When Julia Gillard calls "Bill! Bill Shorten!", a scrappy little terrier comes running.
In the ABC TV satire At Home with Julia, the prime minister explained to visitors to The Lodge that she named the dog after the minister for workplace relations because he's "always at mummy's heels".
![Illustration: John Shakespeare](http://web.archive.org./web/20170901083527im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/k/x/y/t/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gxjpea.png/1501391472194.jpg)
Until, in the final insult, her pet relieves himself on her leg, just as, in real life, Shorten switched his support from Gillard to Kevin Rudd, the decisive final vote to destroy Gillard and restore Rudd.
Shorten hasn't set the electorate on fire. But he has managed to doggedly build his leadership and restore a battered Labor party to a position of political competitiveness.
Even dominance. Labor has been ahead in the polls consistently since the election, over a year now. Nobody calls Shorten a lapdog anymore.
Consistently underestimated, he survived a royal commission into trade union corruption.
And he's managed to outlive the stigma of being the two-time traitor, the "faceless man" who connived in the downfall of Rudd, then Gillard.
In fact he has, without fanfare, become the longest serving Labor leader since Kim Beazley. Shorten has held the post for three years and nine months now, longer than Rudd, Gillard, Mark Latham or Simon Crean.
![Federal Opposition leader Bill Shorten.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170901083527im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/h/w/4/0/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gxjpea.png/1502363483842.jpg)
"We've seen Good Bill on display consistently for the last year and a half," says a veteran Labor operative who has been central to recent Labor governments and knows Shorten well.
"He's been working hard and he's been very disciplined. The running helps," referring to Shorten's midlife discovery of the morning jog. "Good leaders develop good routines. It's helping keep him disciplined."
![Many believe Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten are equally disappointing.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170901083527im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/h/m/r/m/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gxjpea.png/1502088987969.jpg)
A lobbyist for one of Australia's major business groups is no fan of Shorten, but delivers his group's calculated assessment: "It's hard to construct a scenario where Bill Shorten doesn't become prime minister."
He is still, to much of the electorate, faceless. Many people simply don't know who he is. He's not charismatic, and he's self-aware enough to know that. To his credit, he resists the temptation to pull desperate stunts to get attention.
![Some still say he's a "faceless" man, with strong union ties dating back to his days as AWU secretary.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170901083527im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/x/i/h/0/c/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gxjpea.png/1501391472194.jpg)
He is, instead, doing something rather remarkable. He is using the power of ideas. To get attention, to take the initiative, to attack the government and to build Labor's support.
The standard playbook for an Opposition leader is to go super-negative, hyper-oppositionist. Oppose the government at every turn in the angriest possible voice. Shorten has followed the playbook. But he's gone beyond the book and taken some risks with new policy ideas.
For instance, it was the orthodoxy that it'd be political suicide to campaign on a promise to curb tax perks for real estate investors. Some of the Opposition leader's staff warned him against the idea.
The government would smash it as an attack on home values and the death of the Australia dream.
Which is exactly what happened: "Bill Shorten's policy is calculated to reduce the value of your home," Malcolm Turnbull intoned gravely. "Every home owner in Australia has a lot to fear from Bill Shorten."
But Shorten went with it. And he almost won an election. Labor won an extra 14 seats to come within one seat of taking power.
The idea of curbing negative gearing and capital gains tax has now been entrenched as a possibility for dealing with runaway property prices in the biggest cities.
It plays directly into the idea of a growing inequality, in this case the inequality between the generations enriched by the sheer accident of super-cheap money and a younger generation priced out of home ownership.
Shorten has now set inequality as his lode star. "Tackling inequality will be a defining mission for a Shorten Labor Government," he announced last week. "The system as it stands is accelerating inequality rather that addressing it," he said in a speech. "A belligerent defence of trickle down economics is no kind of plan for Australia's future."
Labor was pleased when Treasurer Scott Morrison immediately launched into a belligerent defence of the status quo. But it was absolutely ecstatic when the touchstone of economic authority, Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe, lent weight to Shorten's campaign.
Asked whether inequality in Australia had risen or fallen, Lowe replied: "Well, it's risen." He spoke of two distinct types of inequality - in wealth and in income. Both had risen, he said.
"Wealth inequality has become more pronounced particularly in the last five or six years because there's been big gains in asset prices," chiefly real estate. "So the people who own assets, which tend to be wealthy people, have seen their wealth go up." On the second, he said: "Income inequality has drifted up a little bit but not very much."
No politician ever wins a credibility contest against the governor of the central bank. Morrison's staff attempted to salvage some dignity with this: "To the extent that the governor referenced rising income inequality, he was referring to a longer time period going back over decades. The Treasurer has been referring to movements post the GFC", the global financial crisis.
It was a valiant effort but the government's political argument has, essentially, been lost.
Not only the Reserve Bank but every credible international economic authority has in recent years declared inequality to be an important problem. Even the traditionally super-dry institutions like the IMF and World Bank.
And the success of the new populist political movements around the world confirms that this is not an academic point. Inequality was central to the success of the campaigns of Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn's in Britain.
Shorten is riding the same powerful current, but he draws a sharp distinction between his approach and theirs: "Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn want to wreck the place, I just want to reform it," he has quipped to colleagues, presenting himself as a gradualist and centrist, not a revolutionary. If this is Australia's left-wing populism, it's of a more responsible variety.
The Labor leader has also shown that he can be more than a hyper-partisan oppositionist. He has, for instance, offered to negotiate with the government to produce a workable clean energy target. He has supported four-square every government decision on counter-terrorism and national security.
Shorten plans to tap deeper the rushing current of concern over inequality. This weekend, he will step up his campaign against inequality.
On Saturday in Queensland he will propose ideas to address inequality in the workplace. On Sunday he will announce ideas to attack inequality in the tax system. Specifically, Labor will set out plans to curb the use of trusts to evade tax.
He has lost any support he might once have had from the business sector and he draws the disdain of Australia's power elites. A woman who operates in the upper reaches of Australian boardrooms says that she's "disgusted" that he fuels divisions over inequality for his political advantage.
He hasn't made much of an effort lately, either. Although Shorten talks of working with business, he has developed an offhand attitude to corporate chiefs.
Quite apart from promising a royal commission into the banks, basic relationships are suffering. Shorten has cancelled appointments with chief executives of major companies at short notice and not attempted to make amends.
Has Shorten merely got lucky? That the Coalition is divided into ideological camps, that Tony Abbott torments Turnbull's every waking moment, that One Nation has sapped Coalition support, that the times suit a Left-leaning party that has a natural constituency for redistributive politics?
Shorten's position on this is to quote the golfer Greg Norman: "The more I practise, the luckier I get."
Of course he's enjoyed luck. But he doesn't have any job security. If he stumbles, Anthony Albanese will be there to challenge him for the leadership. There's likely over a year to the next election and Turnbull is not going to give up lightly.
But Shorten knows what he's doing and where he wants his political identity to be by election day. When voters are asked, "what does Malcolm Turnbull stand for" does anybody have a clear idea? When they're asked, "what does Bill Shorten stand for," he wants them to answer, a fair go.
Shorten still has a lot of work to do. Labor is consistently ahead in the polls, but as the independent poll analyst John Stirton points out, Shorten's approval rating is the lowest of any opposition leader since Alexander Downer.
"You would much rather have Labor's poll numbers than the Coalition's," says Stirton, "but Shorten personally is underperforming Labor's numbers."
So Shorten needs to continue building. But consider the contrasting trajectories of the two leaders. Turnbull took the Liberal leadership with public expectations of messianic proportions, and has serially disappointed the people since. Shorten took Labor's leadership with the lowest of public expectations and has since outperformed.
He may not be the anointed one, but Bill Shorten is underdog no more.
Peter Hartcher is political editor.
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