Do we like them?

Do we like Bill Shorten?

Our score: 6 out of 10. His voting record is solidly on the side of LGBTQ+ people, workers and climate action, but the search tools gave out before we could check his court record or conduct.

Bill Shorten was born in Melbourne in 1967, trained as a lawyer and joined the union movement in 1994. He rose to national secretary of the Australian Workers Union and became the member for Maribyrnong in 2007. He first came to national attention as the public face of the Beaconsfield mine disaster.

His political reputation has a sharp edge. He was one of the so-called “faceless men” behind the 2010 removal of Kevin Rudd as prime minister, and he switched his loyalty back to Rudd in June 2013. He then became Labor leader in 2013 and held the job until 2019. He served as a minister for workplace relations, education, financial services and superannuation, and as assistant treasurer. He belongs to Labor's right faction.

The gap in this file is the other half: we could not check court records, allegations or his own recent words, and nothing here shows what he has been up to lately. Treat the good-person result as unresolved rather than a bad mark. On the votes alone he is a pretty safe pair of hands.