Ms Tips was not surprised at all to see Sam Dastyari, one of six Labor MPs to get promotions yesterday in Bill Shorten’s slightly reshuffled shadow cabinet, appointed as, amount other things, parliamentary secretary for the youth.

She assumes Dastyari has been angling for the role for some time. After all, the 32-year-old Dastyari’s commitment to youth culture goes back far. He recently went on the Canberra press gallery’s most popular podcast, The Silent Majority, to regale its hosts with tales about growing up cool in western Sydney.

Or, well, maybe not so cool.

“I can break dance,” he admitted. “I was a wog growing up in the suburbs of Sydney. We didn’t do sport — we did break dancing. You either break danced or hit the gym, and I was never very good at hitting the gym.

“The goal of being a professional break dancer is certainly a career goal I have not reached.” Vid or it didn’t happen, we say.

And Dastyari is comfortable as any 15-year-old quoting Taylor Swift. Recently in the Senate, he used a deadpan reading of Swift’s “poetic, beautiful and — I think — touching song Blank Space” to slam the Liberal Party (“Magic, Madness, Heaven, Sin. Saw you there and I thought, oh my god. Look at that face, you look like my next mistake …”)

Ms Tips should point out she was impressed Dastyari’s Swift knowledge extended beyond the uber-popular Shake It Off. Blank Space is the far better song.

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