'Extraordinary highs… extraordinary political lows': Bill Shorten bows ...
Former Labor leader Bill Shorten has announced his retirement from politics at a press conference in Canberra with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Thursday and will take a job as the next vice chancellor of the University of Canberra.
Shorten will remain the MP for the seat of Maribyrnong until February next year and stay as the minister for NDIS and government services until he retires, saying there is “plenty more work to be done” in his portfolios in the next few months.
Reflecting on his career, he said there was “not a single day in the last 17 years” that he would hand back, amid “some extraordinary political highs … [and] let’s face it, some extraordinary political lows”.
Shorten led the federal Labor Party between 2013-19 and served as the member for the Victorian seat of Maribyrnong since 2007. He stood down as Labor leader after the bruising defeat in the 2019 federal election, his second loss.
Shorten added that he has always been determined to “stand up for the underdog”.
“I genuinely consider myself to be one of the luckiest people in politics,” he said.
NDIS Minister Bill Shorten says his involvement with the scheme is one of his career highlights.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
“I have been the member for Maribyrnong, it is a community that I love so much. I’ve had the privilege to serve in portfolios that I care about. The bushfire reconstruction, industrial relations, superannuation. When I first became the junior minister for disabilities, and now the minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme.”
Before his political career, Shorten led the Australian Workers’ Union, which formed Shorten’s power base in Labor’s Right faction.
Speaking in Canberra this morning, Albanese said Shorten had been talking to him for some time about retiring.
“I think it is a credit to Bill that this news will come as a surprise because at no point in the past two and a bit years would any observer of Australian politics think that Bill Shorten was taking it easy or slowing down,” he said.
Shorten’s retirement will create vacancies in his portfolios and in his seat in Melbourne’s inner west, which he holds with a comfortable margin of 10.3 per cent.
Albanese said that there would not be a byelection, nor did Shorten’s departure date indicate there would be a February election.
“No, that happens to be when the academic year starts so I think it would have been unreasonable to say to minister Shorten it is terrific you have this opportunity but can you just chill out for another year in between sometime between May or whenever it is,” Albanese said.
His exit from politics, first confirmed by this masthead, has been a topic of consistent speculation since Labor won government in 2022 but he always insisted his focus was on reforming the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which he championed since he was a junior minister in 2009.
Bill Shorten announces his retirement from politics alongside Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Thursday.Credit: AAP
Soon after Labor was elected in May 2022, Albanese informally spoke to Shorten about taking on the role of High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, but the former party leader knocked back the job. Shorten and Albanese are not political allies but enjoyed a successful working relationship in this term of government.
Shorten has been both a proven media performer for Labor and a powerful factional leader and was notably one of the key figures in the spills of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years.
Asked if he had regrets about removing former prime minister Kevin Rudd in 2010 and Julia Gillard in 2013, Shorten brushed it off with a smirk and a quote from Frank Sinatra’s My Way.
“Regrets, I might borrow from someone else,” he said. “Regrets I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention. I did what I had to do but much more than this, I did it my way.”
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During his first term as federal opposition leader, Shorten led the successful prosecution of Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey’s disastrous 2014 budget which eventually led the Coalition to tear down Abbott and replace him with Malcolm Turnbull.
Labor gained 14 seats in the 2016 election, leaving Turnbull’s Coalition government with a one-seat majority. In the second term of Shorten’s stint as opposition leader, Turnbull was dumped by the Coalition and replaced by Scott Morrison, who defied the polls to beat Labor in 2019.
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