FACTION MAN

Correspondence

Frank Bongiorno

Most of us feel we don’t know Bill Shorten all that well. Thanks to David Marr’s excellent Quarterly Essay, we are now entitled to feel we know him better. Still, there are aspects of Shorten’s career that seem to me only comprehensible once its context is taken more fully into account. In particular, the post-1983 transformation of the union movement and the ALP are critical in understanding the kind of politician that he is, but they have so far received limited public attention.

Shorten is a Generation-Xer, one of that group who now increasingly compose Australia’s political elite. We have only had one such prime minister, Julia Gillard, but she was born in 1961, often considered its cusp. Born in 1967, the year the Beatles gave us Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Shorten sits squarely within this group. As such, his experiences are of a type shared with other members of that generation. These go beyond a possible partiality to power ballads and John Hughes films. He was a teenager and university student in the 1980s, a period when Labor dominated national politics under the prime ministership of Bob Hawke and also had considerable electoral success in the states – including in Shorten’s own Victoria, where John Cain Junior led the first Labor government in thirty years. Marr writes of Shorten and his friends watching federal Labor’s 1983 victory on television and finding inspiration in Hawke. It would be surprising if a teenager such as Shorten, contemplating a political career, had not found in the new Labor prime minister an inspiration, and Hawke has surely been a powerful model for Shorten’s career.

But only up to a point. Hawke became a national figure on the back of an immensely powerful public persona, and of his role first as an Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) advocate in the 1960s, and then as its president during the turbulent 1970s. Shorten also chose a career in the union movement, but in the Australian Workers Union (AWU). By comparison with Hawke’s, his opportunities for cutting a figure on the national stage before he entered parliament were meagre, although he did so with considerable ingenuity during the Beaconsfield mining disaster of 2006. Marr also points out that whereas Hawke tended to get his lieutenants to line up the numbers for him, Shorten has been more active in looking after his own. Yet for all his gifts of persuasion and organisation, Shorten has never given any indication of possessing the kind of public charisma Hawke had in spades. 

But there is a more critical difference, and one which has nothing to do with the respective personalities of the two men. When Hawke came to office in 1983, almost half the workforce were still union members; by the time Shorten was beginning to make his mark as an AWU man in the 1990s, this figure had dropped to about 35 per cent. Today, it is well under 20 per cent.

There are complex reasons for this decline. It owes something to the changing nature of the workforce – the shift away from manufacturing and towards service industries, and the rise of part-time and casual labour – but also a great deal to policy: notably, the effective end of compulsory unionism in most workplaces as a result of legislation passed under conservative state governments, such as that of Jeff Kennett in Victoria. Other critical changes of the early 1990s also drastically shifted the nature of the Australian union movement: union amalgamations, the rise of enterprise bargaining and the development of a system of compulsory superannuation in which unions were participants through the industry super funds.

It was in this new union environment that Shorten became a leading figure, with the added spice that he chose a branch of a union – the Victorian AWU – that had been so grossly mismanaged by some of its officials, and was so riven by internal conflict, that its continued existence could not be taken for granted. The AWU was also under pressure elsewhere: for instance, in Western Australia’s Pilbara, where employer aggression from the time of the Robe River dispute of 1986–87 had, by the 1990s, essentially eradicated the union from the workplace.

It is not hard to see how Shorten’s qualities and skills would have found their mark in this environment. The combination of casualisation and repression of the union movement at the hands of state governments, leading to the end of closed-shop unionism, meant that the unions now needed to work much harder to recruit and then keep their members than had been the case under the old arbitration system. These circumstances provided an opening for skilled organisers, and Shorten filled it very well. Some of the ways in which he drew members into the AWU’s circle have raised eyebrows, including those of Dyson Heydon, but it is easy to see why arrangements in which employers paid the union fees of their workers would have been attractive to the organisation during this period.

Added to this, however, was the rise of enterprise bargaining. It is easy today to overlook just how significant this was as a departure from previous patterns of industrial relations. These had, of course, often included collective bargaining, but in a very different regulatory environment, one in which state intervention through courts, boards, commissions and tribunals had played a much more influential role in setting wages and conditions through the award system.

Enterprise bargaining meant that a large blue-collar union such as the AWU was involved in literally hundreds of agreements with employers. Securing “the deal” became more central to the way unions operated, and each union dealt with employers, often face-to-face, in an environment in which they were frequently competing with rival organisations for the allegiance of members. In the case of the AWU, its rivalry with the militant Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union was a key factor. But perhaps of equal importance was the way that enterprise bargaining resulted in new kinds of direct relationships between union officials and individual employers. So, in a different way, did the involvement of union officials in industry super funds. 

This is quite different from the environment of what Gerard Henderson called the old “industrial relations club,” where Bob Hawke forged friendships with corporate bosses or the leaders of peak organisations – the likes of Peter Abeles and George Polites – that, from 1983, carried over into his corporate style of government, with its economic and tax summits, its Economic Planning Advisory Council and the like. Yes, Shorten’s relationship with the late Richard Pratt has some of the hallmarks of Hawke’s business mateships, but the more systemic relations with business-owners and managers that the AWU built up in the process of striking enterprise bargaining agreements appear to have been more significant.

All of this has had substantial implications for the Labor Party. These were perhaps not fully foreseen in the early 1990s, but a most revealing internal party review from the period, headed by the then national secretary, Bob Hogg, pointed to some of the dangers. “The decline in union coverage of the total workforce and the number of unions affiliated to the Party as well as the current [union] amalgamation and restructuring” all had “very serious implications for the Party,” the review concluded. “Those implications are serious in terms of the Party remaining representative and in terms of its internal organisational power structures … As unions become such a substantial prize in the ALP then political considerations will become the dominant factor in union elections rather than the industrial considerations and the broader interests of the union membership.”

Indeed: and the snake-pit of factional Labor Party politics in Victoria, which David Marr describes so vividly, is one very direct outcome. With the decline of both the branch rank-and-file ALP membership and union coverage, factional bosses such as Shorten, Stephen Conroy and Kim Carr often seem more like princes of the states of the Holy Roman Empire at the time of the Thirty Years’ War than factional leaders of the Hawke–Keating era, efficiently dividing among their charges the spoils of office. This also helps us to make sense of Shorten’s decision, as an ambitious up-and-comer, to make his way through the AWU – with its control of all those votes on the floor of Labor Party conferences (and therefore, ultimately, of party offices and pre-selections) – rather than take the ACTU route chosen by Hawke decades earlier.

Marr makes the valid point that, despite its many faults, the turbulent Victorian branch of the ALP produces very talented politicians – of whom Shorten is a prime example. But Marr also poses the important question: can Shorten scale up to the tasks required of a national leader? A number of senior Labor politicians since Paul Keating, while competent (or better) as ministers and shadow ministers, have failed to shine as party leaders or prime ministers. Each has appeared to have some of the qualities and skills needed for the job, but not the full complement. Beazley, Crean, Latham, Rudd and Gillard: the list is already long. Is it growing?

Frank Bongiorno