Product Review

The top job is within Bill Shorten’s grasp. But who is he? How did he rise to become Labor leader? And does he have what it takes to beat Malcolm Turnbull and lead the country?

In this dramatic essay, David Marr traces the hidden career of a Labor warrior.

He shows how a brilliant recruiter and formidable campaigner mastered first the unions and then the party. Marr presents a man willing to deal with his enemies and shift his allegiances, whose ambition to lead has been fixed since childhood.

But does he stand for anything? Is Shorten a defender of Labor values in today’s Australia or a shape-shifter, driven entirely by politics? How does the union world he comes from shape the prime minister he might be? Marr reveals a man we hardly know: a virtuoso with numbers and a strategist of skill who Labor hopes will return the party to power.

‘Shorten is now more vulnerable than ever to the fundamental charge the Coalition levels against him: that this is the man who brought down two prime ministers and lied about it on radio. It’s going to be dirty. At the heart of the contest will be Shorten’s character. All the way to polling day, Australians will be invited to rake over every detail of his short life and hidden career.’ —David Marr, Faction Man

‘David Marr is as brilliant a biographer and journalist as this country has produced.’ —Peter Craven, Spectator

‘Taken in sum, the fifty-nine Quarterly Essays published since 2001 offer perhaps the deepest analysis of the meandering political path we've traversed from the turn of the current century.’ —CityMag Adelaide

David Marr is the multi-award-winning author of Patrick White: A Life, Panic and The High Price of Heaven, and co- author with Marian Wilkinson of Dark Victory. He has written for the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Monthly, been editor of the National Times, a reporter for Four Corners and presenter of ABC TV’s Media Watch. He is also the author of five bestselling biographical Quarterly Essays.