AWU mates give Bill Shorten a hearty good-bye as he moves to Canberra

Speech given by AWU National Secretary Paul Howes at the Tribute Dinner for former National Secretary Bill Shorten in Melbourne on December 13, 2007.

How can we believe that it is just three weeks and two days ago when Peter Costello and John Howard sat together on the same TV couch and swore undying love; told us all of their inevitable seamless succession.

Peter held his smirk that night as he tried to convince us of his love for John.

But now it all seems centuries ago. Part of ancient history lessons. An age of tyranny. A pair of crazy emperors that are no more.

It's just two weeks and five days since election night - but that too already feels like generations ago - and a lot of us are still adjusting.

Adjusting to the sheer wonder of never having to hear John Howard's mingy little carping and sneering voice again.

Brothers and sisters, decency has prevailed.

In the most important election since 1972 - or possibly ever in our political history - we have prevailed.

We have come through.

It was a night that saw a true sea-change in our nation, a transformation which recognizes that organised labour has a role to play in our great nation - has a role to play in rebuilding the values of our nation, has a role to play in reintroducing decency and justice for all working Australians in their daily lives.

Because on election night we saw one of those rare seismic shifts in history that mark out, secure and nail down the coming shape of a people's future.

It is our task now to hammer out that shape and call it Australia, call it Australian freedom and decency, ensure that we can remember it and call it by that great Labor value - a new 'Light on the Hill', the new fair go for all.

We must, we can, grasp this opportunity to rebuild these

'Light on the Hill' values - so our children and grandchildren

We will never again have a chance like this, we will never again have such a clear mandate for change.

We should never forget those television ads which daily brought into our lounge rooms the awful reality of life under Howard's radical work laws.

One hundred and twenty-one years of sacrifice and set- back, of dead ends and rethinks, of scabs and betrayals and let-downs and royal commissions and narrow escapes, have brought us to this brief patch of time in which we will be made or broken, in which we will conquer or suffer eternal decline, and we must not waste it, we must not waste it, on trivialities.

Now is the time for unity in our great movement.

We must use it well. We must use the strength we have, and the tools we have, and the friends we have, and seize the day.

We must be proud of what we have done; proud of our union which helped fight the good fight - especially in that crucial state for this Federal election - Queensland.

And there will be one person we should be specially proud of not just because of his place in this past election.

Bill Shorten might have moved on to Canberra but those of us who have worked with him as proud Australian Workers' Union people will always remember that when great and sometimes controversial tasks are put before him - he does not shirk away from the job.

We need to accept that the AWU has gone through some troubled times in the not too distant past.

And it was Bill who faced up to those troubles , took on the task reclaim the proud traditions of our union by re-focusing our organisation on the members; their families and their communities.

Bill took us back to the basics, and made us once more a proud union for the members, a union which stands by its membership in whatever struggles we face - struggles which have been all too plenty over the last decade or more.

Bill Shorten sat down the AWU leadership and looked at new ways to organise members and to organize the un- organised. The result today is that in 2007 we can safely boast that proud AWU members are part of a strong union, a union with a long history in the labour movement, a union which is the biggest blue-collar organisation in this country.

Now that he has gone to Canberra I know that he will make us all proud.

We know he will make us proud because Bill Shorten has a clear, uncluttered vision, a sure hand on whatever tiller has been put before him, bounless energy, bravery in contest, invisible violence in the scrums, a capacity to make friends instantly that stay friends lifelong, a sense both of what is possible and what nonetheless must be, a map of what is to come, and how it must be fixed, and fixed in our time, and a good bloke to have a beer and share a joke with as well.

It would be wrong to offend his modesty by saying much more than this, but I feel I should add one thing.

The union movement in this country at the moment is enjoying enormous credibility and we as a movement must realize that we owe Bill Shorten much of our present credibility.

In just thirteen days at Beaconsfield, seizing the hour, he turned unionists in the public mind from gangsterish villains into national heroes.

He illustrated the self-sacrifice which is the core of our movement, and the striving for social betterment which is its beating heart.

He showed people skills - people skills which Tony Abbott could only dream of - a capacity to engage, and charm, and soothe, and stir hope among a devastated Tasmanian community, an inquisitive nation, and a union movement more buffeted by government onslaught than it had been in a hundred years.

He gave us in those two weeks I believe that spark of hope that, ignited, and helped give us government.

Without him, and without the surrounding inspiration of the people of Beaconsfield, the Liberal Party's union-thug ads might have worked, and we might today be looking down years of hopelessness, at the Minchin WorkChoice amendments, and then the Costello WorkChoice amendments, to the tyranny we already had, and the very extinction of unionism in our national life and our culture.

It's not going too far to say that Bill, with his people skills, and his ability to play the moment to advantage, and stay on message, and rally the troops made that difference to our national life, to succeed where others might have failed, to go the extra mile beyond exhaustion, beyond the last aching misery of sleeplessness, and so prevail.

I am more than aware that these are big boots to fill, a big torch to hold in succession to such a man, to such an AWU legend.

Parented by unionists, energised by Jesuits, and the radical ferment of Monash in the 1980s - a ferment that for a while enthused even Peter Costello -- Bill was quickly a graduate in Arts and Law and in his middle twenties an organiser for the AWU.

Campaigning and attracting to this oldest of unions - the union of John Curtin, William Spence, Dame Mary Gilmore, Mick Young, Laurie Short and the Shearer's strike ... and Waltzing Matilda -- oil and gas workers, jockeys, fruit-pickers and netball players, while simultaneously getting and reading and thinking widely about unionism in a global, ageing world, and the challenges of Asia, and how it all fits in.

He reformed, restructured and revived a tainted and shrinking organisation into a new powerful and growing union.

He worked out new ways, new tools of negotiation, to get into non-union workplaces and achieve the solidarity of the steel, aluminium, glass, public sector, manufacturing and aviation workers in an era when the whole notion of unionism was under threat, when Reith and Corrigan and their redefinitions of what a workplace was showed how determined they were on our extermination.

By 2001 he was also the union's National Secretary and the most admired new broom in decades, articulating with what you might call disarming, forensic, logical, humorous ferocity and self-mocking clarity his calling and his goals.

He put in the hard yards, and the midnight oil, and the difficult balance of his marriage to Deb and a home he loved and a job that flung him round the globe.

And in the mere two thousand days we had him here at the top of our union, he changed, I believe, the big picture forever for Australian working families, and all of us were lucky to know him, and to share his exhaustion, and the pursuit of his testing, and punishing and always luminous cause we are the better for it.

And in the true test of a great leader he training up and sought out the next generation of union leaders - ensuring stability in our organisation for the future.

So it has come to pass that the AWU I've inherited now has 135,000 members, about four times as many as the Liberal Party, five times as many as they'll have this time next week!!

This is Bill's legacy, along with his clarity of thought, and his audacity of hope, and it's a kind of splendid misery for me, as his former deputy and successor, to see him go.

He's forty, he's an MP.

He is a Parliamentary Secretary but knowing Bill he won't be there for very long.

Talent like his will out. It will prevail. It will have its day. Bill Shorten's life thus far has been a good and honourable chapter of the Australian dream, of rising without particular advantages through educational opportunities and energetic determination through communal approval and tumultuous times to leadership of a core group, and the highest offices in the land.

His is an egalitarian saga of advancement and praise as yet incomplete that has glory, perhaps, ahead of it, and certainly a song or two.

Please charge your glasses as we toast one of the greatest leaders our union and our movement, my mate, a true leader of the working Australian - Bill Shorten.