Crabb and Marr: Power and Personality

David Marr and Annabel Crabb

Flashback to pre-election 2010: Malcolm Turnbull, the recently ditched Liberal Party leader, was unsure if he’d stand again for the seat of Wentworth. Meanwhile, Bill Shorten was among the first-term ‘faceless men’ who’d removed a sitting Labor Prime Minister and installed another.

A week is a long time in politics, but six years is an eternity. Today, Turnbull and Shorten are the dominant figures on the political landscape. In this discussion at the Athenaeum Theatre, two of the sharpest minds in Australian journalism – Annabel Crabb and David Marr –  discuss two of the most powerful men in Australia: Turnbull and Shorten.

Marr’s incisive 2015 Quarterly Essay, ‘Faction Man’, traced Shorten’s career as a formidable campaigner, recruiter and Labor warrior to factional heavy and eventual leader. Crabb has drawn on extensive interviews with Turnbull himself for her new book, Stop at Nothing, which details his past lives and adventures, as well as the challenges he’s faced from within the Liberal Party. If anyone can shed light on these fascinating and powerful figures, and their recent political manoeuvres, it’s these two writers.

So: what's changed since they wrote their essays? What do Crabb and Marr see as the most pressing complications for both Turnbull and Shorten, and for Australia's voting public? Who and what influences these politicians … and what's love got to do with it?

Listen as Marr and Crabb share a lively, illuminating conversation about political personalities and the will to power.