Election campaigns now focus on party leaders. Two recent accounts of Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shoten, with covers dressed respectively in blue and red, tell an engaging story about the two leaders.
Together they raise two questions: Do the qualities of leaders matter much? And what insight do the leaders' stories provide into the likely achievements of the government they would lead?
David Marr's Faction Man: Bill Shorten's Pursuit of Power and Annabel Crabb's Stop at Nothing: The Life and Adventures of Malcolm Turnbull display the clear and lively writing, unostentatious research and strong argument that we have learned to expect from Black Inc publications and these two gifted journalists.
As the subtitles suggest, they differ in style: Marr's Caravaggio meets Crabb's Breugel.
Marr describes Shorten at work in the claustrophobic world of the Labor factions and the unions where great haters abound and, in their own words, constantly 'f... one another over'. Shorten's face is lighted in this dark environment, as he plays the game skilfully and ruthlessly, charming and betraying colleagues, while drawn also by higher ideals of a more just world.
Marr describes the factionalism of Victoria Labor in prose reminiscent of Tacitus' sardonic take on Imperial Rome: 'They do politics differently there. Wars are fought in the name of peace. Explosives are packed under the foundations of the Labor Party in the name of stability. They call the wreckage left after these brawls rejuvenation.'
Crabb has a much lighter touch. She describes the career of Turnbull, with all its energy, intellectual and tactical brilliance, and irresistible victories with obvious enjoyment and in sunlit prose. She celebrates the human foibles of her protagonists even when they are engaged in hand to hand combat. She constantly makes the human comedy of politics domestic.
'When he (Turnbull) arrived in Canberra (after gaining selection in Wentworth), it was to a Coalition scandalised by the scale of the violence: it was as if a genteel bridge party had now to contend with a barbarian wearing the freshly flayed skin of the deputy secretary for scones.' This is politics as sketched by Trollope, transcribed by Wodehouse, with etchings by St Trinian's.
"Marr discerns in Shorten a tension between two strands: the unionist organiser and the 'man for others' deriving from his mother and crystallised in his Jesuit education."
But Crabb, like Marr, writes with serious intent, identifying the qualities Shorten and Turnbull have shown in their path to leadership of their