Bill Shorten: high-flying fake or workers’ champion?

Bill Shorten first became a household name in 2006 during the Beaconsfield mine disaster.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten.

Bill Shorten first became a household name in 2006, surfing a wave of favourable publicity when the news broke that two men had survived the dreadful Beaconsfield mine disaster.

It was a brief burst of fame, still more than a year before Shorten resigned as head of the Australian Workers Union to enter parliament and have a shot at realising his dream of becoming prime minister one day.

Beaconsfield nonetheless remains the classic example of what Malcolm Turnbull was talking about this week in targeting Shorten as a “hypocrite” for his cosy links to Melbourne billionaires.

Dick Pratt, the super-wealthy cardboard industry king, was Shorten’s enabler on that occas­ion. It was a Sunday night and all hope of finding survivors of the mine collapse was lost. Shorten was stranded at home in Melbourn­e when the stunning news came through — he’d just returned­ from the mine site and there were no domestic flights back to Tasmania until the next day.

Shorten’s first thought? Natur­ally, call Pratt and ask to borrow his private jet parked at Essendon airport. In quick time, Shorten was back in Beaconsfield.

With the mine’s management falling silent, he happily filled the void for an inform­ation-starved national media. From start to finish­, he relayed details of the rescue operation and the con­dition of the men trapped beneath the earth.

It was a mark of Shorten’s closeness to one of Australia’s richest men that just a phone call to Pratt could secure his private jet free of charge. But that was far from the first, or last, time that Shorten would fly Air Pratt.

He and his then wife, Deborah Beale, flew to the US on board Pratt’s jet for family holidays at the packaging magnate’s New York apartment. One of Shorten’s more exotic adventures aboard Air Pratt was a trip to Cuba.

Defenders from Shorten’s circle­ claim that Turnbull’s brutal spray in parliament this week — unusual in its intensity, especially after the Liberal PM declined to lay a glove on him during last year’s election campaign — was a cheap tit-for-tat. The multi-million­aire PM’s patience was wearing thin at Shorten’s jibe, borrowed ironically from Tony ­Abbott’s former chief of staff Peta Credlin, that Turnbull was “Mr Harbourside Mansion”.

Privately, Shorten has always been keen to say the Pratt connect­ion was because of Beale. He is right, to an extent. Those close to Shorten say he conveyed the impressio­n, indeed encouraged the idea, that Pratt was Beale’s godfather. The late Pratt and his widow, Jeannie, were especially close friends of Beale’s parents, former Liberal MP Julian Beale and wife Felicity. Pratt adored Deborah, having doted on her when she was a child.

Shorten was brought into the family fold when he and Beale married after a whirlwind romance­. Their engagement party was held at Pratt’s mansion, Raheen­. It was a lavish event with singers Vika and Linda Bull and a stand-up comedian. Shorten sold his half-share in a beach house he’d owned with former partner Nicola Roxon to help pay for the engagement ring.

The marriage to Beale, say Shorten insiders, offered much more to a man who relished mixing with the rich and powerful. The bright, likeable Beale helped open doors. Whether by accident or design, her links to the Melbourne establishment assisted with introduct­ions for Shorten to captains of industry.

It was a positive for his early career­ as he tried to model himself on Bob Hawke, pitching himself as a moderate union leader who shunned class warfare.

Corporate chiefs became cur­ious, wanting to meet the man who, according to rumours that Shorten encouraged, was destined to be Labor’s leader. While secretary of the AWU’s Victorian branch, before taking on the union’s national secretary­ position as well to generate a national profile, Shorten was introduced to transport magnate Lindsay Fox by then ACTU secretary Bill Kelty, a Fox mate. Shorten had few members in transport but Fox liked to size up union up-and-comers.

Shorten built buddy relations with members of the rich Smorgon steel family, an industry where he did have members.

He also got to know retail­ giant Solomon Lew. The Lew relationship was based in large part on their shared pro-Israel stance. As leader of the right-wing AWU in Victoria, Shorten devoted much time to battling the Left over Israel. He mixed easily with Lew and other Australian Jewish businessmen. It was good politics, too, for Shorten, to win the support of Melbourne’s Jewish business community.

One Shorten acolyte put it this way: “Bill’s gregarious. He could just as easily be in Toorak, intoxi­cated by the company of rich ­people, and then travel to the western suburbs for a union barbecue with chemical workers.”

Turnbull got at least one thing wrong this week when he called Shorten, among many harsh things, a fake and sycophant for “tucking his knees under the tables of billionaires’’ during his past union career. The Liberal PM also claimed “everyone knows that”. Voters now have an inkling, thanks to Turnbull, that it is rich indeed for Shorten to needle him about his wealth. But it’s doubtful that voters yet know much more than a broad outline of Shorten’s alleged hypocrisy.

That is why, as Peter Dutton has signalled, the Turnbull assault on Shorten’s character is most likely only the start: political ­messages require repetition and reinforcement.

Inside Labor, Shorten’s blueblood past has been a concern for some time: he is often criticised for acting like Labor royalty. During the recent election campaign, party funds were allegedly used to help pay for child-minding and clothes worn by Shorten­’s wife, Chloe Bryce, daughter of the former governor­-general.

Election-night festivities had two classes of guests: red wrist bands for downstairs and silver ones for elite guests upstairs.

One insider said: “An element of criticism of Bill is unfair, becaus­e he met people through his first wife. At the same time, he has since decided to go to the Left publicly and launch anti-market attacks that contradict his past ­positions.

“Turnbull was right to say he’s been a sycophant to the wealthy, but Bill has left himself wide open.

“He doesn’t begrudge people who’ve made wealth, so why not say that? He’s never been a working-class hero, so why create a fake persona now? The problem is (he) always takes the low road, the easy way. He’s the one who usually lets himself down.”

What Shorten really thinks was given an airing six years ago in the worldwide release by WikiLeaks of US cables that proved embarrassing to many public figures.

According to a leaked 2009 cable, when Shorten was a parliamentary secretary for Kevin Rudd, the then US consul-general in Melbourne heard Shorten­ be “highly critical of current Australian union leadership”. He talked up his pro-business cred­entials, his MBA from Melbourn­e University and his closeness to the late Pratt.

Turnbull this week seized on Shorten’s alleged duplicity by noting­ his firm oppositio­n to company tax cuts because “Malcolm is helping his rich mates”. This positi­on is starkly at odds with Shorten running the case in past times for reducing corporate tax.

In his diaries, Mark Latham highlighted what he regarde­d as Shorten’s duplicity on free trade with the US from a conversation they had when Latham was Labor leader and Shorten led the AWU.

“Little Billy was in my ear about the FTA, telling me the party has to support it. I said I thought both he and his union were against it, to which he responded: ‘That’s just for the members. We need to say that sort of thing when they reckon their jobs are under threat.’ ”

The Pratt association tops political conversation about Shorten’s rich links because there is much available information highlighting dual allegiances. There is, however, much other negative Shorten material that Turnbull has shown an inclination to exploit. One is Shorten’s loyalty, to the puzzlement of many, to Kimberley Kitching, recommended for possible criminal charges but promoted by Shorten to the Senate, and to her husband, Andrew­ Landeryou, a former bankrupt who seems to court trouble.

The other is the Coalition’s increasing references to companies such as Cleanevent from Shorten’s tenure at the AWU’s Victorian branch: Shorten was happy to cut a wage deal for low-paid Cleanevent workers that slashed their penalty rates, while the company contributed funds to his union, including the payment of members’ dues.

When Shorten’s branch negotiated a three-year deal for members­ on Melbourne’s East Link freeway project for Thiess­-John Holland, the construction consortium agreed to a union-­requested payment of $300,000 that went straight into AWU coffers. Shorten escaped criticism over this and other ­arrangements involving payments to his union in the 2015 findings of the royal commission into union corruption.

But Turnbull and his frontbench have started gnawing at commission evidence that does not show Shorten in a favourable light. It was nasty for Turnbull to claim Shorten was unfit to be prime minister. A worse slur was to accuse him, a man meant to put workers’ interests first, of “selling out”.