There's a very good chance that Bill Shorten will be the next prime minister. Stop snickering, you. Just look at the polls.
Labor are either in a strong lead (according to Newspoll) a stronger lead (Essential) or a freakin' massive lead (according to Fairfax-Ipsos) over the Coalition.
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Turnbull paints Shorten as dodgy
Malcolm Turnbull unleashes another stinging attack on Bill Shorten in Parliament hoping to exploit what he believes is the Labor Leaderâs achilles heel.
Labor also won by a landslide in Western Australia following the disastrous decision by the Liberals to do a preference deal with One Nation. And the Liberals are not ruling out doing it again because, like the old saying goes, the definition of sanity is doing the same thing over and over and confidently expecting that eventually the public will totally get on board.
Also, the shadow frontbench is filled with well-liked, seemingly capable MPs and senators – Tanya Plibersek, Tony Burke, Penny Wong, Chris Bowen, Anthony Albanese, and so on – while Turnbull's lost his health minister to an expenses scandal, has an Attorney-General dealing with the Bell group fiasco and is facing a stoush with his foreign minister over Tuesday's on-then-abruptly-off extradition treaty with China, which was supposedly a precondition of a trade deal.
![Opposition Leader Bill Shorten at the ALP caucus meeting at Parliament House on Tuesday.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170713072032im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/7/v/i/n/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gv8p22.png/1492350304203.jpg)
Oh, and there's the vast efforts and goodwill being expended on making hate speech less preventable, which the vast majority of the public thinks is a terrible idea.
So: given all this, why isn't Bill Shorten doing better? Or, for that matter, well?
Even among the Labor true believers no one is hailing Shorten as a leader in the mould of Keating or Hawke, much less Whitlam or Curtin.
And while the two party preferred vote is brutal, the actual primary vote for Labor isn't spectacular either with both they and the Coalition languishing in the low 30s. It's just possible that the strategy of sitting back and letting the Coalition punch itself in the face isn't winning the hearts and minds of the people of Australia, even if it's almost certain to win them the actual election.
So you'd think – as the Liberal Party clearly have done – that the answer is to go after Shorten himself with a series of personal attacks, which was briefly the plan in February.
"This sycophant, blowing hard in the House of Representatives, sucking hard in the living rooms of Melbourne, what a hypocrite," Turnbull roared as his MPs thumped their desks like adults. "Most of [Labor] have never done a day's work in their lives."
And he got plenty of praise for it too – 3AW's Neil Mitchell even compared Turnbull's parliamentary spray to Julia Gillard's misogyny speech, with which the PM was delighted. "You know something, they're the best speeches," he replied about a rant that contained the limp almost-joke "manual labour is a Mexican band as far as they are concerned". "The best speeches are when you speak from the heart."
(Seriously? Turnbull's heart is best expressed via a dubious manual/Manuel pun? Wow.)
Of course, that heartfelt speech didn't save Gillard. And similarly when Turnbull did his little parliamentary dummy spit, his own popularity dropped.
People might not especially like Shorten, but clearly they don't hate him enough to make him a high-value target. In fact, maybe the shocking truth is that no one even notices that Shorten is the leader of the Labor Party at all.
It may not matter, of course. For one thing, unless you're voting in the Division of Maribyrnong, you're not going to vote for or against him in any case.
Also, the Coalition won by a landslide in 2013 with Tony Abbott on an unusually tepid approval rating, so it's clear that a party can still romp it in even if the public have reservations about the leader. And that's especially true if the government of the day are in a period of policy stasis marked by flurries of factional self-harm.
And let's be honest: Bill Shorten is a professional negotiator with a lifetime of experience getting bickering sides to come to a compromise and work toward a common goal. He did it with the Australian Workers Union and he did it with the Labor Party – and given the likely makeup of the senate crossbench for the foreseeable future, talented negotiation is going to be a very, very necessary skill.
And if Shorten does not appear to be a man of inspirational vision, maybe we've had enough of those for a while. Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull all had strong, personal visions for Australia. Maybe Australia needs a competent bureaucrat that can actually, y'know, get stuff done.
Shorten might not be the leader Australia especially wants – but after five years of not very much, he might just be the one we need.
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