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.

[citation needed] 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.

[5] In April 2009, Conroy faced criticism after he made comments disparaging the ISP iiNet's defence in a Federal Court case against a number of film studios and Channel Seven.

[7] 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.

[9] In June 2010, Conroy was criticised 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.

After announcing there would be no discussion over the bills, and that they would be passed or failed as a package, he backed down, allowing negotiation with parties who held the balance of power in the senate.

In that role, he was responsible for internet censorship,[12] the National Broadband Network,[citation needed] and the proposed switch to digital television as a complete replacement for analogue.

[15] On 19 March 2009 it was reported that ACMA's blacklist of banned sites had been leaked online, and had been published by WikiLeaks.

About half of the list was child-porn related; the remainder included sites dealing with legal porn, online gambling, euthanasia, Christianity and fringe religions; sites belonging to a tour operator, dentist and animal carers were also listed.

[16] Conroy described the leak and publication of the blacklist as "grossly irresponsible" and that it undermined efforts to improve "cyber safety".

People often say, oh no Steve's a conservative Catholic, but they won't ever find on my voting record something that backs that up.

[33] By the time of Conroy's resignation, Labor Party policy supported same-sex marriage and bound its MPs to vote in favour of legislation from the end of the 2016–19 parliamentary term.