Sheehan on Shorten

Dollar signs turn survivors into heroes - Paul Sheehan - Opinion - smh.com.au

Paul Sheehan takes a very cynical look at the whole mines affair (he even seems to think it is rather distasteful of the rescued to be taking about money.)

What interests me, though, is Sheehan's take on the media savvy (and potential future Labor Party leader) Bill Shorten:

Shorten is entitled to take whatever the media will give him. He did his job well and may be a good bloke, but it needs to be pointed out that he harvested a massive amount of credulous treacle from the media and the normally feral letter-writers simply for spinning a public relations job on behalf of a union which is part of a larger power structure, the militant, trench-warfare Victorian union culture that Shorten has shown no signs of wanting to reform.

For this is the same Bill Shorten who comes out of the Victorian Labor Right faction led by Australia's political Frankenstein, Senator Stephen Conroy. The same Bill Shorten who recently engineered a safe, red-ribbon seat in Federal Parliament by the usual route of branch-stacking, factional deals and backstabbing, tipping out Bob Sercombe, the soon to be ex federal member for Maribyrnong. The same Bill Shorten backed by Victorian state MP, George Seitz, described in The Age on Saturday as "perhaps Victoria's worst, certainly its most crafty and long-lived, practitioner [of branch-stacking]". The same Bill Shorten supported by Sang Nguyen, long-time mobiliser of Vietnamese votes for Senator Conroy's factional wars.

I don't think Sheehan feels all that kindly towards him.