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Colleagues deride the defence minister as vain and too enthusiastic about the trappings of office – but his factional power makes him a possibility to succeed the prime minister. By Jason Koutsoukis.
Is Richard Marles more than ‘two boots sticking out of Albo’s bum’?
In late April, Richard Marles applied to use the RAAF’s special purpose aircraft for a trip to Hawaii, to meet with ministerial counterparts. The travel wasn’t unusual – the defence minister is a regular on the military jet. This time, however, Anthony Albanese personally intervened.
“Because Albo is a plane nut, and a logistics nut, he’d worked out that the Min Def would gain a day crossing the international date line,” says a government official briefed on the matter. “So Albo booted it back and said the flight could be done commercially.”
The episode is illustrative of Marles’s style as defence minister. Colleagues say he is too enthusiastic about the trappings of office. Some describe him as vain.
Last financial year, he spent $3.6 million on VIP military flights. He was the government’s highest spending member after the prime minister. Reports suggest he frequently used the jet to get from his electorate to Canberra, rather than driving to get a commercial flight.
When he is abroad, he collects snow domes. He also collects pins and lanyards. He likes to count the countries he has visited and recently boasted to colleagues that he had made it to more than 100.
A former ally says the minister can “fake sincerity beautifully”. He does it when praising other ministers or responding to crises.
“It’s quite magnificent. It’s his superpower,” the former ally says. “The thing about Richard is that he appears so cuddly and teddy-bearish that you don’t see him coming. He benefits a lot from people underestimating him, because he is a killer. It’s just incredibly well disguised.”
Another Labor source notes Marles’s talent for currying favour and ingratiating himself with those in positions of power
above him.
“He has all the sincerity of a lap dance,” the source says. “If ever you can’t find Richard,” another source says, “just look for two boots sticking out of Albo’s bum. He’s like a homing pigeon.”
Marles’s parliamentary colleagues attribute his unshakable self-belief and sense of entitlement to his time as a boarder at Geelong Grammar, Australia’s most exclusive school, where his father, Donald, was a teacher and housemaster.
He trades on his connection with King Charles III, who also attended the school, regularly exchanging Christmas cards with Sir Clive Alderton, Charles’s principal private secretary.
Rising through the ranks of Labor student politics at the University of Melbourne, where he earnt degrees in law and science, Marles worked as a solicitor at prominent Labor law firm Slater and Gordon before moving to the powerful Transport Workers’ Union, long a stamping ground for members of the Victorian Labor Right.
A legal officer and later assistant federal secretary of the TWU, in 2000 Marles moved across to the Australian Council of Trade Unions, where he served as assistant secretary under Greg Combet.
Whatever Marles’s political reputation at the time, Combet, a future minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments and now chairman of the Future Fund, was wary enough to deny Marles an office on the ACTU’s sixth floor, where Combet and the other assistant secretaries were located, instead banishing Marles to the fifth floor.
Marles, who is now 57, spent the next seven years at the ACTU further entrenching himself in the Victorian ALP and planning a move into federal parliament, eventually setting his sights on the seat of Corio, which takes in Victoria’s second-largest city, Geelong.
Corio was occupied at the time by Gavan O’Connor, who was unwilling to stand aside, but Marles went in for the kill, winning Labor preselection for the 2007 federal election.
“He beheaded Gavan,” says one close observer of that preselection. “There were a number of other tough preselections in that round, but that was easily the most brutal. That was when everyone finally understood how ruthless Marles can be. He didn’t win that on his own, but he wielded the knife.”
Consumed by the need to keep pace with fellow Victorian MPs such as David Feeney and Bill Shorten, both of whom he got to know well in student politics, Marles nevertheless had to wait his turn.
“Richard was very shitty that Bill was promoted after the 2007 election and he wasn’t, and he went to people like Mark Arbib and all of the other NSW people to get promoted, and eventually he was promoted,” said one of Marles’s colleagues at the time, referring to the NSW Right powerbroker.
Finally securing promotion as parliamentary secretary for innovation and industry in 2009, and later as parliamentary secretary for Pacific Island affairs and parliamentary secretary for foreign affairs, by 2013 Marles was in cabinet, serving briefly as trade minister during Kevin Rudd’s second stint as prime minister.
During Labor’s nine years in opposition, Marles served in shadow cabinet as Labor’s spokesman for immigration and border protection, and for five years as defence spokesman. But it was the night of the 2019 election, and Labor’s devastating and unexpected loss to Scott Morrison, that proved one of the most consequential in Marles’s career.
On election day morning, Marles sent then leader Bill Shorten a long text message ruminating on the years they had spent working together, and how it would be the honour of Marles’s life to work with him as prime minister. Later that night when the results became clear, with Shorten frantically trying to assess what might happen next, Marles failed to return Shorten’s phone calls. He remained out of contact throughout the night and right through the next day.
Instead, Marles was busy plotting his own future. Joining a phone hook-up on election night with Anthony Albanese, Tony Burke and other party powerbrokers, Marles helped stitch up a deal that would see Albanese installed as the next leader, with Marles as his deputy. The same deal made Marles the most powerful factional leader in Victoria, undercutting Shorten and shutting him out of a future tilt at the Labor leadership.
“Richard knows how to exercise power in the party, which is very important,” says former Labor defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon, who served alongside Marles in parliament before retiring in 2022. “I’ve said the same thing about Albo. To exercise power in the party, you have to understand the party and know absolutely how it works and how to secure outcomes out of the party processes, and Richard is somebody who can do that.”
After Albanese won the 2022 election, Marles, as Labor’s deputy leader, had his choice of portfolio, opting for defence, which he viewed as satisfying his interests in foreign affairs and the South Pacific.
Overseeing the implementation of the AUKUS policy inherited from the Morrison government, as well as the Defence Strategic Review and the release earlier this year of the 2024 National Defence Strategy, Marles has won praise and fierce criticism for many of the decisions he has taken.
“You can be the best defence minister since federation, but if you can’t take the party with you in terms of strategic and defence policy, then you’re not going to be as effective, so he ticks that box,” says Fitzgibbon. “He is genuinely and deeply interested in foreign and strategic and defence policy, and always has been, so he understands the policy issues, which is another big tick.”
From across the aisle, former Liberal defence minister Christopher Pyne also has praise for Marles, despite their obvious political differences.
“Richard’s best decision was to embrace AUKUS and continuous shipbuilding in Australia at Osborne and Henderson,” says Pyne, who observed Marles in parliament for more than 12 years and now works as a lobbyist for weapons companies.
“His political style is to seek common ground with his internal and external opponents for the perceived greater good without compromising Labor values. He is good at listening, synthesising and delivering messages and outcomes in which almost everyone feels they have a stake in the success of the enterprise.”
Marles has also maintained the respect and the backing of the prime minister.
“He’s very close to the boss,” says one senior member of Albanese’s team. “It’s a very warm and very good relationship. There is a lot of mutual trust, which is good, and they’re very complementary in terms of their style and their policy interests.”
Still, if advancing AUKUS has won Marles praise in some quarters, it has made him the enemy of those within the party who remain furiously opposed to the pact, in particular former prime minister Paul Keating and other Labor figures including Gareth Evans, Bob Carr and Barry Jones.
Marles has also faced criticism for not doing enough to boost defence spending, with his detractors arguing that the $5.7 billion additional funding allocated to defence over the next four years does not match the scale of the strategic challenges Australia faces. Marles, for his part, has consistently maintained that $5.7 billion is the biggest commitment in terms of increasing the defence budget over the forward estimates in decades.
Marles has attracted criticism for being the only government minister to have a standalone ministerial office besides his electorate office, which was established on Geelong’s waterfront at a cost of more than $600,000. Marles made his request for the additional office space just 13 days after Labor won the federal election in 2022.
About the same time, Marles vowed that when in Canberra he would work out of an office at the Australian Defence Force headquarters in Russell. Yet when Marles learnt that $800,000 had been spent creating an office for him, with his name embossed on the door and a view across Lake Burley Griffin, he made it clear he would not be using the office.
Marles has also faced problems within his office. On October 10, his chief of staff, Jo Tarnawsky, went public with allegations that she had effectively been barred from the office in late April after she raised concerns about bullying within the office – although not by Marles. Asked about the episode in parliament, Marles said: “Let me say that, in the way in which I’ve tried to manage this, I have done so with Jo’s welfare in mind at every moment.”
Another issue that rankles Marles’s critics is his insistence on putting his “Deputy Prime Minister” title ahead of his Defence Minister title on all his official correspondence, letterhead and media transcripts.
“The office of deputy prime minister has no actual power, it means nothing, it was just something that was established after Harold Holt drowned and a formal process was needed to establish who acts in the role of prime minister in the event that the prime minister of the day fell under a bus, or in Holt’s case drowned,” says one of Marles’s caucus colleagues. “Defence Minister is the title that carries actual power and authority. It’s just Marles’s vanity that we see him insist on using this ridiculous DPM acronym.”
Which leads to Canberra’s favourite parlour game: who is next in line for leader?
While much of the speculation so far has focused on Treasurer Jim Chalmers, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, the hard reality of the current numbers makes Marles a more likely successor than most people appear to understand.
“First thing, ignore the rules around leadership contests that Kevin Rudd introduced, because all you need to know about that is that the leader of the day can change those rules,” says one Labor caucus member. “The second thing to know is that not only does Richard enjoy Albo’s backing, but he’s got Don Farrell in his corner as well, the most powerful numbers man in the caucus, plus most of the Victorians. Richard is not the anointed successor but rule him out at your peril.”
Joel Fitzgibbon agrees.
“Albo is what – he’s 61, he has been there since 1996, he’s doing a great job, but he won’t be there forever, and therefore there has to be a successor,” Fitzgibbon says.
“And I think any fair-minded person in the caucus or the party room will tell you that Richard’s name ranks right at the top of those potential successors. He has the ability, he’s in the majority faction – the Right – and he has very strong support within that majority faction. So Richard simply has to be part of that equation.”
Marles declined a request for an interview.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 26, 2024 as "Is Richard Marles more than ‘two boots sticking out of Albo’s bum’?".
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