In the late 1990s, a corporate lawyer helping wealthy clients hide their assets was beginning to feel uncomfortable. There was a feeling that had been gnawing away at him for several weeks, becoming harder and harder to ignore. Eventually, while riding the elevator to work one morning, his subconscious took over.
“I don’t tend to make snap decisions, but I remember going up in the lift one morning and realising I just couldn’t do it any more,” he tells Guardian Australia.
“I walked into the senior partner’s office and said, ‘look, I just can’t do this. I can’t restructure people’s finances and trusts to avoid tax. This is not where my life is headed.’”
So, starting that morning, David Shoebridge began his transformation into what one senior federal Liberal MP describes as “easily the most effective Green” in parliament.
As a Greens MP – first in New South Wales and then the federal Senate – Shoebridge has defended the existence of an anti-capitalist faction, gotten arrested outside the home of a prime minister, clashed with defence and intelligence chiefs and corruption tsars, and questioned the very foundations of Australian military strategy.
And yet there was a time when Bob Brown, the co-founder of the Greens, believes he could have forged a career with the Labor party.
For a short period, Shoebridge did.
‘Some kind of radical socialist’
Shoebridge was once a member of the Labor party’s Stanmore branch in Sydney’s inner west. Branch meetings were a stone’s throw from where Anthony Albanese cut his teeth as a member of the party’s left faction.
“They were decent people,” says Shoebridge, who was an associate to family court judge Eric Baker when he joined the party in the mid-1990s. “They had left politics that were not dissimilar to mine.”
Shoebridge says he watched the branch pass resolutions for progressive change, which were ignored. After about six months, he says members told him they were always ignored, but persisted anyway.
“They said ‘we keep the flame alive’ and I said, ‘that’s not how I want to do politics’,” says Shoebridge. So he quit.
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He went on to build a career as a barrister specialising in employment law. In the early 2000s, he was sent to state parliament by union clients to thwart his old party’s proposed changes to workers’ compensation.
It was on this mission he met the hard-left Greens MP Lee Rhiannon, who went on to become his mentor. According to Brown, she had a huge influence on his career.
“David Shoebridge is no shrinking violet,” Brown says. “[Rhiannon] gave him a determination not to be put down or feel dismissed when people refer to him as radical.”
When Brown and other party figures condemned the emergence of Left Renewal – an anarchist faction with few members in NSW – it was Rhiannon and Shoebridge who defended it. They were not members, but believed the Greens should be home to those seeking radical change.
“To rail against a system that is failing to deal with a climate crisis, a cost-of-living crisis, a justice crisis … I don’t think that’s radical,” Shoebridge says. “I think that’s perfectly rational.
“If, in doing that, people call me some kind of radical socialist, I will own the tag. The place needs a shake-up.”
‘Incredibly offensive and a downright lie’
Shoebridge has his critics.
In 2017, the police union leader Pat Gooley accused him of waiting just two hours after a man had been killed by officers before making “unhelpful comments for political mileage”.
In his Redfern office, Shoebridge seems to welcome confrontation. He admits to, at times, creating “theatre” in parliament to draw attention to issues that may otherwise go unnoticed.
“I didn’t get elected to parliament to join the club,” Shoebridge says. “I got elected to make it relevant to community movements … and make it accessible. If it’s not interesting, it sure as hell isn’t accessible.”
But then, in November 2023, the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, accused Shoebridge of being “utterly irresponsible” and spreading disinformation about Labor’s defence exports to score political points from a human tragedy.
Shoebridge had asked Wong whether more than 700 components produced in Australian factories would end up in F-35 joint strike fighter jets recently ordered by the Israel Defense Forces. The jets would later be used to launch missiles into Gaza.
When asked about the issue in July this year, Richard Marles didn’t name Shoebridge, but criticised those spreading misinformation. He said “those who walk down that path really need to think about what they are doing for their own self-publicity”.
Those attacks penetrated his armour.
“That was tough,” Shoebridge admits.
“Having a series of senior government ministers basically call you a self-serving liar using a genocide for some personal vanity project is incredibly offensive and a downright lie.”
Labor’s position hasn’t changed, but its language has. The government acknowledges F-35 parts are exported, but describes them as “non-lethal in nature”. It has also distanced itself from the supply chain.
‘We don’t agree on much’
Shoebridge rarely takes centre stage for the Greens. But his role in estimates hearings has earned praise from hawkish Liberal senators, whose views on Israel and the Aukus security pact are diametrically opposed.
“David Shoebridge and I don’t agree on much, but he’s easily the most effective Green and one of the most impactful crossbenchers in the Senate,” says the Victorian Liberal senator James Paterson.
Paterson sat beside Shoebridge in November last year, when the Green grilled police on why a 14-year-old autistic boy was given a blue-and-white birthday cake saying “we love you”, when they had already decided he should be charged with terrorism offences.
On multiple occasions, officers told Shoebridge they were unaware of the cake and couldn’t respond. It prompted a visibly upset Shoebridge to accuse the force of “a degree of institutional bastardry that I couldn’t have believed would happen”. By the end of the hearing, the Australian federal police told the committee that its officers did not provide the cake.
“He is undeterred by often lame attempts by ministers and officials to avoid the question,” Paterson says. “No senator should tolerate the absurd obfuscation and obstruction of the committee process and David certainly doesn’t.”
But the former NSW Liberal minister Victor Dominello says Shoebridge isn’t just a confrontational performer.
He recalls a walk around the Domain in mid-2016, when the two men made a deal unknown to many colleagues at the time.
Dominello had inherited the “political graveyard” policy of third-party insurance reform, which was once described by a former Labor minister as “akin to the first 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan”.
The pair agreed to “put politics in the back pocket” and work on reforms together. Shoebridge was regularly briefed in Dominello’s office, including on his consultation with industry.
“The fact he was prepared to work on the policy and not the politics showed extraordinary integrity and leadership from him,” Dominello says. “It enabled us to get some groundbreaking reform through the upper house.”
Praise from Liberals isn’t cherished by Greens. In a leftwing party built on protest, it could even be career-ending. But in his Redfern office, Shoebridge says he feels “incredibly comfortable” among his colleagues in Canberra.
“I find my values reflected in the debates we have inside the party room,” he says.
That moment in an elevator, nearly three decades ago, seems a distant memory.
