Bill Shorten ends 2018 on a winner
SBS News
Updated Updated 20 December 2018
Bill Shorten started the year under pressure over coal mines and facing a resurgent Malcolm Turnbull in the polls.
Without doubt the Labor leader has been a big winner of 2018.
He is now the clear favourite to win the next election and while it isn't unloseable, Labor is ticking all the right boxes.
Shorten made sure of that at Labor's national conference this week, where the unions and the factions locked in behind him.
There was no contentious battle over asylum seekers, with Labor confident the changes it will make to offshore processing will be enough to stop boats from starting again.
There was no commitment to increase Newstart. It frustrated the Left faction and welfare advocates, but Shorten was determined not to make that decision under pressure.
Labor will review Newstart and everyone agrees it is too low. But committing to a huge, ongoing new cost is a decision the party will assess in government.
The union push for industry-wide bargaining was watered down. But it remains to be seen where that one ends up in government.
Australians aren't used to the kind of huge strikes regularly seen in Europe, where entire industries shut down in pay disputes.
Shorten has promised to bring unions and businesses together after the election to get agreement on lifting wages.
This might be the job he was made for.
Shorten has sometimes seemed wooden in front of public crowds, putting the wrong emphasis on words.
But put him in front of a crowd of business people and he's more comfortable.
He seems to speak the language rich people understand. Maybe it was going to wealthy Xavier College as a boy in Melbourne.
As a union leader Shorten did deals with businesses. Some of those were probed in the trade union royal commission and the findings weren't always kind to him.
But what did come through was Shorten being willing to give way on some conditions in order to lift wages and get projects finished.
He is a man businesses can work with.
He may not like the comparison, but Shorten on business might look a bit like Donald Trump on China.
Malcolm Turnbull urged businesses to lift wages and they did nothing. They just pocketed their gains and carried on.
Similarly, the United States put up with China's intellectual property theft and gaming of currency and trade rules for years without getting anywhere.
Then Trump threatened China with a big stick and then followed through with tariffs. China has since agreed to significant trade changes to end the trade war.
Shorten has a big stick with which to threaten businesses. The ACTU is as strident under Sally McManus as it has been in years.
"Employers are sitting on their hands and not bargaining. That's a problem," Labor's workplace spokesman Brendan O'Connor said on Thursday.
"We need the system to get going again, a combination of multi-employer bargaining and enterprise bargaining."
If businesses weren't prepared to do the right thing on their own under Turnbull, they will face Shorten with a mandate from the electorate to return some of their huge profits back to workers.
The spotlight is on Shorten and what he'll do as prime minister because every indication is he will take that job some time in 2019
Prime Minister Scott Morrison is pushing all the buttons and making a lot of noise, but his party and his government are crumbling around him.
The NSW Liberals are splitting off on climate change, which a couple of dozen federal Liberals believe isn't real and the rest of the country has to deal with it.
The Victorian Liberals are shattered after a devastating state election defeat.
The Nationals are combusting over another sex scandal.
There is a chance Morrison could stop parliament from sitting before the next election in order to avoid chaos on the floor of the minority-held house.
While Morrison deals with chaos, Shorten has a unified team, support from factions, unions, and - most importantly - polls showing support from voters.
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