Bill Shorten has spent hundreds of hours at town hall meetings talking to small groups and large about anything and everything.

Then there's the countless school fetes, community events and fancy dinners a politician has to attend, not to mention an eight-week long federal election campaign.

So maybe it was a case of overkill that led the 2000 people spoken to as part of the Australian National University's Australian Electoral Study to deliver the most brutal performance review of any leader in the 30 years the study has been asking about characteristics of individual leaders.

Less than ten per cent of the people who participated in the survey said the Labor leader was intelligent or knowledgeable.