In Chinese culture, red is the most propitious of the colours.
It's forbidden at funerals. It symbolises happiness, joy and good fortune.
And so Sunday was a particularly auspicious day for a red-themed campaign launch for Kristina Keneally's run for the Bennelong by-election in more way than one.
Ms Keneally is not only recently surging in the polls, but her campaign had already knocked on 3000 doors, an extraordinary figure for one launched just five days go.
"Come along with me," she said. The crowd at Ryde Civic Hall roared their approval.
They had just been warmed up. Small children raised their hands to their ears as the Chinese Masonic Society opened the event with about five minutes of intense drumming accompanied by dancing dragons.
Images from the launch would also show her surrounded by volunteers in red t-shirts who clapped on even the most predictable lines.
Labor, the red team of Australia's political oligopoly, would realise the significance of that backdrop when political campaigning is all about the televisual image on the evening news.
After the voters of Bennelong booted ex-Prime Minister John Howard out after 33 years, much was attributed to the role of the electorate's changing ethnic demographics in that result.
There's not a campaigner on either side who does not recognise that this is a very significant point in the battle for Bennelong.
The recent census found about 3.9 per cent of Australians claimed Chinese ancestry.
In Bennelong it is more than 20 per cent. It is Sydney's second-most Chinese electorate behind only Watson.
Ms Keneally was joined by a long list of state and federal Labor luminaries who pushed buttons calculatedly.
ALP federal deputy Tanya Plibersek mentioned Liberal support for English-language tests for immigrants in the same breath as "White Australia Policy".
Introducing his candidate, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, made reference to Liberal party preference deals with One Nation in Queensland.
"There should be no place in modern Australia for racism and if the Liberal party don't understand that they're not fit to govern," she said.
Ms Keneally took the stage and the room roared with energy: "This is an opportunity to say to Malcolm Turnbull, enough".
She struck all the notes still ringing in voters' ears from the election last year - about the importance of Medicare cards, not credit cards being more important; the NBN being a second-rate policy by a third-rate government. But they loved it.
The former Premier of NSW even had the cheek to note rising electricity prices under the state Liberal government (they rose under a Keneally Labor government, too).
She spoke too about the massive backlog in local school infrastructure. (Independent experts date a failure to anticipate a baby boom in Sydney that began in 2006 with the previous Labor government, and one that lay largely unaddressed until her utter routing in 2011).
It didn't matter. She was rolling.
It highlighted perhaps the biggest factor of the election and Labor's biggest asset – energy.
Perhaps it highlights the Liberal blue team's biggest obstacle: in Chinese culture, that colour is a symbol of woodenness.