Tony Wright National affairs editor of The Age
June 12, 2013
Responsibilities: Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten could be the saviour the ALP are searching for as members hope to retain some of its power. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
It is a measure of the Labor Party's current desperation that a single minister, Bill Shorten, has emerged as an emblematic figure supposedly invested with almost super powers.
If Shorten shifts his support from Julia Gillard, as the headlines and the barely muted whispers go, then her grasp on the prime ministerial chair will be gone.
It is as if he is being considered a latter-day senator Graham Richardson, the old powerbroker from the Hawke era who is credited with orchestrating much of the unpleasantness that ended in Paul Keating wresting power from Hawke in 1991.
The differences between Richardson and Shorten, in fact - like those between Hawke and Gillard; Keating and Rudd - could hardly be starker.
Shorten may have been the most high-profile of the so-called ''faceless men'' who engineered the end of Kevin Rudd's prime ministership in 2010, but unlike Richardson, he is burdened with his own ambitions for becoming a future Labor leader.
He has none of the ''whatever it takes'' wild luxury of a Richardson to cause endless mischief: he has a reputation to foster for the future.
Furthermore, while Richardson was one of Keating's tightest mates in those long-gone days (a brotherhood fractured utterly a bit later), Shorten has no love at all for Kevin Rudd.
He has spent the past three years pledging his support for Ms Gillard, the Prime Minister he helped make, and he is still publicly pledging it.
To now reverse his position in aid of a Rudd return might stamp him indelibly as a ruthless turncoat - hardly handy on the CV of a man with a view to leadership himself.
So what the hell is going on?
It's relatively simple. Labor MPs are searching for anyone who they imagine might have the authority and the number of allies to save at least some of them.
Shorten is seen as fulfilling these qualities, plus he is from Victoria, Gillard's own state.
Those trying to twist his arm are proposing a reverse argument to that of potential turncoat: if he does not step up, he will be blamed for lacking the fortitude to assist the party when it most needed it, should Gillard lead Labor over an electoral cliff in September. Also not good for the CV.
He is, thus, in an unenviable position; damned if he does, damned if he doesn't.
The catalyst for this devil's choice is recent internal Labor polling, and more from the ACTU, that has ignited fear and loathing in the breasts of ALP members and senators across the country.
An almost bearable resignation had settled across the party for many months about its loss of support in NSW and Queensland, where Labor voters had never forgiven the party for tossing aside one of their own, Kevin Rudd, for a southerner, Julia Gillard.
Labor MPs and the union movement knew it was serious - and in Western Australia, too - but they had little idea of the scale of the catastrophe down south until internal polling and research undertaken by the ACTU in Victoria began returning figures in the past couple of weeks that flabbergasted the most hardened.
The definition of a marginal seat had to be rewritten. Electorates on what might normally be considered comfortable margins of 8-10 per cent were suddenly facing wipe-outs, according to those professing to be in the know. There was barely a Labor seat in outer-metropolitan Melbourne or an industrial or migrant-dominated area the ALP could be sure of holding.
More polling showed South Australia had joined the rush, with the likelihood of the Labor Party losing almost two-thirds of its 11 seats.
Victoria and South Australia were supposed to be relatively reliable Labor strongholds. Further south, all Tasmania's five seats were considered in great jeopardy.
Thus, when Kevin Rudd journeyed to Geelong, an industrial city with two ALP seats facing disaster and was mobbed by voters crying ''come back Kevin'', the TV cameras whirring, lightbulbs began blinking among panicked Labor MPs.
They needed someone, somewhere, to do something. Quick. In the absence of a better idea, the fallback was Shorten, whether he liked it or not. Some of his colleagues, knowing Shorten's own polling figures in his seat of Maribyrnong had taken a big hit, too, sensed he might be up for it.
To this point, however, he's not. Shorten is smart enough to know he alone could not persuade Gillard to blink. It would need a posse of her supporters, or a declaration by an authority like Bob Hawke.
The Labor Party's last desperate throw of the dice is this: how does a federal government persuade itself and voters it is a sensible or even halfway attractive idea to change leaders twice in three years?
The deeper dilemma is even less digestible. The choice is whether to remain deeply unpopular or to hope that the party might emerge from a leadership change as simply less unpopular.
The options, then, are all negative. They are choices that will be made from a position of weakness.
You would very nearly pity Shorten if you were prepared to forget he'd already played the Grim Reaper with another Labor prime minister almost exactly three years ago.
