By Tim Dunlop Thursday 12 February 2015

Photo: Bill Shorten's challenge is to start articulating a policy agenda. (AAP: Lukas Coch)

Bill Shorten can no longer rely on a small-target strategy to get him into government - he will need to show he can roll with the times and stay committed to the pillars of Australian civilisation, writes Tim Dunlop.

The diagnosis of what has gone wrong with the Abbott Government has become so obvious that even Bill Shorten is starting to get it.

Until now, Shorten has been running a small-target strategy, keeping his head down and letting the Government destroy itself. And judging by the polls, you would have to say it has been pretty effective.

But I think Shorten has realised that it is no longer enough.

On Monday in Parliament, in the wake of the farcical leadership spill within the Liberal Party, Shorten managed to string together a halfway sensible speech, speaking to a motion of no confidence in the Prime Minister.

Don't get me wrong. Shorten still strikes me as pretty hapless and he is far from an inspiring speaker (his performance during Question Time was horrible), but Tony Abbott's failure has provided him with enough space to stand up in.

That space, for want of a better term, is the political centre, one that is aching to be filled by someone halfway credible. In his speech on Monday, Shorten took his first tentative steps towards establishing that credibility.

Interestingly, he seems to have realised that the alternative to being a small target is not to make himself a big target; rather, it is to speak to some pretty basic concerns the electorate has with the direction of the country.

Of course, it isn't as straightforward as it sounds.

Like any other position on the political spectrum, the "centre" is a set of policy prescriptions that need to be defined and fought for, and Shorten has a long way to go before he can claim to understand and control that middle ground.

Still, Monday's speech suggested that he is at least beginning to grasp the basics:

You are asking what we should do? Do not cut Medicare. Do not wreck the higher education system. Do not touch the pensioners.

Amen to that.

These are the big three, the pillars on which Australian civilisation rests. If anything should be the subject of bipartisanship, it is these, and Abbott's abandonment of them goes a long way to explaining his problems. As Shorten put it:

The fundamental problem in this nation is that the Liberal Party has drifted too far to the right. You no longer represent the mainstream of Australian thinking. In that last budget you ... broke the covenant of trust with the Australian voters.

More importantly, Shorten also made some tentative steps towards developing the bigger picture:

Furthermore, we need to stop the marginalisation of the middle class of Australia. You opened up an attack on the minimum wage in this country. You opened up an attack on the aspiration of Australians to have a decent income. You have abandoned the manufacturing sector in this country.

All of this is important, though what he said barely scratches the surface of what we face as a country.

The marginalisation of the middle class is a problem that is causing ructions throughout the world and few politicians even seem aware of what is at stake. As I argued in this piece, robotics, automation, artificial intelligence and other technological developments are likely to completely alter what we understand by work and what it means to be able to live a decent life.

Indeed, just how close such changes are is highlighted by the fact that the South Australian Government has just announced changes in legislation to allow for the use of driverless cars on SA's roads, and driverless cars are the merest tip of a technological revolution that is coming faster than most of us think.

Simply providing assistance to dying industries, as Shorten implies he wants to do, then, is not going to be nearly enough. Nor will it be enough to continue to push the so-called microeconomic "reform" agenda. As Professor John Quiggin noted the other day:

Everything worthwhile in that agenda was implemented decades ago. What is left are the dregs - policies like privatisation and individual employment contracts - that have failed to deliver improvements in living standards, and on which the Australian public has long since rendered its final, negative verdict.

Shorten is also a long way from articulating a convincing approach to climate change, and that is something any future prime minister is going to have to deal with.

So how do the months before the next election play out?

If Abbott remains leader, he will need to return to the agenda he set in opposition, the one he abandoned, promise by promise, once he was elected. He might be willing to do that (he's nothing if not fickle), but who in their right mind would believe any commitment he gave?

No one trusts Abbott anymore. And as Peter Martin points out in a devastating piece, that lack of trust is damaging the most important part of the Liberal brand, their economic credentials:

Here's what's missing: trust. Not just between Abbott and his backbenchers, but also between Abbott and us. If anything, the leadership contest has made things worse.

As Abbott brought forward the timing of the leadership vote on Sunday, his supporter and finance minister Mathias Cormann told the ABC the economy was "heading in the right direction". He wanted "to build on the achievements we made in 2014".

(But) take a moment to consider the achievements and the direction in which things are heading. That year began with a quarterly rate of economic growth of 1 per cent. After the budget, it slid to 0.5 per cent, and then to 0.3 per cent. It's falling, rather than rising. The direction is down.

Their other choice, then, is to install Malcolm Turnbull, who, despite his last failed stint as leader, at least retains some credibility with the electorate.

But Turnbull's problem is that he will never be reconciled with, or to, key sections of his own party.

Turnbull can certainly get the Coalition over the line at the next election, but the disquiet he causes within the party means that once in government, they would be on track for an even bigger meltdown than we have seen to date, as the factions fight for the soul of the party.

And that is a fight Turnbull and his supporters will lose.

A vote for Turnbull, then, is probably a vote for Scott Morrison because once Turnbull is rolled again, the party will be, by definition, committed to a tea-party-like agenda of unwinding the welfare state and Morrison is the poster-boy for that discipline-and-punish faction.

All this means that Labor increasingly looks like the natural party of government; that is, the one more closely aligned with the majority of voters.

But Shorten can't take that for granted. And he can't just play small-target politics and hope to fall across the line.

Abbott, through his radical and haphazard agenda, has, at least, helped all of us understand better what sort of country we want to live in (spoiler alert: not the one Abbott envisages).

Shorten's challenge, therefore, is to start articulating a policy agenda that not only reassures people about Labor's commitment to the pillars I mentioned above, but shows that he has a plan to deal with what is likely to be a rapid transformation of economic life.

Despite Monday's speech, he is still a long, long way from doing that.

Tim Dunlop is the author of The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience. He writes regularly for The Drum a number of other publications.

Shorten's small-target ploy can't last - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)