Mike O’Connor: Bill Shorten’s $620,000 speechwriter a Days Of Our Lives-level farce

Only in Canberra, where life is as as far removed from reality as an episode of Days Of Our Lives, can having a $310k-a-year speechwriter be seen as okay, writes Mike O’Connor.

The most charitable of souls would have to concede that when it comes to listing the great public speakers of our time, the one name that won’t be on the list will be William Richard Shorten.

Mind you, he’s in good company. Anthony Albanese can send an entire football stadium into a deep slumber just by getting to his feet and threatening to speak while stumbling, bumbling Immigration Minister Andrew Giles gives a passable imitation of a person recently exhumed.

Our man Shorten, however, punished for losing to Scott Morrison by being handed the poisoned ministerial chalice containing the National Insurance Disability Scheme, has the edge on his colleagues when it comes to making public utterances for he has a speechwriter.

NDIS and Government Services Minister Bill Shorten.

Not any old hand-me-down, run-of-the-mill, pick your own cliché speechwriter but one being paid as revealed in the Senate estimates hearings $620,000 for two years work.

You might think that an organisation the size of the federal government which grows and spreads like a choko vine on an outdoor dunny would have plenty of people in its communications team.

It does as it turns out with about 180 of them at the last count crouched over their keyboards or as is more likely as we’re talking about Canberra public servants here, lying on the couch at home in their trakkie daks pounding out the government’s message. Most of these are graded in public service-peak as EL2s and are paid around $140,000 a year.

Liberal senator Maria Kovacic, struggling to make ends meet on a mere $230,000 a year, has asked why the speechwriter was being paid more than double that being earned by the best of the best in the department.

The answer was that none of them, alas, was up to the task of spreading the gospel according to Bill, that same Bill who railed against all those dreadful, greedy high income earners when running for PM.

Enter Julianne Stewart who as well as having worked for Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Malcolm Fraser, Tony Abbott and Australia’s favourite CEO Alan Joyce, has also written scripts for Sons and Daughters and A Country Practice.

Given that most of people who worked for K. Rudd are still in therapy, Ms Stewart is obviously a person of some resilience and it’s not hard to see how writing scripts for a television soap opera would come in handy when dealing with the National Disability Insurance Scheme which has become a prime time political drama.

Good luck to her in helping Bill explain how under the service, providers have been able to siphon off more than $2 billion in taxpayers’ funds and spend it on illicit drugs, luxury holidays and cars.

So widespread is the rorting that the agency admits it probably won’t be able to track down and prosecute many of the offenders. Bill blames “spivs and shonks.” Thanks, Minister, but everyone in the front bar of Pub Australia has worked that out for themselves.

Bill is not the only one in need of a speechwriter. Certainly, the boys and girls over at the federal government’s Housing Australia agency could also do with a hand in explaining how it’s coming along with, as its title proudly proclaims, housing Australia.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

Tasked by Mr Albanese with building 40,000 homes for low income families which obviously excludes government speechwriters, the agency has spent $6 million in executive salaries in a year and shelled out $24 million for external consultants with the CEO earning a prime ministerial salary of $560,000 a year.

Between January 2023 and December 2023, $16,613,428 was spent on IT, legal, advisory and other services on top of $7,423,953 spent in the preceding six months which included $1,630,977 on legal services and $4,553,685 on IT services with $3,628,462 spent on undisclosed “advisory” services.

And how may houses for those low income Aussie battlers has it built with all this money? None. Not one. Zilch.

This is the same federal government which promised that if elected, it would clamp down on spending millions of dollars hiring consultants while hundreds of thousands of well remunerated public servants sat around playing computer games and organising their next rostered day off.

Soap opera? Farce? Tragi-comedy? Sadly, it’s just another day in the Canberra bubble where life is as far removed from the reality lived by most of us as an episode of Days Of Our Lives.

Originally published as Mike O’Connor: Bill Shorten’s $620,000 speechwriter a Days Of Our Lives-level farce