‘I’ve evolved from factional operative’: Shorten says retirement is not retreat

Bill Shorten is preparing for departure, taking his last haircut in the Parliament House salon before delivering his valedictory speech on Thursday to the House of Representatives.

“Taking a haircut” is almost as potent in the crueller reaches of parliamentary slang as being kneecapped – something Australia’s voters did to Shorten in 2019, denying him the prime ministership – but he rebuffs any suggestion his looming retirement from parliamentary politics is a retreat.

A big grin for the final haircut before the valedictory speech. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

“I cannot foresee a set of circumstances where I will ever retire,” he says. “I’m a man in my 50s. The choice was to become a lifer in this place [Parliament House] or to try something new.”

“Something new” is his appointment, at 57, as vice-chancellor of the University of Canberra, beginning early next year.

Many parliamentarians who have risen to the heights attained by Shorten, leader of the Labor Party for six years and Cabinet Minister for the past three, could be expected to take a juicy foreign posting. It is understood he was offered Paris or London, though he will not confirm it.

“I didn’t want to go overseas,” he says. “I wanted to be my own boss.”

Shorten says he is proud to have received a message from former Prime Minister Paul Keating after his future at the University of Canberra became known.

Keating told him “good on you for picking a public institution, not a private institution”.

“I didn’t want to be a corporate door-opener, although that’s fine – no judgment about that – but I’m interested in the national interest,” Shorten says. “Perhaps I’m evolving from the day-to-day bickering.”

As he approaches his last week sitting in the federal Parliament, evolution is on his mind.

Bill Shorten says he has evolved from the factional activist of old. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

He appears to have mellowed way beyond the factional warrior who led the late-night coup that unseated Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in 2010 and replaced him with Julia Gillard, and who then famously played a major role in ending Julia Gillard’s prime ministership and reinstalling Rudd in 2013.

“I’ve evolved from union organiser to factional operative to MP to leader,” he says.

“I used to think Australia was all made up of different tribes. Now I think we’re all one tribe, maybe different clans. But we’ve got to identify, not in lowest common denominator – we’ve got to ensure we’re all pulling in the same direction.”

Running a university such as the University of Canberra, with its pragmatic emphasis on preparing students for real careers, he says, is a method of delivering public policy in a less partisan way than is required in federal politics.

“The fact that I got the chance to serve in parliament just makes me feel so lucky.”

Bill Shorten on leaving parliament

It is a university known for attracting students who are the first in their families to rise to tertiary education.

Shorten says he is much more idealistic than when he entered parliament 17 years ago, or even 35 years ago when he took his first degree, in arts at Monash University, where he was active in student politics and where he later studied law.

The chance to assist students to achieve goals unattainable by their parents meets what he says is his ideal of delivering Australians the chance of gaining success through both merit and fairness.

Shorten insists he has been “just lucky” to have had a career in politics, which no one in his family had experienced.

He insists he doesn’t want his career to be defined by the loss of the 2019 election to Scott Morrison.

“The fact that I got the chance to serve in parliament just makes me feel so lucky,” he says.

“The fact that I got to lead Labor for those six years was incredibly lucky; the fact that I got to contest the prime ministership and chase the dream … most people never get to challenge for the dream.”

Since then, he had learned that “failure can teach as well as success” and “you don’t have to be the leader to be a leader”.

He nominates as one of his post-leadership satisfactions his role in helping victims of the robo-debt scheme to win, against Scott Morrison’s government, the largest class action settlement in Australian history.

Shorten, credited with all but inventing the National Disability Insurance Scheme and persuading Gillard to legislate it, places it alongside Medicare and universal superannuation as monumental Australian achievements that will last.

He says it was through the “sense of humour that the universe has” that after his loss to Morrison and subsequent period in opposition, he was given the role of repairing the scheme after it went off the rails and became a sinkhole for scams and waste.

He is confident the scheme is back on track, but adds “keeping the NDIS on track is like painting the Sydney Harbour Bridge”.

It’s a task without end, soon for others to deal with.

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