Delivering a speech to the party faithful at Beenleigh Bowls Club on Thursday as he began a nine-day bus tour of Queensland, Mr Shorten said the party needed to “win Queensland” if it wanted to form government.

“We’re going to need to outline our plan for every part of Queensland, from the suburbs to the regions, from the south-east corner right up to the far north of Queensland,” he said.

“We understand in Labor that where goes Queensland, goes the nation.”

Mr Shorten pitched Labor as the “stable” option, claiming people had approached him over the summer break to complain about the number of prime ministers.

“They’re over the shambles, they’re over the circus,” he said.

“Australians would come up to me on the beach and they’d say, 'Bill can we just have one prime minister for three years?'

“I’ve had some conservatives who’ve come up to me and said, 'We don’t agree with everything you’re saying but you, Labor, at least appear to be stable' – and I said, 'this is our sixth January that I’ve been leader of the opposition'.”

Mr Shorten plans to travel more than 14,000 kilometres over nine days through Queensland, after launching his “fair dinkum thing, the Bill bus”.

The bus drew attention as it drove through the streets of Logan, with several motorists beeping.

Labor state secretary Julie-Ann Campbell took aim at Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who went on his own bus tour through Queensland in November but was criticised for hopping on taxpayer-funded flights for stretches of the trip.

“Queenslanders are smart – we can’t be tricked and we don’t just fall for cheap marketing ploys like people who say they’re going to take a bus tour through Queensland but spend more time on a jet than they do on the bus,” she said.

Labor president Wayne Swan dubbed 2019 a “winning year for Labor”.

On Thursday, Mr Shorten was due to announce Labor would fund a $33 million urgent care clinic to relieve the pressure on the Logan Hospital.

Labor candidate for Forde Des Hardman, a radiographer, said the hospital was at "100 per cent capacity all the time”.