The Beenleigh Recreation and Bowls club is the kind of place where you’ll find a $4.99 weekday roast, $15 “schnitties” and $4.50 schooners.
It’s the kind of place you’d expect to hear fair dinkum uttered un-ironically.
Bill Shorten and his people have chosen it for the launch of the “Bill bus” a 1,400km odyssey across Queensland, where one of the main takeaways is the Labor leader will be “actually on the bus”.
“It’s fantastic to be back in one of my favourite parts of Australia and back on the fair dinkum thing, the Bill bus, a real bus,” he tells a crowd of red-shirted Labor supporters.
Launching the campaign in Beenleigh, in the electorate of Forde, one of nine seats Labor believes it has a real shot of claiming in Queensland at the next election, is no accident.
The candidate, Des Hardman, a local radiographer, had a real shot of winning the marginal seat back in 2013, before Kevin Rudd made the decision to swap him out for former premier Peter Beattie.
The Liberals’ Bert van Manen has held on to the seat ever since but Labor is confident Hardman, who patiently waited his turn, campaigning without grudge for Beattie in 2013 and for himself in 2016, will take the seat.
The campaign for Forde will be run much the same way as the campaign for Longman, with the electorates sharing similar working-class roots and geographical in-between statuses, with the southern Forde sitting just outside the Brisbane and just before the Gold Coast.
Which is why Catherine King is the first guest on the Bill bus tour, stopping outside the Logan hospital to announce a new urgent care centre, if Labor is elected.
Shorten travelled the 25 minutes or so from the Beenleigh club to the Logan hospital and did a quick meet and greet in the hospital.
It will be the first of several health announcements on the nine-day tour, which includes a family day off on the Sunshine Coast on Saturday, which Shorten has already been forced to defend, after criticism from the direction of the government.
“No,” he says when asked if taxpayer money will be going towards the trip. “And listen, I notice some people in the government are critical of me doing nine days up here in Queensland and taking Saturday off to be with my family, but rather than bagging me for being in Queensland, why don’t they come and visit? Or come and work in Queensland if that is what you want to do?
“For the next nine days, the headquarters for me is Queensland.”
Sixteen towns are on the list for those nine days, which takes in just over half of Queensland’s 30 electorates.
Labor holds eight of those seats. Eight of the Coalition’s 21 Queensland electorates sit on a margin of under 5% – Leichhardt, Dawson, Bonner, Petrie, Forde, Capricornia, Dickson and Flynn, all of which feature predominantly on Labor’s hit list.
Labor never stopped campaigning in Queensland, with Shorten having headed north 48 times since 2015, clocking up about 80 days. Town halls have been a feature of the Shorten campaign, with more to come. But the main message, so far, is that Shorten will be on the campaign bus, which Labor hopes will contrast with Scott Morrison’s recent tour, which featured a “ghost bus” emblazoned with his face, but not, for the most part, featuring the physical presence of the prime minister.
Instead, as Morrison attempted to reach as many places as possible, he flew into electorates and met the bus. Labor has promised Shorten will be on the bus, other than where it was not “logistically” possible, or not appropriate.
“Will you be on the bus the whole time?” is the first question, in bold, on Shorten’s media prep sheet, sitting folded on the lectern in front of him. He doesn’t refer to the sheet when asked the question but does list off each of the dot point suggested lines.
“Our bus is going to travel at least 1,400kms,” he said. “I’ll be on the bus every day that the bus is going. I won’t be catching an aeroplane in between now and towards the end of next week.”
That distance would take Shorten from Brisbane to Townsville. Cairns, further north, where Warren Entch’s decision to run again in Leichhardt has put a spanner in Labor’s plans to win the seat, may not make the list.
“It’s a matter of whether I can fit in Cairns this trip, or whether I make a separate trip,” Shorten said.
For Queensland, federal politicians are set to become a familiar sight, with both parties concentrating a large portion of their campaigning efforts in the state.
“Certainly I have chosen to start my campaigning in Queensland,” Shorten said. “I did in 2016. You know, where goes Queensland, goes the nation.”
