Why Shorten doesn’t begin to fill Bob Hawke’s shoes

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten and former prime minister Bob Hawke.

It has been a turbulent, volatile and unpredictable year, to use three of the lamest adjectives in the journalist’s playbook. Some might even call it a rollercoaster ride of fortunes, or emotions, or a rollercoaster ride of both fortunes and emotions, which it was for Nick Kyrgios, or so we read at the weekend. Not surprisingly he wants to get off.

No journalist, as we know, has yet applied the giddying fairground metaphor to Bill Shorten, who through force of personality — or perhaps lack of it — has avoided the ups and downs common in his profession.

Shorten’s Newspoll rating as preferred prime minister rose to 32 per cent two years ago, and there it has pretty much remained. Seldom has an opinion poll chart so closely resembled the topography of the Hay Plain: flat, monotonous and featureless.

Shorten’s party, on the other hand, is motoring steadily at a higher altitude in Newspoll, leading the traders in second-hand political wisdom, of which there are many, to conclude that Shorten will be our next prime minister, possibly as soon as next Saturday. Something clearly doesn’t add up. It could be the polls, or it could be Shorten’s tactics. Mindful of Newspoll’s track record, it seems likely to be the latter.

Yet Shorten, blissfully unabashed, is determined to make the next election personal, judging by his fondness for the perpendicular pronoun.

At a Curtin Research Centre dinner last October, for example, he used the words “I”, “me” or “my” 103 times, which may well be a record in Australian politics. “Labor” — that’s the name of the party he leads, by the way — ­warranted just seven mentions.

Bashfulness is not a quality we expect to find in politicians and yet, even by the standards of his brazen profession, few leaders have been less abashed, or seemingly less self-aware, than Shorten.

Bob Hawke, a leader who was hardly lacking in self-confidence, looks sheepish in comparison. In his 1983 campaign speech, for ­example, an address twice as long as Shorten’s in October, he ­employed the first person singular pronoun just 19 times. Labor ­warranted 52 mentions.

Shorten distinguishes himself from his predecessor not just in rhetoric but in substance. Hawke promised restraint; Shorten offers indulgence. Hawke promised bus­i­ness leaders seats at the top table; to Shorten they are the enemy.

Hawke was an intellectual in the Australian tradition, yet effortlessly portrayed himself as the workers’ friend. Shorten’s man-of-the-people performance is less convincing. “My university is Australian workplaces,” he told diners, somewhat ungrammatically, “and my teachers were Australian workers in Australian businesses.”

The more the Opposition Leader tries to persuade us he’s the genuine article, the less persuasive he becomes. Like an actor in a daytime soap opera, he is handicapped by poor character construction and the awkwardness of his lines.

What are we supposed to make of this passage, for example, from his Curtin speech?

“This country sings. We just don’t read the notes, we play music … The challenge confronting us is bigger than us. It’s about more than where we’ve come from …”

“Sit down, and let them serve dessert!” you can hear the diners screaming in their heads. But there’s another 620 words of sound and fury to come.

“The test which animates our movement is what legacy will we leave.”

Legacy. You’d hardly think a Labor leader had the nerve to use the word, after the stinking mess the party left behind last time. The ill-conceived National Broadband Network, shoddily designed ­National Disability Insurance Scheme and dreamy renewable energy target would rank among the worst interventions ever by an Australian government.

The release this month of the 1994 and 1995 cabinet papers reveals that even at their most complacent, Labor governments 20 years ago were in a different league.

Reform, as Hawke practised it, seems too hard for his successors, and the Australian workers in Australian businesses Shorten claims to represent are paying the price. Had Kevin Rudd entered ­office in 2007 with the hard-nosed restraint shown by Hawke 24 years earlier, his honeymoon would have been somewhat shorter. Had Rudd, Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan been driven by the boring but necessary responsibilities of office — fiscal restraint and fostering productivity, for example — today’s Australian workers would undoubtedly be enjoying higher wages and the transition from the mining investment boom would have been less bumpy.

Instead, we are being asked to put our faith in Shorten, with his soapbox promises and his commitment to that great technocratic dream of perfectly reallocating wealth between capital and labour.

“I’m here as the alternative prime minister of this nation, saying working Australians need a pay rise,” he told the Curtin dinner. “I do believe the wages of this country need to move up — I make no apology for that. Because I understand how an economy is constructed.”

It is scary enough that an alternative prime minister believes an economy is “constructed”, a hubris that should be buried in history’s landfill alongside Stalin’s five-year plans.

Worse still is his belief that bosses aren’t giving pay rises ­because they want more money for themselves and that he, as prime minister, will somehow force them to shell out.

As proof of the stinginess of big business, Shorten cites growth in labour productivity, ignoring that to a large extent this represents the deepening of capital investment.

He ignores the growing deadweight of the state, which he plans to increase, with a return to subsidised manufacturing, and increased subsidies for renewable energy. He ignores the sluggish growth in the economy and ­opposes cuts to company tax. He ignores the labour-market rigidity that he will entrench in government, as he must, because unions may not be good for the country, but they’re good for his career.

“They’ll call me the most anti-business, Cuban-Corbyn-East-German-socialist leader — ever,” Shorten predicted in his speech in October.

That’s another certainty we can bank on.

Nick Cater is executive director of Menzies Research Centre.