It says much about the political and media moment we are in that it’s not the bait in the headline but the morsels of truth buried deep beneath that provide stories of the day worth chewing over.

Three incidents this week offer tasty proof of this. The first concerns an interview with Labor’s Bill Shorten in GQ, which Newscorp reviewed with the title “Shorten drops F-bomb and reveals biggest career regret”.

Shorten swearing is hardly news – at least not for anyone with the ability to imagine what goes on in a Labor caucus room. But the “bomb” was dropped in regards to Shorten’s criticism of the government’s attachment to the infamous TPP free trade deal – a document to which no one but the Coalition has been privy. For generations, the right-faction Labor leadership from which Shorten was spawned has exercised excruciating caution in its public views on trade and finance. Yet “What the fuck?” came from Shorten to GQ, “They can’t even provide us with how the agreement benefits people.”

Michaelia Cash 'unreservedly' withdraws remarks about Shorten’s female staff Read more

In terms of a Labor paradigm shift, it’s not the language but the suggestion of an abandoned orthodoxy underneath it that’s tectonic. And what I think has allowed Shorten to reposition with such confidence – let us not pretend a party leader’s statements are ever, ever glib – is a brand new, emerging political reality suggested by the week’s two other hidden stories.

Much has been made of how Jacinda Ardern found herself the subject of intrusive questioning into her personal life in a 60 Minutes interview this week. To watch New Zealand’s prime minister interrogated on the circumstances of her unborn child’s conception in such a way that would even get your uncle banned from Christmas dinner was revolting and rightly provoked condemnation worldwide.

But more interesting than the condemnation was the disparity reported between interviewer Charles Wooley and his audience. His defence was: “I know that some people in New Zealand might be annoyed that we didn’t talk about housing, or university fees ... but Australian audiences aren’t very interested in the minutiae of New Zealand politics.”

Mr Wooley might do well to read the Guardian – then he’d learn how deeply uninterested Australians are in the private lives of politicians, a fact borne out in the latest Essential poll to follow the Barnaby Joyce scandal. Any Australian news publication can apprise Mr Wooley just how significant to our electorate the issue of housing affordability is. How Ardern intends to overcome her conservative predecessors’ legacy of failure on this issue in a country now described as “divided by wealth” has important insights for us given our own preoccupation with inequality.

Whether Charles Wooley thinks she’s “hot or not” might be less a gauge of her popularity than her phased reintroduction of free tertiary education for New Zealanders, her respectful engagement with Indigenous policy and her leadership on recompense measures for abuse survivors.

Her old-school leftwing politics have taken her own Labour party from a dismal 23% standing in the polls into both government and a primary that’s increased to 48%. The post-interview outrage is not just because a woman’s achievement has been minimised. It’s about what substantive policy issues were left unaddressed while the minimising took place.

And this, I think, is the spectacular misjudgment made by Michaelia Cash when she detonated herself in Senate estimates yesterday. Labor’s Doug Cameron may have been preparing to wreck her on the subject of her office’s relationship to a dodgy raid on the AWU, but he was hardly in combat tank mode with questions about her new staffing arrangements.

“If you want to start discussing staff matters be very, very careful,” Cash threatened, then snapped, “Because I’m happy to sit here and name every young woman in Mr Shorten’s office about which rumours in this place abound. If you want to go down that path today, I will do it.”

It was an inept attempt to smear Shorten with the political entrails of Joyce, but it came across as conspicuously gendered slinging of mud. Audible gasps in the estimates room were nothing compared to either the horror of the press gallery, the roar of social media or the cold political homicide performed on Cash by Labor’s Penny Wong, who came in, forced the minister to apologise and swept out.

Cash herself did not return to the room, but the space she left behind in the political conversation was filled by fellow conservatives in the media – Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin, Sharri Markson - who filed in one after another to denounce her.

But again, the story is not Cash, or her staffing arrangements or even what happened at the AWU. It’s her failure to heed an unsuspected, overwhelming feminist zeitgeist that’s entirely transformed the context in which political narratives now appear. Even months ago, an unpleasantly sexist interview was just unpleasant, a bit of spiteful rumour-mongering, a reason for personal shame.

Since then, #MeToo has happened. #TimesUp has happened. A popular political feminist consciousness has solidified across the electorate and anything resembling the old paradigm has a brand that is not only stale but toxic. The most recognisable avatar of the anti-gun avalanche in the United States is an enraged teenage girl with a shaved head.

Steve Bannon may be evil but he’s certainly a genius, and he made a very salient point in his own interview with GQ: “The Time’s Up movement [is] basically going against 10,000 years of recorded history. That’s the power of it,” he said. “You see here something that’s in a very early, raw stage, but I’ve never seen such potential power in something.”

No wonder the local conservatives are rallying to disassociate themselves from their tainted kin.

Jacinda Ardern's 'sexist, creepy' 60 Minutes interview angers New Zealand Read more

Because locally, it’s Shorten who’s realised the best leadership lesson for the labour parties of the west isn’t in Jeremy Corbyn or Bernie Sanders, both defeated. It’s the visibly distinct, victorious feminist brand of Jacinda Ardern.

And feminism isn’t a brand you actually have to be a woman to share. Shorten’s alignment with a union movement led by Sally McManus, a deputy like Tanya Plibersek, a Senate champion like Penny Wong and a caucus heaving with 47% female talent – 48% if feminist star candidate Ged Kearney prevails in Batman – marks him in stark contrast to Turnbull’s pale, male and anti-feminist hordes.

No wonder he’s bullish; those who can grasp that future is, indeed, female are the ones who will still be around when the future happens. Which is why the most important comment in Shorten’s GQ interview was one Newscorp stashed at the end.

“I wish I had my time in the union again, in terms of promoting more women,” said Shorten. “I’m a big supporter of 50/50 in the ALP,” he said.

Oh, Bill, yes. Of course you are.