James Campbell: Bill Shorten’s empty words do the trick

BILL Shorten’s opportunism and evasive tactics might be shameless but it’s hard not to admire his political skill, writes James Campbell.

BILL Shorten might have many shortcomings as a politician but he certainly knows how to twist the knife into his political opponents.

For weeks now, as the evidence of malfeasance has mounted at the banking royal commission, the Labor leader has looked like the cat that got the cream as the government squirms.

On Monday, as the news broke that AMP chair Catherine Brenner had fallen on her sword, he dialled it up. Asked if Brenner had taken too long to quit and if others should follow her example, the Opposition Leader answered: “Well, I think it would be a scandal if the people at the top end of AMP leave with millions of dollars in shareholder money in the form of golden handshakes.”

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A scandal it might well be, but capitalism being what it is, AMP is a corporation that can pay its board and executives what it damn well likes. It really has nothing to do with Shorten — or the Prime Minister — as well he knows.

But that didn’t stop him continuing: “I’m calling upon Mr Turnbull to exert some moral leadership.

“There’s no way after what we’ve heard in the royal commission that millions of dollars of shareholder money should be handed out in the form of golden handshakes to disgraced executives leaving as a result of these scandals.”

Not that he was actually calling on Turnbull to regulate golden handshakes, mind you. That would be difficult, if for no other reason than it would oblige him to have a policy to do something similar.

Instead, he was just calling on the PM to “set the tone”.

Setting the tone is exactly what Shorten has been doing for years.

He might be shameless, and so many of his statements amount to the political equivalent of the empty calories nutritionists warn us about, but you can’t deny he’s effective. He was at it again on Wednesday when he was asked whether he could live off $40 a day.

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For weeks now, as evidence of malfeasance has mounted at the banking royal commission, Labor leader Bill Shorten has looked like the cat that got the cream.

“No,” he answered “I couldn’t and I do think that there’s a real problem for the government payments to people at the very bottom of our society.”

So will Labor increase the dole and if so by how much?

Shorten’s not saying — just that if he comes to office, he will have “a root and branch review of our government’s payment system on Newstart and like-minded allowances and payments”.

Shorten was at a Catholic primary school in Drummoyne in Sydney to accuse the Turnbull Government of cutting $30 million of funding from schools in the electorate of Reid, part of the $17 billion he accuses the government of cutting from the nation’s schools.

In fact, the Turnbull Government is increasing funding to schools — stupidly, in my opinion, as there is little evidence from the past few years that more money means better educated children — just not increasing it by as much as Labor says it would do.

It should go without saying, of course, that a smaller increase is not a cut, but Shorten has been repeating the claim for months with no sign government ministers are going to land a glove on him any time soon.

Indeed, they can’t seem to help playing into his hands as they did in the matter of the now-abandoned Medicare levy increase.

For years, the government has been arguing that the Gillard and Rudd governments left the NDIS chronically underfunded when they departed office. Indeed, they’ve produced quite a lot of evidence to back up that claim. Labor’s response has been to close its eyes, stick its fingers in its ears and shout, “Not true! Not true!”

Bill Shorten was asked about Liberal Senator Linda Reynolds’ proposal that there should be a referendum to change Section 44 of the Constitution. Picture: AAP

The black hole in NDIS funding, should, like the NBN fiasco, be something Liberals could hang around Labor’s neck for a decade. When Scott Morrison announced the government was dropping the Medicare levy increase because things are now so great there’s so much money we can pay for the NDIS after all, Labor was able to claim “see, we told you it was a lie”.

Again, it’s shameless but it seems to be working.

WATCHING Shorten on Wednesday, it was hard not admire him changing the subject whenever the conversation turned to something he didn’t want to talk about.

At one point, he was asked about the Liberal Senator Linda Reynolds’ proposal that there should be a referendum to change Section 44 of the Constitution, which lists the grounds for disqualification on who may become a candidate for parliament.

Changing Section 44 is going to be very hard. Shorten knows that so he answered thus: “I want to just say that I think Liberal Senator Reynolds has pointed to a real problem in the Constitution. She makes the point that this rule doesn’t exist in other comparable First-World countries.

“If we were drafting the Constitution today, which obviously we can’t, if we were doing it from scratch, you probably wouldn’t have this particular restriction which is in place.”

So Shorten will be supporting a change then? Unclear.

“I have to say that when it comes to updating our Constitution, my first priorities are to recognise our First Australians in the nation’s birth certificate, to give a voice which would allow Aboriginal Australians to have some say in the decisions made about them,” he said.

Ignore for a second the fact Aboriginal Australians already have some say in the decisions made about them — through the ballot box as everyone else does — and admire the shameless slipperiness of the next prime minister of Australia.

James Campbell is national politics editor

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