He also told of the sacrifices she made to send him to a Jesuit school while his seafarer father – "nice man, but he wasn’t raising us" – went to work. And he explained how this motivates him today. Loading Shorten has always been a man apart in the union movement and the Labor Party. Few others in that world have gone to Xavier College, the Jesuit school in Melbourne. In telling his mother’s story, Shorten also tells his own. "My parents sent me to a rich school," he said on Wednesday. "But we were not rich. We were not poor. We were like hundreds of thousands of other families. My family spent all their spare cash on educating [his twin brother] Robert and I. "We had three holidays when we were kids. Who cares? I got a quality education.

"But the point about it is: my mum has taught me that what matters in life isn’t how rich you are, or how poor you are. It’s not what religion you worship. It doesn’t matter who you know, what church you go to, what priest you listen to. "Mum taught me it doesn’t matter about your gender. It matters how hard you work. But everyone deserves the same chance." In what way was it right to say that Ann Shorten "achieved her dream" because she was able to take a law degree in her 50s when she could not do so in her 20s? This made Shorten’s words doubly powerful. He was relaying a life story many Australians could understand, one of ambition thwarted and delayed.