There’s something very sordid about Labor’s attack ad on Malcolm Turnbull. Not just in mentioning how he has “millions” in funds that invest in corporations that would benefit from company tax cuts — presumably he is supposed to put all his money in a hole in the ground while Prime Minister — but in the way it sneaks that line into an ad about company tax cuts and investment in schools and hospitals, insinuating, without having the guts to say it openly, that personal greed is the Prime Minister’s motive. It’s cowardly, and grubby. 

Australia doesn’t have enough people like Malcolm Turnbull in public life — people who’ve done more in their life than devote it to achieving political office, people who’ve been successful in other careers before entering public life. People who don’t have to work at all for the rest of their lives, but choose to give it a go in public office, to endure the long hours and abuse that are part and parcel of being a politician. Yes, we know Turnbull’s wealthy. So is Peter Garrett, who served three parliamentary terms, including two as minister, for Labor. Does anyone seriously think they’re motivated by personal greed, compared to some apparatchik whose career consists of a steady progression from student politics to ministerial staffer to preselection to minister, who has lived and breathed politics since they were a teenager, as if that’s healthy, and makes for a rounded individual. That describes many good politicians. It also describes an awful lot of poor ones, on all sides and at all levels.

Still, Turnbull can’t complain. Nor should the press gallery, which has been clutching its pearls about Labor’s ads. Go back to February last year, when Turnbull offered a few choice words about Bill Shorten in parliament. “A social-climbing sycophant.” “Parasite.” “Sucking up to Dick Pratt.” Seller-out of poor workers. Quaffer of Pratt’s champagne. “This sycophant, this simpering sycophant. Blowing hard in the House of Representatives, sucking hard in the living rooms of Melbourne.”

Charming stuff from the country’s leader.

How much tut-tutting and head-shaking was there from the press gallery? Not much. It was all praise for Turnbull “lighting up Parliament”, “finally taking off the gloves”, “a blistering barrage that had all the hallmarks of a classic Paul Keating ballot box spray”. Only Cut & Paste, unusually, pointed out what a monumental hypocrite Turnbull was. For a lot of other journalists, it was Turnbull rediscovering his mojo (yet again).

The government has repeatedly tried to make Shorten’s character an issue, even having a go during the Barnaby Joyce affair, only for their own cackhandedness to cause it to blow up in their faces. The central charge against Shorten has always been, to use Turnbull’s phrase, that he’s a “social-climbing sycophant”. That he’s sat drinking champagne at the tables of the Melbourne elite, that he’s used his position to advance himself socially and financially.

Coming from Malcolm Turnbull, who has used his colossal brain and equally Brobdingnagian ego to become one of Sydney’s greatest social climbers, it’s rich indeed (and both Turnbull and Shorten went to elite private schools, let’s not forget). Coming from the Liberals, who profess to be the party of “aspiration”, it’s hilarious. “Aspiration’ is still being fired scatter-gun round Question Time this week; it was used over 20 times yesterday — not quite the half-centuries of mentions we enjoyed last week, but still sufficient to make one wonder why the aspiration they charge Shorten with is so appalling.

But then the Liberal tradition is that any Labor leader who refuses to conform to a Ben Chifley stereotype of salt-of-the-earth working class type straight from a Chips Rafferty film is demonised as somehow unnatural. Bob Hawke — another social climber with friends in high places — was a “little crook”, according to Andrew Peacock. Paul Keating was an out-of-touch Europhile subjected to regular and defamatory insinuations of corruption. Kevin Rudd had “questions to answers” about his wife’s wealth. And Julia Gillard — well, take your pick from the many charges levelled at her, none of them with an iota of substance despite the expenditure of $46 million of taxpayer money to try to dig up dirt on both her and Shorten.

So spare us the confected outrage that Labor’s taken the low road. The government and the media were already down there.