It is tempting to conclude that Bill Shorten watched the blue-collar backlash in the US last week and panicked, deciding to condemn foreign workers taking up Australian jobs.
Malcolm Turnbull believes the opposition leader has succumbed to a kind of post-Trump panic at the prospect of traditional Labor voters leaching away â most likely into Pauline Hanson's One Nation column.
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PM's strong words for Shorten
Bill Shorten has revealed his plan to put Australian workers first but Malcolm Turnbull says it's hypocritical and opportunistic. Courtesy ABC News 24.
Certainly, the stunning elevation of Donald Trump â who pulled off the simple trick of voicing ordinary people's job fears â didn't dissuade Shorten from his new "Australia first" positioning. Far from it.
But in truth, Labor strategists have long feared the implications of boiling working class resentment amid growing inequality and economic dislocation. Those fears have been only validated by the anti-establishment cataclysms sweeping Britain, Europe, the Philippines, and now the US.
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These events should be worrying Turnbull just as much. Yet once again, the PM has ceded first-mover advantage to his more nimble and politically savvy opponent.
As a result, Turnbull is left promoting an unpopular policy solution to an abstract policy question â the ready availability of labour to facilitate jobs and growth. That is up against Shorten's much easier task of providing an applied solution to the tangible question in voter land âunemployment. His answer? Australian jobs first.
Across the nation, anger is rising over the 457 skilled migration visa, the category used by employers to import workers where the labour supply is inadequate.
This anger may be brushed off by politicians and economists as simplistic, but so what? No equation describes the path to outsider disaffection more bluntly than this: employers demand ease of international hiring; governments deliver the 457 device; Australians lose jobs.
Nowhere is this toxic sequence more viscerally felt that in Australia's most decentralised state, Queensland.
This is where One Nation has its base, where working class hostility to foreign workers is keenest, and where unions are organising against imported labour most effectively.
So extensive is that mood that even the Coalition's Queensland-based George Christensen has spoken up declaring: "There is no need for the issuance of any further 457 foreign worker visas in our region."
The 457 may not be front of mind in the nation's CBDs, but in the suburbs and especially in the regions, in front bars, leagues clubs and building sites it is a constant topic of discussion.
There are two Australias. They both vote.