Swan's apprentice outshines the chef

THE Treasurer needs to lift his game as talented newcomers strut their stuff.

THIS week the apprentice outshone the master: Bill Shorten selling superannuation reforms left Wayne Swan looking second-rate as he struggled to sell his banking measures.

The potential rivalry between the Assistant Treasurer and the Treasurer could become an unwanted distraction for Julia Gillard next year. But there is nothing she can do about it.

Questions will continue to be asked about Swan's performance, even if many in the media don't touch the issue because Swan is a prodigious networker. (He was out again on Sunday evening with journalists in Canberra.)

Shorten has much to work on before he is ready to take the next step into cabinet and perhaps beyond (question time performances, for example), but the deft way he has handled the superannuation issue is a sure sign of the sort of approach needed by a government that continues to look as though it has lost its way.

There is a divide opening up inside the Labor Party between senior frontbenchers such as Swan who struggled through the Howard years in permanent opposition and feel they deserve their time in power but may not be up to the job, and the next generation such as Shorten and Chris Bowen (who was in charge of superannuation before Shorten) doing much of the heavy lifting. They are more capable but perhaps aren't quite ready for the challenges of higher office.

As the likes of Shorten and Bowen find their feet next year in senior portfolios, and presumably as members of the old guard continue to be exposed as out of their depth, tensions may bubble to the surface. But it is the potential for rivalry between Swan and Shorten where the real theatre exists.

It is Australia's version of the Miliband brothers: David and younger brother Ed challenged for the British Labour Party leadership. Both were affiliated to the same union. Ed won out because he maintained the support of the unions.

Swan and Shorten aren't brothers but they are union brothers-in-arms. Both are affiliated to the powerful Australian Workers Union. AWU national secretary Paul Howes was Shorten's protege when he was national secretary, but he is also close to Swan. AWU chairman Bill Ludwig, like Swan, is a Queenslander. The two are extremely close, but Ludwig was AWU chairman when Shorten was running the union.

The likeliest scenario is that Swan will continue as Treasurer, Shorten won't rock the boat and Labor and Gillard will need to hope Swan finds his mojo. But if Labor is to seek a replacement more capable of selling its economic message in these reform-starved times, it is Howes and Ludwig who will need to take the gutsy steps to allow Gillard to replace her deputy. She has no authority to do it without union backing. Swan is, after all, Deputy Prime Minister, a position elected by caucus.

Indeed, Gillard has a question mark over her own performance as a member of the old guard who couldn't win Labor government before the electoral cycle naturally swung its way in 2007, nearly 12 years after Paul Keating lost office. But to succeed as PM she needs a good team around her; inexperienced PMs always do. Which means getting rid of dead wood. By-elections, however, are Gillard's No 1 enemy as leader of a minority government, and Swan's seat of Lilley is in Queensland and was lost by Labor (and Swan) in 1996 before he won it back in 1998. She wouldn't want him to leave parliament if he were demoted. As a tribal loyalist Swan would likely put Labor first, but others shown the door might not be so generous.

This is the enduring problem for Labor's second term. The line-up isn't ideal (just look at Kevin Rudd in foreign affairs), but changing it is too difficult for a minority leader to contemplate.

Despite mishandling the mining tax, moving to implement only three of Ken Henry's 138 recommendations from the taxation review (compare that with Shorten, who is implementing 139 of 177 recommendations from the Cooper review), and struggling to sell his banking reforms, Swan was promoted to Deputy Prime Minister and remains Treasurer in the aftermath of the Rudd years.

Swan must lift his game, rising to the heights Peter Costello occupied when supporting John Howard's leadership, if he is going to help Gillard turn Labor into more than a two-term administration resembling the Gough Whitlam government of 1972-75 (only without the ideas).

If he can't, Swan should get out of the way and let someone else do the job.

Yet who that would be is far from decided. Shorten is Swan's understudy but few doubt Bowen covets the job. And Tony Burke's ambitions are far from hidden, although he would be best served focusing on the difficult issues of water management for which he is responsible.

In Swan's defence the reforms he has had carriage of are far more substantial than the superannuation reforms Shorten has looked after since Gillard promoted him into the ministry. But that doesn't change the fact that consultation over the mining tax was poor to nonexistent, whereas the super reforms came after many months of talking to the sector.

Shorten needs to sharpen up his salesmanship (on Thursday he declared "to provide or not to provide, that is the question many families are asking every day" - how awful), and if he is to stir his troops in parliament as Costello did, he will need better researchers to improve his material. But ideas are the basis of greatness in politics, and on super and developing a disabilities insurance scheme Shorten appears to be long on ideas.

The great reformers from the Hawke and Keating years, which included ideas-heavy ministers such as John Button, John Dawkins and Peter Walsh, forged lasting changes to shape future prosperity. Shorten is doing it now. Granted there is more he could do, starting with adopting some of the Howard approaches to allow people to tax-effectively top up super when they aren't young enough to benefit from future increases to the compulsory rate.

Yet Shorten's near comprehensive adoption of the Cooper review, after meaningful debate and discussions with the sector, sits in stark contrast to Swan's populism on the banks, or his timidity in implementing the Henry review before the election last August.