Nobody likes Richard Marles (so how did he get so powerful?)

https://www.themonthly.com.au/august-2025/essays/nobody-likes-richard-marles-so-how-did-he-get-so-powerful
by Martin McKenzie-Murray

Despite his senior position in the government, his factional heft within the Labor Party and the critical importance of his portfolio, the defence minister is unusually lacking in enthusiastic supporters

Richard Marles has collected political foes like he’s collected snow globes – abundantly – and the former love to mock the latter. His office is filled with these trinkets, evidence of his worldliness and, according to those fond of him – or at least those who swim in the same factional waters – it’s a thoroughly trivial habit of which nothing meaningful can be said.

Perhaps this is true and it’s only his enemies’ pettiness that elevates the significance of these bloody things. Nonetheless, the snow globes are mocked wryly as a lame affectation and suggestive, they say, of a much grander and intolerable vanity.

The significance here is not the globes, but the fact that a considerable number of colleagues neither trust nor respect him and have spoken to me with unusual candour about their dislike. This is especially true after Marles’s blunt assertion of factional power in May – “a grubby and corrosive affair”, as one of his colleagues described it.

Marles was born in 1967 and raised in Geelong. He received his early education at Geelong Grammar, that great finishing school for British royalty, media tycoons and other dynastic families, and where his father once served as a house master.

From there, Marles entered the University of Melbourne, where he studied law, joined Young Labor, binged upon political biographies and dreamt of becoming prime minister. It was also here, as president of the student union, that he began assiduously cultivating influence.

This is all very normal for a man whose political ambition was fixed young, and the subsequent points of his résumé also conform to those of the modern Labor apparatchik: a brief and undistinguished legal career with Gordon Slater, legal officer at the Transport Workers’ Union, assistant secretary at the Australian Council of Trade Unions, and then, in 2006, his coup de grâce: winning preselection against the sitting Labor member Gavan O’Connor in the safe seat of Corio, the one that covers his native Geelong.

Marles was 38 at the time, and his anointment to contest the 2007 federal election is still remembered today for its brutality and the public unhappiness of O’Connor. The five-term local member, one of few Labor MPs to occupy a regional seat who actually worked the land himself, alleged that Marles was the beneficiary of branch-stacking and other ancient Labor chicanery. The Australian Electoral Commission declined to pursue an investigation after O’Connor couldn’t provide sufficient evidence.

In Victoria, at least, Labor’s process for preselection was unusually aggressive that year. After four consecutive losses to John Howard, there were few firewalls around sitting members and little patience for respecting occupancy and longevity, and no fewer than six Labor members faced challenges. The two other successful challengers were Bill Shorten and Mark Dreyfus, who entered parliament with Marles in the class of Kevin07. “It was an unusual bloodbath that year,” says one Labor insider who was close to that federal campaign. “It was reflective of impatience about successive [election] failures.”

In 2008, Marles gave his first speech to parliament. Mateship was a central theme. “Mateship is at the heart of our great military image, which is not Nelson standing on the deck of the Victory peering out at the French fleet as he was about to impose upon them a terrible defeat,” he said. “Nor is it a group of American marines raising the flag on the heights of Iwo Jima in an emphatic symbol of victory. No, our great military image is of a medic leading a donkey, on the back of which is an injured digger – one Australian helping another, a mate helping a mate.”

Ask certain colleagues to reflect upon those words today and you’ll cop an earful.

Those close to Marles describe to me a “lifelong nerd” and long student of military strategy and geopolitical affairs. His careful development of factional power, one close ally says, is always to a public end. “He sees the accumulation of power as a way to achieve outcomes, to enact policy change,” they say. “He’s literally motivated by that. He also is an extraordinarily intelligent man, and he knows that in order to be a preselected candidate, to be a member of parliament, to be a minister, there are certain steps that he had to take.”

In other words, the ally says, Marles was at first enchanted by loftier things – history and political change – but applied his intelligence equally to politicking, so that he might assume the power to render public change. “After he did his articles, he knows that he has to be involved in the labour movement if he wants to become a senior politician. He’s learnt that he had to do politics. He does legal work for the TWU and becomes an intrinsic part of that union. Then he’s promoted into the ACTU. But his eyes are on a bigger prize in terms of a seat in federal parliament. He has a background in Geelong, and he meticulously pursues the recruitment of members to the party.”

Others close to Marles speak of his natural warmth and relative cuddliness; the fact that he radiates far less severe preoccupation than other senior politicians. “Bill [Shorten] could be funny and charismatic, but equally he could be intimidating,” one Labor staffer says. “Richard is much warmer. In politics, loyalty can be inspired by kindness or fear, and I think Richard encourages it with kindness. He’s assumed power, sometimes brutally, but I don’t think that side of it comes naturally to him.”

But in the funhouse mirrors of politics there’s no single prevailing view of anyone, and one finds a very different portrait of Marles from others. From sceptics both within caucus and outside it, that warmth is described as well practised to better conceal a forked-tongue and prodigious ambition.

The alternative profile to the cuddly nerd and student of history is of a man possessed by unusual vanity. A man who considers himself a gifted orator but who offers overwrought platitudes. A man incapable of speaking fluently off-the-cuff, who obsesses over memorising his prepared speeches to suggest a better command of language than he has.

Several critics, from within his federal caucus as well as the trade union movement, pointed to ACTU assistant secretary Marles’s conspicuous absence during the Your Rights at Work campaign – one of the most significant union campaigns in recent memory, conceived to fight Howard’s changes to workplace laws, and which heavily coloured the 2007 election. “His career is striking for its complete lack of achievement,” one senior Labor colleague says. “In fact, the absence of achievement has stunned me. He had a completely undistinguished career as assistant secretary to Greg Combet [at the ACTU], where he was sent to [Papua New Guinea] to work on their embryonic trade union. He now boasts about his deep knowledge of PNG – but one might like to contemplate why he was there in the first place. I’m bemused by this. My observation of his time [at the ACTU] is that he wasn’t used at all during Your Rights at Work … Almost no one rates him. I’ve never rated him as anyone with any talent. And where was he in the recent campaign? He’s just not a vote winner.”

Of Marles’s assistant secretaryship, one veteran union official tells me: “Look, I’ll say this – he’s more formidable as a politician than he ever was as a trade unionist.”

Richard Marles and Bill Shorten were once close. The final break in their friendship, according to several who know both men, followed Shorten’s surprise loss to Scott Morrison in the 2019 federal election. The nature of their fracture, though, has at least two characterisations. Those wary of Marles say that he praised Shorten during the campaign even as he anticipated his old friend’s loss. And that after Morrison’s “miracle” victory and the sudden evaporation of Shorten’s influence, Marles withdrew his sympathies and was eerily cold as he plotted his place within a party that would now presumably be led by Anthony Albanese.

The story from those close to Marles is, effectively, that Shorten is a big baby. That he’d had two attempts to become prime minister, enjoyed the full and disciplined support of the party’s apparatus, but had nonetheless shit the bed and become embittered. Marles never expected Shorten’s loss, they say, he’d merely considered his position in the event of it – his self-interest was entirely proper and normal. “The tragedy with Bill is that Richard and Anthony didn’t do anything,” one factional ally of Marles says. “Bill had full power and got whatever he wanted from 2016. The party was structured around him becoming prime minister and he fucked it. Bill can be bitter and direct his anger at whoever, if that’s how you deal with your trauma, but Bill has no one to blame but Bill himself. And then Bill stuck around, throwing stones and taking his anger out about losing on Albo.”

Marles and Shorten have known each other since they were teenagers. They once dreamt and plotted together, if not always harmoniously. Marles was best man at Shorten’s first wedding. But after 2019, as Shorten flamed out and Marles was elected deputy leader, the Member for Corio was pledging allegiance to Albanese while quietly hoovering up the numbers of yesterday’s man.

But you know what they say: if you want a friend in politics, get a snow globe. Or a private RAAF service.

Labor won big in May, and the factional complexion of its federal caucus changed accordingly. Nationally, the left increased its representation and so did Victorian MPs, which obliged a reconfiguration of the ministry to maintain factional equilibrium – or, at least, it did if the prime minister didn’t intervene.

He didn’t. “I think [Albanese] likes having a kind of dull deputy who does dirty work on his behalf and cops the blame,” one Labor insider says. And so, as chieftain of the Victorian right, Marles flexed his muscle and chose the casualties, while still retaining his faction’s numbers in the ministry by promoting acolytes to its fringes. The principal casualties were the New South Wales right’s Ed Husic, minister for innovation, and the Victorian right’s Mark Dreyfus, the attorney-general. While Dreyfus is notionally from Marles’s faction, he has long been effectively indifferent to the machinations of factional warfare.

The sudden and savage demotion of Husic and Dreyfus – two of the better and brighter members of cabinet – was rationalised to me by Marles’s people as an act of bloodless calculus: unfortunate, perhaps, but entirely impersonal. “The factional arrangements have a balance,” they say. “There’s a quota. And it’s a brutal, brutal, brutal game, but it’s the game you play. Everyone’s being hunted all the time.”

There is no law that obliges the factional quota, and theoretically grace and flexibility can be appealed to. Plenty within the federal Labor caucus were angered by Marles’s flex, and none see the promotion of the publicly obscure Sam Rae and Daniel Mulino to the outer ministry, at the cost of Husic and Dreyfus, as meritorious.

In May, not long after his demotion to the backbench, Husic memorably expressed his anger on the ABC’s Insiders program: “We’ve had bare-faced ambition and a deputy prime minister wield a factional club to reshape the ministry. And I think when people look at a deputy prime minister they expect to see a statesman, not a factional assassin.”

When I share the rationalisation of Marles’s allies with some of those within Labor’s federal caucus who were aggrieved by the demotions – that it was numbers, baby, pure calculus – they are appalled. “How is it bloodless? There’s blood everywhere,” they say. “It’s monstrous. There was cruelty and a lack of care. What about respect, grace, acknowledgment? What about thanks for these two – people who have contributed and achieved far more than Marles has? And what message does it send to the wider party?”

Marles’s folks suggest to me that a more appropriate target for Husic’s spleen would have been his NSW right colleagues Chris Bowen and Tony Burke. “It was up to the NSW right to determine who they shot, and they shot Ed,” one says. “I think Tony Burke is one of the most tactically brilliant politicians in the country, and extremely underrated, but in the fog of war around the very brutal execution of Dreyfus, the NSW right has been able to distract from their own bloody hands by pinning it on Richard.”

The obvious flaw of Labor’s factional system is that it too often rewards those whose only gift is greasing its machinery. It rewards those who reward it, and in writing this I thought of Andrew Leigh, the federal member for the Australian Capital Territory seat of Fenner. With fellow Canberran Alicia Payne, Leigh is one of only two Labor MPs not factionally aligned – an independence Leigh has maintained since his election to parliament in 2010.

Such independence amounts to an anti-Faustian pact, and Leigh’s factional aloofness has condemned him to the margins. He’s currently the assistant minister for productivity, competition, charities and treasury – the hinterlands – and what I’ve long thought to be his considerable intelligence and decency is largely reserved for his books and local constituents. (To protect Leigh from the inevitable parlour games that follow from such stories as this, we have spoken several times over the years, but not for this essay.)

For many within Labor’s federal caucus, Leigh’s independence is a form of exotic martyrdom. “I’ve counselled Andrew to join a faction,” one senior Labor figure tells me. “That’s the vehicle for promotion and achievement in this party. But he won’t be beholden to factions.”

If Leigh’s independence is ineffectual and vain – and certainly it has imposed a severe ceiling to his career – then we might also ponder its opposite. Ruthlessness is typically rationalised as a means to an end, but what happens when the means is the end?

Critics of Marles tell me that the “noble rationalisation” of politicking and factional cannibalism – that the assumption of power is unpretty but necessary, and that leadership requires strong stomachs – must be measured against achievement. While Marles is now the Victorian right’s chieftain, defence minister and deputy prime minister, those snow globes rest upon the rubble of many deals, compromises and spoilt friendships. “He ain’t Keating,” one Labor MP says. “He ain’t Hawke. There are people who’ve achieved mighty things in this party – he’s not one of them. If you’re Whitlam, Keating, Hawke, Button, you can say, ‘Well, I needed to do those things. I needed to plot and scheme.’ But I’m left wondering about his corresponding achievements. There’s none. It’s just been plotting and scheming.”

Two years ago, before Donald Trump’s return to the White House, Marles was reflecting upon the US alliance in a private conversation shared with me. Marles thought Australia and America were “mature and curious” countries, and that bilateral discussions about increasing a US military presence – which the AUKUS arrangement all but obliges – were being held thoughtfully.

The characterisation of the United States as mature and curious is less applicable today, as an erratic president possessed of authoritarian impulses threatens or imposes punitive tariffs upon old allies. There is a residual anti-Americanism within the Labor left, one that’s been electrified by Trump’s resumption of the presidency, though scepticism about our alliance – or the wisdom of AUKUS – has never been tolerated within the party.

“It’s obviously a fraught issue,” one former prime ministerial staffer says of our US alliance. “Even those who support the alliance – even if it’s not fulsome support, but thought the lesser of two evils – today, with Trump, that pragmatism is undermined and less palatable.”

Privately, Marles counsels forbearance: the alliance is older, tougher and richer than the Trump presidency. He will be gone in less than four years, and we must grin and bear some turbulence. In fact, he is fond of citing the Serenity Prayer in this context: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference”.

Critics of Marles’s position – of which Paul Keating is perhaps the most prominent – say that his faith in the US alliance is anachronistic, undermines our sovereignty and, by tethering ourselves so tightly to the United States, undermines our strategic flexibility. “When Marles talks about America, I think he’s talking about an old one, an illusory one,” James Curran says. Curran is a former intelligence officer with the Office of National Assessments, and is now professor of political and diplomatic history at the University of Sydney and a columnist for the Australian Financial Review. “There’s a real sense of us still needing to be wanted, a desire for reassurance. But the America that Marles thinks of is in its twilight.”

Andrew Carr is an associate professor at the Australian National University’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. He carefully balances fear and repulsion of the US president with the broader decline of US primacy, of which Trump is merely a symptom, not a cause. “Trump is a lot of talk, but he’s not fundamentally changing a lot of things,” Carr says. “Every US president since Nixon, with the Guam Doctrine, and certainly Reagan, has tried to push for much greater burden sharing – has tried to get allies to do a hell of a lot more. A lot of them have done it by being nice and gentle, and reassuring the allies. And the allies have said, well, thanks, and then not really done much on defence. Trump is trying a very different technique. In the short term, it’s working, but I have my doubts about the longer term. But while he criticises publicly, he isn’t actually ripping up a lot of the infrastructure in quite fundamental ways. And so, it’s likely that he will be replaced by someone who will move back towards the mean, in many ways, in terms of how the US establishment is operating. Biden carried on many elements of Trump without a huge controversy.

“At the same time, US primacy is over. The United States’ dominant position and its capacity to deter just by its desire to say so, or its capacity to get other countries to negotiate, is fundamentally diminishing. And you’re seeing the whole region changing. Even if things go back to a more establishment and capable basis, you’re not likely to see a return to where the US was 20 years ago.”

In 2021, when Scott Morrison announced the trilateral security arrangement AUKUS, Labor was “infamously” given a mere 24 hours’ notice. This, obviously, was insufficient time for the opposition to study the arrangement, much less arrive at a sophisticated position on such a massively consequential policy. Nonetheless, it found Albanese’s immediate and effusive support.

The prevailing view among defence analysts, political commentators and even those within Labor caucus is an unsurprising one: that the Labor Party, just six months from the 2022 election, was terrified of gifting the Morrison government a wedge they would undoubtedly use to ratify public suspicion that Labor was inherently weaker on national security. “They wanted zero daylight between themselves and the Morrison government,” Curran says. “It’s almost unthinkable that today’s Labor Party would do what Bob Hawke did in ’83 and come into office and review the ANZUS Treaty – which is what Hawke did. Now, he may well have done that with a political position in mind – that is, to enable the left of the party to get everything off their chest about not only the tensions of the Whitlam and Nixon years, but also their opposition to US intelligence facilities on Australian soil. Nevertheless, you couldn’t imagine the Labor Party doing that now.”

Immediately after Labor won the 2022 federal election, Marles was anxious to comfort the Biden White House about Australia’s commitment to AUKUS and the alliance generally, and sent an informal envoy to achieve that. Zero daylight.

The Western Australian Labor MP Josh Wilson is the only member of the party’s federal caucus I know of who has spoken publicly about his opposition to AUKUS, but internal dissent is far broader than Wilson’s lone voice suggests. One cabinet member told me that no debate was brokered by the party, whether that be in party conference, caucus or cabinet itself – a fact that infuriated them.

Carr, while broadly supportive of AUKUS, says the recent history of defence strategy enjoying bipartisan support starves defence policy of debate and consideration – a fact helped by our peace and complacency. “I think bipartisanship came about for good motives,” Carr says. “It was about a genuine basis of agreement between the parties about the importance of the alliance, the importance of the UN, the importance of cooperating with and focusing on Asia … and it was done with the idea that this was too important an area to allow bitter partisan disputes. But I think what it has meant in practice is that you have a generation who – partly because of bipartisanship, partly because we’ve just lived in an incredibly safe and secure part of the world – haven’t really thought about defence policy for all of their careers. And the smartest and most capable advisers tend not to go, until very recently, into defence portfolios. And the best ministers don’t often want – again, until very recently – to be in the defence portfolio.”

One more hawkish criticism of Marles as defence minister is the discrepancy between rhetoric and expenditure. Marles has repeatedly stressed the historic instability of our times – lines echoed in last year’s Defence Review. But while Marles announced last year an increase in defence spending, closer inspection reveals that the majority is pegged to the back end of the next decade, and the vast majority is on AUKUS. “[W]e’ve seen the 2020 Defence Strategic Update, the 2023 Defence Strategic Review and the 2024 National Defence Strategy,” wrote Marcus Hellyer, head of research at Strategic Analysis Australia, in The Australian last month, “each intoning that our strategic circumstances have worsened since the previous ponderous document and are the worst they have been since World War II, that we need new capabilities, and that time is of the essence. But the funding hasn’t matched that narrative.”

James Curran sees the US alliance as necessary, but nonetheless unthinking and habituated – strategic contemplation often extends only so far as managing the relationship. But about the discrepancy noted by Hellyer, he emphatically agrees: “Labor’s legacy from this term in government might be that it wasn’t able to arrest this sense that Australia, whilst once celebrating itself as being on the front line and taking on China, nevertheless was not able to get its defence capability and readiness anywhere close to matching what its rhetoric points to or suggests.”

If Hawke’s review of the ANZUS Treaty was merely a gift of catharsis for the left of his party, there has been no such gift today. Nonetheless, the right of the party is derisive of what they see as the left’s naive indifference to strategic contemplation. One Marles ally told me that the anti-US left should follow their train of logic: what would withdrawal from, or the serious unstitching of, the US alliance look like? What alternative is there? Would we then be prepared to dramatically increase military spending at the cost of other public investments? Would we entertain national conscription? How might we develop our own sophisticated military industries?

There are no obvious answers, no clear alternatives. Andrew Carr says that Labor’s earnestness to endorse the status quo has robbed it of flexibility and a distinctive tongue. “I think that having locked into this bipartisan support, they’re kind of locked within a kind of intellectual and political framework that they’ve built,” he says. “They haven’t built the legitimacy for significant change, and they haven’t got the language or the clear policy structures for driving those big alternatives. And so their job now is to implement what they’d endorsed coming into power, and it’s almost impossible to see a fundamental change unless someone else changes that door for them. For good political reasons, they’ve built a box for themselves.”

For now, Richard Marles lives inside that box – either as a deluded US sycophant, or a thoughtful pragmatist distinguished by a lifetime of contemplating geopolitical strategy. But as committed as he is to the portfolio, his aim is higher. And however poorly colleagues or pundits might rate his chances of becoming prime minister, Marles would rate them higher. Like his old mate Bill, he’s dreamt of it all his life.