyish-blond, good-looking 50-year-old former diplomat, leads a party which regards this reach into the country’s wider working community as one of its greatest assets in the shaping of a new Australia, looking to a future that will sustain prosperity without leaving behind the elderly, manufacturing and low-paid workers, poor families, public sector workers, rural workers and trade unionists.

Bill Shorten, the 40-year-old national secretary of the Australian Workers’ Union is one of the charismatic champions of this new Labor vision. Looking more like Donny Osmond than Arthur Scargill, Shorten is one of the “new bloods” standing at the election following a cull of old-guard Canberra MPs who were seen as partially to blame for Labor’s successive failure to win national power because of diversionary “faction fighting” about the direction the party should take.

Shorten, who spoke to Tribune during a recent visit to London for talks with Community general secretary Michael Leahy and his colleagues, is one of the leading modernisers in Victoria, which has come to be seen as the engine house and vanguard of new Labor in Australia. Earlier this year, delivering the keynote speech to the AWU’s biennial national conference dinner, Shorten called on Bob Dylan’s 1960s anthem, The Times They Are A-Changin’, as a theme for his vision of the demographic, economic and social changes that are confronting Australia, if not all developed Western societies.

“Changing times demand new ideas and new energy”, he told an audience which recognised future Cabinet material when they saw it. “They demand new ways of thinking and doing things. And they demand new responses and directions from governments, businesses and unions.”

An arts and law graduate from Melbourne, Shorten began his trade union career as an organiser with the Victorian branch of the AWU, the country’s oldest and most diverse union, with 33 offices across non-metropolitan Australia, representing workers in industries including oil, gas, steel workers, fruit pickers and jockeys. After election as Victorian branch secretary in 1998, Shorten reformed the union’s internal structure following its earlier amalgamation with the Federated Ironworkers Association. Spearheading a recruitment drive in the steel, aluminium, glass, public sector, manufacturing and aviation industries, he saw annual membership in Victoria rose by 27 per cent, against a background of national membership shrinkage. Shorten then moved on to lead the fight against Howard’s workplace laws, which are a key battleground in the election.

In the run-up to the selection process for the election, more than two years ago, Shorten faced repeated questions over his alleged involvement about a “hit list” of old guard MPs who faced displacement under the “new blood” putsch. “Clearly”, he said in one television interview, “after four election losses, there should be an opportunity to perhaps take some people off the bench and give them an opportunity to play on the field. That’s important. But I think some of the talk of these sort of ‘blood on the wall’ selections is completely over-hyped.”

Shorten goes into the election as the candidate for one of those contested seats, in Maribyrnong, in Victoria. Although he epitomises the appeal which Labor wants to get across if it is to win a change of government in a comfortable economic climate, Shorten – unlike the modernisers who forged “new” Labour in Britain – underlines the importance of trade union values, from the Tolpuddle Martyrs to the present day.

“The values which motivated those men, and led to their transportation to Australia, are still relevant because we cannot have a successful society in which working people are exploited or left behind. Unions are involved, not just in the defence of working people, but also in the broad pattern of society and opportunities for all.
“That also means adapting to change, accepting the reality that there may be no such thing as a job for life anymore. But instead of throwing people onto the scrapheap, we need – and the unions are in the forefront of this – to manage life transitions, to help people cope with what once may have been a life-changing trauma from which they never recover.

“It means moving away from our current culture of overwork and finding better, more innovative ways to balance our work, family and recreational lives. That means rejecting approaches that give Australian workers less job security, lower pay, longer hours and no capacity to take leave to care for a sick child or relative.
“The Howard government’s determination to stretch productivity across much longer working lifetimes makes very little sense from a long-term perspective: economic, social, personal, family or business. As we live longer lives, we don’t need that sort of outdated approach to industrial relations.

“There is not much point in living longer if we are constantly fearful – as many working families are in the United States – of being just one personal catastrophe away from falling into poverty and unemployment. That’s why public investments such as Medicare and our public hospital system and a decent social security system are so important. They are absolutely critical elements of Australia’s social capital.”

Shorten’s advocacy of a more “holistic” society, in which unions have a role in the protection of employment rights at the start of a working life to the management of pension funds at the retirement end, is aimed at an electorate which shows signs of tiring with what it sees as Howard’s backward-looking, narrow and reactionary approach to life. As long as their “never-had-it-so good” economy is not threatened, voters feel they can risk moving on with a party more in keeping with its own self-image.

Shorten’s official union website biography reveals that: “Bill shares his life with his wife, Debbie Beale.” A minor detail, but one which speaks volumes about the gap between the new Labor appeal and the rough, tough, self-starting, macho-kind-of-guy in a digger hat represented by Howard.

Shorten also believes that Howard and his party have failed to keep up with public concern over global warming and, with China in the same Pacific economic neighbourhood, the effects of globalisation.

“Howard has shown no sign of wanting to recognise global warming as an issue”, he said. “Globalisation is a fact of life but that does not mean that its effects should not be managed rather than surrendering all aspects of the economy.”

In what has yet to gain traction as a credible, rather than a desperate, move, Howard has promised tax cuts if he wins. Rudd has promised a staged withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq.

Labor needs to win 16 seats in the 150-member House of Representatives to take office – a daunting challenge, in spite of its poll lead. The result depends on voters who want to see change – but not too much.