Paul Sheehan Sydney Morning Herald columnist
March 11, 2013
''The Prime Minister, Bill Shorten, said yesterday.'' This is a phrase that we should at least be prepared for. It could become common.
While Gillard would never step aside for Rudd, it is credible to conclude she would consider doing so for Shorten.
The media's obsession with Kevin Rudd may be missing the point. Shorten may be the better bet. Tony Abbott and his staff are already war-gaming the possibility of facing Shorten, not Gillard or Rudd, as prime minister at this year's election.
Illustration: michaelmucci.com
This column has been scornful of the incessant, poll-driven leadership speculation by the media, but at the weekend there was a real poll, an important state election, which delivered another hammer-blow to Labor's credibility.
Since Julia Gillard was returned to power after the 2010 federal election campaign - thanks to the two MPs whose electorates recorded the lowest Labor vote in the nation, Tony Windsor and Robert Oakeshott - Labor has lost the Victorian state election in 2010, been massacred in NSW in 2011, massacred again in Queensland in 2012, and now massacred once more in Western Australia in 2013.
This is a rolling series of broadsides delivered at Labor's credibility by the states that make up 95 per cent of the national economy.
With three-quarters of the WA vote counted, the Coalition was re-elected with a swing of 8.8 per cent to the Liberals. The two-party preferred vote was a resounding 57.5 per cent to 42.5 per cent vote against Labor, close to the result predicted in the final poll. The Coalition is projected to have 40 seats in the lower house and Labor just 19. The Greens were decimated. They won just 7.9 per cent of the vote.
Such is the unpopularity of the Gillard government's carbon tax and mining tax, and its deals favouring militant unions, the Prime Minister was not even invited to Western Australia to bring the gravitas of her office to the election campaign.
In contrast, Abbott was invited by the WA Liberals to their campaign launch.
It did not get much better when the Prime Minister campaigned in western Sydney last week. If the public buffeting her class warfare received is reflected in the next set of polling numbers, a pall will have fallen over her leadership that will be difficult to remove.
Even though Gillard is ahead of where Kim Beazley, Simon Crean and Mark Latham were in public opinion polls before they were deposed as Labor leaders, if she falls any further it will finally be time to treat the poll numbers as a prelude to panic.
Which brings us to the Minister for Unions, aka the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations and Minister for Financial Services and Superannuation, William Richard ''Bill'' Shorten.
While Gillard would never step aside for Rudd, it is credible to conclude she would consider doing so for Shorten.
He was a key supporter in her push for the leadership. He has been her most supportive cabinet minister. They share intimate links with the troubled Australian Workers Union, where Shorten was national secretary for six years before being elected to Parliament.
Such is the private loathing of Rudd within the majority of the Gillard government, and such was the public scorn poured onto his leadership by some of his own former cabinet colleagues, Rudd still has too few numbers in caucus and too much baggage to carry into an election, whatever the polls say now.
As for Shorten's own behaviour lately, he has been manic. Privately, he has been counting heads. Publicly, he has been seeking to mobilise both the left and the right of the union base, the 18 per cent of the workforce given such priority by the federal government.
In recent weeks Shorten has given a speech to AWU members in which he said he carries his AWU card around Parliament House as a source of inspiration, and delivered a speech to a ''militancy conference'' of the Maritime Union of Australia, which is about to embark on negotiations involving a massive stream of resource projects.
At the conference the union's WA secretary Chris Cain said MUA members should be willing to ''break the law'' if necessary to achieve the union's goals. Shorten said not one word to distance himself from Cain's comments.
Several months ago, Shorten was rebuked by a High Court judge, Dyson Heydon, after he intervened in a High Court case, Barclay v Bendigo TAFE, in support of a union official, a ministerial intervention that Justice Heydon described as ''partisan''.
The list of advantages handed to the unions by the Gillard-Shorten combination is now long and, in some cases, inflammatory. No action has been more dubious than the accommodations they have made on behalf of the corruption-tainted, blackmail-prone and violence-riddled Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union.
The CFMEU is to Australian politics what bikie gangs are to Australian culture, yet it has never had stronger support from a federal government. At the bidding of the CFMEU, and the Greens, the Gillard government abolished the Australian Building and Construction Commission, the effective cop on the beat in this industry.
Under Gillard and Shorten, unions have gained expanded right of entry to workplaces. They have won the right to forced arbitration, despite an express commitment that this would not happen. They have created a Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal at the bidding of the Transport Workers Union. They have brought in the Fair Entitlements Guarantee Bill at the request of the Australian Council of Trade Unions. They have stacked the Fair Work Commission with more union-approved appointments. They have legislated to classify outworkers in the textile, clothing and footwear sector as employees at the urging of the unions. And the promised reform of union governance turned into a predictable charade.
If I were betting on who will lead Labor into this year's election, I would still be putting my money on Gillard. But if Labor does panic and decide, yet again, to change leaders, watch for the Prime Minister's little mate to make the key move.
