Bill Shorten is a political contortionist

Bill Shorten at the McArthur River Mine in the Northern Territory in 2013.

Let’s face it, Bill Shorten is the only reason Coalition MPs still get out of bed every morning. Without him, they’d be stuck in the foetal position, rocking gently from side to the side, sucking their thumbs.

If we thought the Turnbull government was a broken husk of a government, we’d be right but in the past six months with the intensity building feverishly over the last fortnight, Bill Shorten has reminded us all that Labor, too, is a shambles, caught in a web of its own making.

A brief history of Shorten’s position on the $16.5 billion Adani mine in North Queensland reveals he’s done more revolutions than Che Guevara. Six months ago Shorten gave the mine the thumbs up. Then he dragged out the party line that he supported the Adani mine provided it “stacked up economically and environmentally.” That was two weeks ago. After a whirlwind trip of the Great Barrier Reef, courtesy of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Shorten had a trademark change of heart, followed by another. Last week he threatened to put the kibosh on the mine entirely. This week he says he no longer supports the mine but will reluctantly let it go ahead.

I’m getting vertigo just thinking about it.

Even his own shadow cabinet was having trouble keeping up with nameless front bench spokespeople blurting out that Shorten had “lost the plot” and was “off the reservation.”

We are getting very close to someone in the Coalition trotting out the hackneyed metaphor, that Bill Shorten has “more positions than the Karma Sutra”. Readers, this is Kaos and we don’t do tired old clichés. We do torturous new ones. Bill Shorten is a political contortionist who can dislocate his spine and fold himself into a shoe box which is where he keeps his principles, so there’s plenty of room.

He sure ain’t no man of steel. I am no metallurgist so when it comes to heavy metal, my mind tends to the musical and that’s why I think Bill Shorten is Australian politics’ man of Nickelback. A crap rock outfit where only a Bon Scott-led AC-DC belting out Riff Raff will do.

As a quick aside, can you imagine the language directed at the addled, absent-minded David Feeney from Labor sources now? Without Feeney’s personal existential crisis, Labor would not be joined with the Greens in the Battle for Batman which sounds like a bad movie and if you live in Northcote, it is.

Illustration: Tom Jellett.

If you thought you’d heard every swear word there is in the English lexicon, I guarantee you, a couple of minutes in the party room would quickly disabuse you of that notion. It would be the sort of rough language that would leave Dave Warner pink-cheeked with befuddlement.

Labor may just sneak home in Batman, but this will have little or anything to with Adani. It would only come about on the back of the Greens terminal in-fighting. The Greens in Batman are a mess with the long-term candidate, Alex Bhathal, the subject of some Greens’ star chamber brouhaha, amid allegations of bullying and branch stacking.

To paraphrase Kermit the Frog, it’s not easy being watermelon.

In fact, the Greens are a mess pretty much everywhere, having been taken to the cleaners by the good people of Tasmania last weekend and donnybrooks elsewhere in the party erupting. In NSW, a preselection squabble is headed off to the Supreme Court with former NSW MLC, Cate Faerhmann, issuing writs against the state branch’s membership officer, Alex Van Vucht.

Fight, fight, fight!

I’ve always said we should let the Greens run the country just for a week purely as an instructive exercise for the Australian people. Afterwards, when we’ve put all the fires out, everyone would know what we are dealing with.

Back to Labor, Adani and the whirling dervish that is Bill Shorten. The member for Herbert, Cathy O’Toole, Labor’s only rep from the deep North, was the only one prepared to go on the record about Shorten’s torturous gymnastics.

“We have never taken kindly to people from the south telling us what to do,” O’Toole said.

Pass me my banjo. Sounds like Labor has a regular Hatfields and McCoys feud going on.

In the absence of strong leadership, it does. Labor’s battle is not with the Greens but with itself. It is a battle fought not just over geography but over an existential crisis of its own over who it represents. Is it inner-city voters with their harsh judgments on environmental issues that have no direct impact on their communities or is it working men and women of Australia living in the suburbs and the regions, looking for employment prospects?

It cannot be both and Adani shines a harsh light on Labor’s great paradox.

Bill Shorten thinks he could be all things to all people but the reality is his somersaults render him to a piece of political fluff that stands for nothing besides a four-page colour brochure from Sussex Street on Labor values and under questioning, we’d find he’s not even sure about that.

Ah Bill, so many positions so little time.