Stephen Conroy - Politics

Politics

After university, Conroy worked as an advisor to Ros Kelly and Barry Jones. He moved to Melbourne to pursue a political career where he met Robert Ray, and served for a time as Superannuation Officer with the Transport Workers Union and as a City of Footscray councillor.

He was appointed to the Senate in 1996 when Gareth Evans resigned to contest a seat in the Lower House. In October 1998, Conroy joined the Opposition Shadow Ministry and became Deputy Opposition Leader in the Senate. He was Shadow Minister for Trade, Corporate Governance and Financial Services from 2003 to 2004, and became Shadow Minister for Communications and Information Technology in October 2004.

Conroy is a leading member of the Labor Right and was criticised in early 2006 by members of the Socialist Left and Simon Crean for working for the replacement of several long-serving MPs with new members, including Bill Shorten, Richard Marles, Mark Dreyfus, Nathan Murphy and Matt Carrick.

After Simon Crean's win in the Hotham pre-selection, where Conroy supported Martin Pakula for the position, Crean attacked Conroy repeatedly, calling on him to resign his position as Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate.

In April 2009, Conroy faced criticism after he made comments disparaging the ISP iiNet's defence in a Supreme Court case against a number of film studios and Channel Seven. Opposition spokesmen described the comments as prejudicial. After iiNet won, Conroy said it was disappointing the two sides had ended up in court.

In February 2010, he admitted using his influence to have a former Labor politician Mike Kaiser, take the position of Government Relations and External Affairs Executive with the National Broadband Network Kaiser was previously forced to retire from the Labor party due to electoral fraud.

Also in February 2010, he was reported to have spent some time while on holiday with Kerry Stokes weeks before cutting license fees that are charged to free-to-air networks, including Stokes' broadcasting network, Channel Seven.

In June 2010, Conroy was criticized by SAGE-AU for "misinformation that verged on fear-mongering" when he suggested Google street view cars could have captured internet banking details in their recording of wireless network traffic, as these are generally exchanged over secure HTTPS connections.