Malcolm Turnbull has dug in behind his personal attack on Bill Shorten, saying that, unlike his opposite number, he doesn’t suck up to billionaires, “I look them in the eye and, when I need to, I take them on”.
The prime minister stood by his swingeing assessment of the Labor leader delivered during a parliamentary debate on Wednesday, saying on Thursday: “He wants to play the politics of envy but he’s been a sycophant. Everybody knows that.”
But Shorten told reporters in Canberra he was comfortable in his own skin and comfortable with his record representing working people, and the comments were indicative of a prime minister under intense pressure.
“You all work in Canberra, you hear that the drums are beating,” he said. “There is leadership instability in the ranks of the Liberal party. What he is doing is firing up about his own job.”
Shorten said he wondered whether all the yelling across the dispatch box was actually a prime minister yelling at himself.
“The more he yells at me, the more I wonder if he is judging himself,” he said. “The more he yells at me and calls me names, I think he is looking in the mirror and he is worried about the fact he has sold out on climate change, the fact he has sold out on marriage equality, sold out on Australia becoming a republic.”
Shorten said the “name calling” of Wednesday was less important than the fact that, on the same day, the “government put forward proposals to cut the family payments to a million Australian families”.
He said Labor stood up for the interests of working families, while “Mr Turnbull, on the other hand, he is clearly showing signs of pressure in the job”.
Asked about the bitter and personal tone of Wednesday’s debate, given combative exchanges in Canberra are a voter turn off, Turnbull said politics was about many issues, including “strength of character”.
“I am myself,” he said. “I am my own man. I can’t be bought by anyone. Bill Shorten sold his members out again and again and they know that. He sold [Australian Workers Union] members out.
“That is a fact. That is not rhetoric. That is not a political line. That is fact.”
Shorten acknowledged that, when it came to the tone of political debate, “we do need to lift.”
“What turns people off politics is [politicians] just yelling at each other,” Shorten said. “I am not perfect. I won’t say that. What I do understand is that we have to try and lift out of politics and go to a better place to restore confidence and politics.
“That is why we are seeing the rise of minor parties. People feel the mainstream politicians are always on at each other like a Punch and Judy show.”
