We're pretty much in the home stretch now. A few more young candidates have resigned or been disendorsed for, basically, bad offensive joke posts in their early 20s, including one from Labor and one from the Greens.
Something which probably won't move the dial much, but will come to be seen as part of electoral mythology if Labor wins, happened this week.
Basically Bill Shorten, Labor opposition leader, spoke in a heartfelt way on TV on Monday about how his mother had been denied opportunities to pursue her dreams due to poverty and how that was a motivator to him. She wanted to be a lawyer but had to take a teaching scholarship so age could afford to look after her kids. All very heartfelt and genuine and stuff.
A couple of the Murdoch papers (the Sydney one, republished in Brisbane) then
ran an attack piece on him for lying about his dead mother. They said he omitted that she got a law degree in her fifties, under the headline "Mother of Invention".
This was disowned by the Liberals and most of the rest of the Murdoch press including the big Melbourne paper which didn't run it. It is obviously a stupid attack because getting a Master's of Law decades later supports the narrative of lost opportunity (she studied after her kids were grown and after university became free due to Labor policy). Plus because it was a pretty putrid attack on him
over his dead mother.
The
video of him responding is literally the most human, sympathetic and genuine he's ever seemed, the anger and hurt pretty visible. He normally seems pretty robotic and is often caricatured as not genuine and a bit shifty.
As I said it likely won't move the dial much. It'll only matter inasmuch as undecided voters see it and break to Labor because of it. But if he wins it was an impactful enough thing with the press that
they'll see it as the own goal by rabidly partisan campaigning press which decided the election, and they'll start to mythologise it.
