For mine, the defining moment in Conroy's career was the red underpants affair. What a dropkick......
Labor senator Stephen Conroy, who has announced his resignation from parliament, has never been afraid to do things his own way. These are some of the moments at which he shaped our recent political history. July 2016: Conroy as opposition defence spokesman rattles his sabre at China, demanding the government “authorise its forces to both sail and fly over” areas of the South China Sea occupied by Beijing. Malcolm Turnbull condemns Conroy as “steaming in a direction all of his own” by apparently “calling for an escalation of tensions”. April 2016: Conroy is reprimanded by Bill Shorten after he accuses Governor-General Peter Cosgrove of weakness by agreeing to Turnbull’s request to reconvene early parliament in May. “A strong Governor-General would never have agreed to this,” Conroy says, invoking “the ghost of 1975” and “the long dead arm of Sir John Kerr crawl out of his grave”. February 2014: Conroy attacks Operation Sovereign Borders commander Angus Campbell as being involved in a “political cover up” during a Senate hearing. Conroy likens the decorated soldier to Jack Nicholson’s villainous Colonel Nathan Jessup from the film A Few Good Men for his approach to restricting the flow of information on the interception of asylum-seeker boats. March 2013: Conroy as communications minister champions a Public Interest Media Advocate — a government watchdog that would oversee the regulation of newspaper content — and a new public interest test for significant mergers. The senator is likened to Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin over his effort to control press freedom and the plan is dumped. September 2012: Conroy lauds over telco bosses his power as communications minister to arrange auctions for the lease of spectrum. “If I say to everyone in this room ‘if you want to bid in our spectrum auction you’d better wear red underpants on your head’, I’ve got some news for you. You’ll be wearing them on your head. I have unfettered legal power.” August 2012: Conroy as communications minister works with the New Zealand government to impose a new standard to slash mobile roaming charges for trans-Tasman travellers. February 2012: Conroy is among the most vocal opponents of Kevin Rudd’s bid to resume the prime ministership. He says Rudd had “contempt for the cabinet, contempt for cabinet members, contempt for the caucus, contempt for the parliament ... Ultimately what brought him down a year or two ago was the Australian public realised he had contempt for them as well.” June 2010: Julia Gillard replaces Kevin Rudd as Labor leader, although Conroy swears he spent the night variously watching Sky News and World Cup football. He tells SBS: “Everyone said, ‘Were you up all night making phone calls, on the phone lobbying for the leadership?’ I said, ‘No, I was watching the soccer’”. April 2009: Conroy as communications minister junks Labor’s election promise of $4.7 billion towards a fibre-to-the-node broadband network in favour of a vastly more ambitious $43bn plan. Conroy subsequently denies claims that he and Rudd devised the scheme on the back of a beer coaster on a VIP flight, but is evasive about whether or not it was in fact a napkin. December 2007: Conroy announces a mandatory national internet filter that would blacklist sites that contain content such as bestiality, sexual violence and crime and terror instruction. A leaked version of the blacklist includes lawful websites offering pornography, gambling as well as totally innocuous webpages spruiking tourism, a boarding kennel and a Queensland dentist. The plan is dumped in 2012. January 2005: The Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement comes into effect after Conroy, a stalwart supporter of the US alliance, helps to persuade the divided Labor caucus to ratify the deal negotiated under John Howard. June 2003: Conroy joins fellow MPs Wayne Swan and Stephen Smith — dubbed the “roosters” by Mark Latham — in orchestrating a failed leadership bid by Kim Beazley against the unpopular Simon Crean. Latham himself would subsequently take over from Crean and accuse Conroy of undermining his leadership. June 2000: Conroy picks a fight with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Allan Fels, accusing him of running a Liberal government propaganda campaign by insisting his agency had sufficient powers to prevent prices unduly rising under the GST. Conroy says Fels was trying to “con business and the Australian public”.
