Bill Shorten: the man in the machine

He is the master of a small room. This is a boardroom in a Sydney warehouse, where an outfit called BlueChilli aims to turn start-ups into businesses. It's as elegant as all get-out. Everyone is young. They're in a rush to go places even when they're standing still. Shorten is shown around: bare brick, coffee machines and whiteboards. He says: "Where's the ping-pong table?" The language around the table is 21st century, but the ask is as old as time: these tyro entrepreneurs want government help.

Shorten is a convincing listener. His questions are sharp: "How does it make money?" When the jargon becomes opaque he calls for a translation. "Unicorns?" The one-in-a-million success. "Moon shoot?" The vision that electrifies a community. This idea seems to give him pause. He commits not a cent in that half hour, but farewells a happy room. "I promise we'll have a good policy, because you'll help to write it."

Shorten has been two years in the job. The mathematics were daunting when he began. In 2013, Labor suffered its worst federal election defeat since the Depression. Rudd saved the party maybe 15 seats, but Shorten needs another 22 to govern. There were good reasons for him not to seek the leadership. He was young. He had time. The Australian people barely knew him. And he knows how bleak the outlook is for leaders who take over once their party has been thrown out of office. A Labor veteran says: "It's especially hard to lead in the first term after you've been in government. Your record is going to be flung back at you every day."

But the man who had for so long said he wanted to be leader could not back away. On the Thursday after Rudd's defeat, Shorten called a press conference to confirm rumours he would be standing. The field was clearer than it might have been: Greg Combet was ill and had left parliament. Chris Bowen, only 40, was willing to bide his time. But next day the Left's Anthony Albanese entered the contest. He was the favourite. A senior figure on the Right told Phil Coorey of The Australian Financial Review: "Bill will get slaughtered."

Bill Shorten with his second wife Chloe, whom he married in 2009. Credit: Simon Schluter

To the commentators' surprise, Shorten won the set-piece debates comfortably. His opponent had stinging one-liners, but Shorten found passion: "If I was to be PM, I would like to be known as the PM for the powerless, for the disempowered, for people who don't have a voice in society."

Albanese won 18,230 rank-and-file votes. Shorten collected only 12,196, but had the numbers in caucus. "They broke arms and legs to lock in the vote for Shorten," said one veteran MP. The factions were still in disarray after Julia Gillard's sacking, but the Right came together to back Shorten. A handful of Left MPs also drifted across to give him a big majority. His 64 per cent of the caucus outweighed Albanese's 60 per cent of the rank and file. There was no huge enthusiasm for him in the party. He was not seen as a miracle worker. But he was bricked in to the job. Yet his response to victory was drab. He barely celebrated. He seemed to shrink. Something had happened.

On the September day he nominated for the leadership, a woman known as Kathy posted a message on Kevin Rudd's Facebook page, beneath his farewell message to the nation. She said Shorten "did things to me without my permission" at a camp in Portarlington in Victoria 27 years earlier. "You probably get crazy messages all the time," she wrote, "but I need help. Thank you again for everything and I am sorry that the ALP did this to you, too."

The cartoonist Larry Pickering published her story on the net. Her allegations were detailed: she was 16, Shorten was 19, and a great deal of booze and some dope were involved the night she said he raped her in the bathroom of one of the cabins. She told Pickering she complained twice to the police: once in NSW in 2004, and again in Queensland in 2006 after she saw Shorten on television at the site of the Beaconsfield mine collapse. She abandoned both complaints.

Shorten has been two years in the job. The mathematics were daunting when he began.Credit: James Brickwood

Pickering believed her but was frank about her confusion and distress: "I assisted Kathy to her car and returned to my cramped office wondering how different Kathy's life might have been if Bill Shorten had never been born. To be honest, I'm not certain it would have been."

The rape allegation was there all through the leadership contest and would remain unresolved for the first year of Shorten's leadership. In the bifurcated world of the modern media, he was named everywhere on the net but nowhere in the press. The Coalition showed remarkable tact. Shorten engaged one of Australia's smartest lawyers, Leon Zwier of Arnold Bloch Leibler, who issued blunt denials in November 2013 after The Australian published the first, careful story about "a senior Labor figure" accused of rape: "Lawyers for the man said last night the 'unsubstantiated claims date back almost 30 years and they have never previously been raised with him. The unsubstantiated claims are absolutely without foundation and are distressing for his family and for him,' the lawyers said. 'He strongly denies any wrongdoing and will fully co-operate with any investigation.' "

Shorten is tough. His eagerness and charm mask this, but those who have worked with him over the years agree he is exceptionally resilient. But the rape allegation crushed him just as he was coming to grips with his new role. He had not, until this time, been a big figure in Labor's national affairs. He had a great deal to call on – his native skill as a recruiter, his talent for healing wounded institutions, his genius with numbers – but he also had a great deal to learn. Any leader comes to office with debts. Yet a lifetime of faction plays meant he had to feel his way forward with particular care. Shorten owed so much to so many. He aged. Something of his old panache disappeared. And in April 2014, his mother suddenly died.

"I feel loss, and I feel I do not know when I will not feel loss," he said at her funeral a week later. His dedication to his mother was profound. All his life he has explained himself by talking about Ann McGrath – never his father, who had disappeared from their lives even before he abandoned his marriage when the boys were in their late teens. The son admits despising him.

Shorten is one of that interesting pack of politicians born of determined mothers and largely absent fathers. There are so many: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are distinguished alumni. Among the qualities these men share are self-discipline, boundless ambition and an appetite for approval on a national scale.

The funeral at Melbourne's Xavier College was a great gathering of family, academics and Labor leaders. Shorten was stricken. Ann had raised her twin sons to be liked and to win. When he has to choose, Bill opts for winning but the tension between him and Robert is old and deep. It leaves him hungry for reassurance. So many stories are told about Shorten the union official, the cabinet minister and the leader of the party asking: "How did I go?" He still wears the face his mother gave him, the face of a boy who wants to be liked. It's a charming mask that hides too much for his own good. This man would be more respected if, like Hawke, Keating and Howard, he let us see the bastard that's in there. Instead, the rough edges are politely hidden.

"She believed in merit," Shorten said at the funeral. "She taught me that merit is a legitimate human condition. That people should not be deified because of some ill-defined birth right or the wealth of an individual."

After 10 months' investigation and on advice from the Office of Public Prosecutions, the Victorian police decided not to lay charges: "There was no reasonable prospect of conviction." The Australian broke the story on August 21 under the headline "Labor figure cleared in rape case." That afternoon, Shorten held a press conference to identify himself as the accused Labor figure: "I fully co-operated to clear my name. And that is what I have done … the police have now concluded the investigation. The decision speaks for itself. It is over …"

Shorten's colleagues rallied around him. In October, Kathy engaged Melbourne QC Peter Faris and there was talk of her bringing a civil suit. That has not materialised and Shorten believes there is no prospect it will.

Abbott chose to fight Shorten on trust. Ipsos, Newspoll and Essential all agreed that Australians found the Labor leader a great deal more understanding than his opponent, far more broad-minded, steadier and a deeper thinker. But they distrusted him almost as much as they distrusted the prime minister. In Question Time in late August 2015 Abbott let rip: "That smirking phoney over there, that assassin, the two-time Sussex Street assassin … Twice this Leader of the Opposition led the Sussex Street death squads to assassinate politically two prime ministers … That is this person who now seeks the trust of the Australian people at the next election."

Though uncertain about both men, Australia was positive about the party they preferred to govern the country. From the moment of the Coalition's 2013 victory there crept over the nation what the pollster Andrew Catsaras calls "a sombre mood of buyer's remorse". Regret and disillusionment coloured the country's politics under Abbott. Nearly every poll from late 2013 showed Australia ready to go back to Labor. That verdict was Shorten's principal political asset.

In the winter of 2015, I had coffee with him in a Sydney cafe. He has a sweet tooth and a little gut to match. He jogs, and he shows me an app that records his laps round Canberra's parliamentary triangle. He's fitter now than he seems in old footage of his union days and reckons he's beaten Abbott once or twice on fun runs. The idea pleases him. But he wants a serious word: "If your yarn is about Bill Shorten the factional operator, I don't think that really captures what's going on. It's part of my history I've worked through. But you know, the games are not worth doing if they're just for the sake of the games."

Shorten is still a player. The Stability Pact – conceived in 2009 as a way to prevent factional warring – nearly came apart at Gillard's execution. Shorten was punished. All of his picks for parliamentary real estate in the 2013 election were foiled. Gillard's seat he wanted to go to Labor identity Andrew Landeryou's wife, Kimberley Kitching. Gillard blocked that. He then tried to put Kitching into the Senate. Conroy blocked that. His candidate for Simon Crean's old seat lost out when both Conroy and the National Union of Workers sided against him.

Since that time, Shorten and Conroy have made up. These days it's more a marriage of convenience, but the ShortCons – the name they gave to their sub-faction – are back in action. The Stability Pact is tightening its grip on the factions. They are as quiet as they have been in living memory – too quiet, according to Labor veterans who mourn the loss of creative friction inside the party. And the numbers games go on, more ferociously than ever as party membership and union membership dwindle.

He says he's grown. "I've learnt along the way. I'm a different person at 48 than I was at 28 and certainly different to who I was at 18." So what does he know now that he didn't know then? "First, you've got to back yourself in. You don't wait for everyone else to agree, because that's not the way of progress. Second, I always ask myself: what will this look like in 10 years' time?"

It is surprising how often he cites military rather than political thinkers. He tells me he admires John Monash for carrying out such meticulous preparation before every attack on the Western Front. But Napoleon is his hero and over coffee he once again cites the Corsican's maxim: find your enemy's weakest point and concentrate your attack there. At the time, that was Tony Abbott. Yet the question hanging over Shorten was whether he had, in fact, taken the fight up to Abbott. In the rolling catastrophe of the Coalition government, most of the damage done to the prime minister has been self-inflicted. Another of Napoleon's maxims comes to mind: never interfere with an enemy in the process of destroying himself.

Shorten is by instinct a dealmaker. This explains a good deal of the difficulty he faces cutting through as Leader of the Opposition. His critics say he settles soft. If the top job is ever his, being a fine networker, recruiter and dealmaker will stand him in great stead. But getting there is a different matter. A Leader of the Opposition's task is to cultivate division. Abbott proved a genius at that. But Shorten struggles often to subdue the agreement demon in his nature.

He has defined differences between the sides. He has defended Medicare, pensioners, the unemployed and university students. He is a republican who backs equal marriage. And Labor under Shorten has pledged to continue the fight against climate change: "We are not sceptics. We believe in the science."

But where Abbott was most himself, Shorten beat a retreat. "For Labor, national security is – and always will be – above politics," he says, but what he means is that Labor will buckle whenever the government declares security is at stake. What will it look like in 10 years' time, I ask, that Labor passed a law to throw doctors and nurses in prison for reporting what they see on Manus and Nauru? "We will stand by them," he replies indignantly. But Labor voted for the Border Force Act and that's exactly what it does. "I don't share that interpretation." This is utterly baffling. Once dragged into court, nurses and social workers may have some whistleblower protection but Labor voted to drag them there. Labor has voted for secrecy. Shorten has no idea how the camps will be cleared. He acknowledges that endorsing pushbacks at the National Conference in July 2015 was only the latest in a long line of catch-ups with the Coalition's refugee policies.

Weeks later, a wave of mockery compelled the Australian Border Force to abandon Operation Fortitude – a plan to send its gorgeously uniformed officers out to check the visa status of "any individual we cross paths with" in the streets of Melbourne. Did Shorten speak for the nation when he heard about this scheme? No, he spoke for a party terrified of the wedge. "If you're going to do a blitz," he said solemnly, "I don't know why you'd necessarily telegraph it to the media first."

Demonstrators rallied at Flinders Street station, and within a couple of hours Operation Fortitude was canned. Only then did Shorten find his voice to condemn "one of the most catastrophically silly ideas I've seen this government do … I don't think there's a single Victorian and indeed a single Australian whose jaw just didn't hit the ground … truly, how dumb is this government some days?" Once he was safe, he was magnificent. n

Edited extract from Faction Man by David Marr, published by Black Inc. this week, $23