The Liberal party has never understood how weekend penalty rates – largely paid to workers in casualised, low-paid, female-dominated industries of retail and hospitality – contribute to the economies of entire families. If ever there was an “us and them” issue to demarcate the interests of the Liberals against the majority of Australian working people, this is it.

So how did Bill Shorten flub his opportunity to land hits on Malcolm “seven day economy” Turnbull where he’s truly vulnerable?

Shorten’s comment that “penalty rates are the difference whether [parents] can afford to send their kids to a private school” remark recalled the “ladder of opportunity” promised to aspirational voters by Mark Latham, in his all-round spectacularly misjudged tilt for PM in 2003.

(The sentence “Anything that reminds of Latham is a bad idea.” really should be tattooed on the arm of every Labor politician.)

Shorten has since explained he was referring to those coughing up for “local Catholic schools”, but even his clarification misses the point.

The Coalition government’s ongoing campaign to drive down wages for the business lobby is emboldened by a new leader riding high in current polls.

And Shorten’s “private school” comment overshadowed an opportunity to remind Australians of the broader impact of cut penalty-rates; cost-of-living issues for families and full-time students, or equity for low-paid workers (most of whom are women), or how they allow working single parents to manage complex challenges of income stability and childcare.

Besides, the overwhelming majority of Australian families still choose to enrol their children in state schools despite decades of inadequate funding; it was a comment that seriously misjudged the timbre of the political times in which we live.



Up against Turnbull, the opposition leader has the opportunity to define himself as a champion of the ordinary Australian worker, whose mobilised numbers will go out and campaign for a Labor election, rather than just appealing to a narrow minority in the aspirational set who may, or may not, vote Shorten’s way.



This remark recalled the kind of messaging that turned the brilliant, warm Julia Gillard into a bogan Thunderbird.

But this remark recalled the kind of loathed campaign messaging that turned the brilliant, funny and warm Julia Gillard into a bogan Thunderbird for nearly her entire time as prime minister.



After two, long, awful years of Tony Abbott, we have to acknowledge he was destroyed not by his clowning around but by the policy advanced aggressively by his government in the notorious 2014 budget.



Arguably, the cross-benchers are right-leaning, but it was not a question of Abbott’s poor sales technique that education deregulation, the Medicare co-pay proposal and every single piece of industrial relations legislation were blocked by the Senate.

It was the attack on the infrastructure that both underwrites the Australian social contract as well as what any reasonable person understands is the economic foundation of our standard of living.

Recasting penalty rates as something “aspirational” detaches them from an accepted, universal common economic good that includes a minimum wage, pensions, public transport, accessible education, universal healthcare and welfare that’s there when you need it.

Shorten knows that this is the basis for a shared prosperity Australians really enjoy and will fight for. The “Secret ACTU Army” of leader Dave Oliver has been running “Save Our Weekend” rallies across the country with a campaign infrastructure that dwarfs their Howard-defeating “Your Rights at Work” mobilisation of 2007.



But what Shorten doesn’t seem to appreciate is the role that he, himself, needs to play to capitalise on the political opportunities around him; to show leadership to an entire people whose new prime minister deprioritises them for “the market”.

Shorten’s had leadership victories - but, to date, they’ve all been internal; yes, he’s united his party, rallied his members into a shared policy agenda and stabilised relations between Labor and the union movement. In August I wrote that:

An opposition doesn’t return to a position of strength like this from the government’s mistakes alone. Does anyone want to admit that that not only is Bill Shorten likely to lead Labor to victory at the next election, but that he deserves to?

Now Shorten must be bold, and unite the Australian people in defence of shared prosperity. Otherwise, deserving or not, he’ll be leading nothing.