After the truly horrible events of Christchurch many progressives in Australia looked with envy at the performance of the New Zealand prime minister, Jacinda Ardern. Social media was flooded with comments of those wishing she was our PM. We have reached a point where despite continued systemic disadvantages for women in politics, no longer is the middle-aged white male the default view of a leader – a woman can not only be the leader we want, but also the one we need.

It is rather galling that we here in Australia are stuck with a prime minister whose biggest issue after the Christchurch massacre is dealing with a report from 2011 (which he claims is a lie) that far from being a voice of inclusion, he allegedly sought to use multiculturalism and Muslim immigration to create division.

'Real leaders do exist': Jacinda Ardern uses solace and steel to guide a broken nation Read more

It doesn’t help his cause that at the same period as the meeting in question he was criticising the Gillard government for paying for asylum seekers to be flown to Sydney for the funerals of their family members involved in the Christmas Island shipwreck.

It was a perfect demonstration of the different leadership we have that Ardern announced this week her government would cover the costs of the funerals of the victims.

Neither does it help Morrison’s cause that only a few weeks ago he fully supported Peter Dutton when telling the nation that it was “simple maths” that sick asylum seekers were going to force residents on to hospital waiting queues.

Nor does it help that in his interview with Waleed Aly on Thursday night he was not even able to pledge to preference One Nation after the ALP and the Greens.

Play Video 1:56 Scott Morrison says he sought to lower fears on Islam in 2010 meeting – video

And matters were also not improved by his reverting to a macho-Trump style when responding to the comments from Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who had suggested any Australians or New Zealanders who came to Turkey with anti-Muslim sentiments would be sent back in coffins “like their grandfathers were”.

Morrison came out fired up and angry, and warned Turkey that “all options are on the table”.

Now that is clearly not true.

For centuries the male has had the comparatively easy ride in leadership

Unless he is planning a full reboot of the Gallipoli landings this Anzac Day, our response obviously does not involve military options.

Not even all diplomatic measures are on the table. Are we really going to break off diplomatic relations? Are we going to ban imports from Turkey? Introduce sanctions?

I mean, seriously. Haul in the ambassador, change the security warnings, demand an apology, but “all options”? Calm down.

But I guess he felt the need to look tough, even though Ardern has very much looked fully in command without the needless masculine overreaching.

This is not to say that women somehow now have an advantage over men in the political arena. More that, were a remake of The American President to be made, the default “idealised progressive leader” would not be someone who looks like Michael Douglas. Indeed, such a casting choice would be met with a roll of the eyes.

On The Project, Morrison didn't want to be prejudged. Surely he's well past that stage | Katharine Murphy Read more

But while Morrison may seem out of step with the times, this brings with it dangers as well for Bill Shorten. As a middle-aged white male he is hardly revolutionary himself. And there is very little sense that progressives will give him much benefit of the doubt.

Recently Shorten has been attacked for things he really hasn’t said, or that were not said forcefully enough.

Prior to the school climate strike it was reported across the media that Shorten was telling kids to “protest after school hours”.

But he didn’t actually say this. Instead he had said “in an ideal world, they would protest after school hours and on weekends, but it’s a bit rich for the government to lecture school kids. This government’s been on strike about climate policy for the last five-and-a-half years”.

It was a pathetically lukewarm and far too politically centred response (not everything needs to be about ALP v LNP). But the outraged reaction would have you think he was wanting the strike banned.

Similarly this past week there were those again willing to jump into Shorten for his speech to Islamic Council of Victoria, in which he said: “Not all rightwing extremist hate speech ends in rightwing extremist violence”.

This was again seen as an example of his timidity. And yet the full sentence ended with, “but all rightwing extremist violence begins with rightwing extremist hate speech”.

Later in the week at a Melbourne mosque he also stated: “If you create a swamp of hate speech, then you cannot disown what crawls out of the swamp.”

Hardly the stuff of cowering to racists.

I say this not to suggest Shorten is the perfect progressive – indeed the ALP as a whole has few credits in the bank – but to highlight that he faces a tough fight to convince progressives he is their leader.

The 'dog whistling' on immigration must stop, Bill Shorten says Read more

Should the ALP win the elections he will not be greeted with Obama-like enthusiasm or Rudd levels of popularity and hope, or Ocasio-Cortez style fandom. On the one hand this is good as those highs are almost impossible to sustain, but it also means he has little room for error.

Progressives will be ever watchful for signs of placating conservatives, of cowering to mining companies, or showing weakness on climate change, of timidity or fence-sitting on progressive issues.

For centuries the male has had the comparatively easy ride in leadership – where women have rarely, if ever, been given the same benefit of doubts, or easy marking.

Now progressives are not only impatient for change and less willing to negotiate than in the past, but they also see middle-aged men as (rightly) having to prove that they are not just part of the same old brigade that got us where we are today.

If the ALP wins the election, Shorten is going to have to work hard not just to demonstrate his skills against the leader of the Liberal party, but also in comparison to whom many progressives see as his real competition – the leader across the Tasman Sea.

• Greg Jericho is a Guardian Australia columnist