Rightly angry at a tawdry personal attack, Bill Shorten has just told Australians exactly what drives him to seek the nation's top job.
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Voters who wondered what motivates Shorten to aspire to be Prime Minister now have their answer in the most compelling single point of the election campaign so far.
Shorten was provoked into the most personal and powerful moment of the campaign - the moment when his voice choked and his eyes filled with tears at the memory of his mother's unrealised ambitions.
Shorten's family story has been told before but he conveyed it with far greater meaning and impact in a press conference in Nowra to respond to the suggestion that he had somehow misled voters about his mother, Ann.
The charge against Shorten in the pages of The Daily Telegraph, that he failed to tell the full story of his mother's life and career, was contemptible and foolish.
It was contemptible because it targeted Shorten on something so personal and a subject that is usually quarantined from the hard politics of an election campaign.
It was foolish because it was wrong - and not only about Ann Shorten. On a deeper level the coverage showed a complete lack of awareness of the sacrifices made by so many women of an earlier generation who had the brains for careers they could not pursue.
He told of the inequality his mother, Ann, faced when she could not pursue a career in the law when she was young, and the discrimination she faced when she finally became a barrister when older.
He also told of the sacrifices she made to send him to a Jesuit school while his seafarer father - "nice man, but he wasn't raising us" - went to work. And he explained how this motivates him today.
Shorten has always been a man apart in the union movement and the Labor Party. Few others in that world have gone to Xavier College, the Jesuit school in Melbourne. In telling his mother's story, Shorten also tells his own.
"My parents sent me to a rich school," he said on Wednesday. "But we were not rich. We were not poor. We were like hundreds of thousands of other families. My family spent all their spare cash on educating [his twin brother] Robert and I."
"We had three holidays when we were kids. Who cares? I got a quality education."
"But the point about it is: my mum has taught me that what matters in life isn't how rich you are, or how poor you are. It's not what religion you worship. It doesn't matter who you know, what church you go to, what priest you listen to."
"Mum taught me it doesn't matter about your gender. It matters how hard you work. But everyone deserves the same chance."
In what way was it right to say that Ann Shorten "achieved her dream" because she was able to take a law degree in her fifties when she could not do so in her twenties?
This made Shorten's words doubly powerful. He was relaying a life story many Australians could understand, one of ambition thwarted and delayed.
Shorten and his colleagues are right to respond to The Daily Telegraph with derision. The way they hit back at the newspaper's publisher, News Corp Australia, is a sign of the way they will pursue their opponents if they win power on May 18.
Labor calculates that the power of Rupert Murdoch's media company has waned in the age of social media. Labor also demonstrates that it is not shy of a fight with The Daily Telegraph, the newspaper regarded as the "muscle" when News wants to take a hard line against a politician or political party.
That makes this election a test of whether The Daily Telegraph has the power it thinks it has, or whether it is as delusional about that as it is about the sacrifices women made in the 1950s.
Voters have been given an insight, if they want it, into who Bill Shorten really is.
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- SMH/The Age
