You can ignore the protestations from the government that it has nothing to do with yesterday’s Australian Federal Police raid on the Melbourne offices of the Australian Workers’ Union to safeguard evidence about donations to GetUp. The whole issue began as a referral by Employment Minister Michaelia “Chuckles” Cash to the new Registered Organisations Commission, recently established to pursue trade union officials, in a co-ordinated move with News Corp following the “revelation” that AWU had donated to GetUp 12 years ago. And it would have been the government that ensured that plenty of media were on hand to film the AFP raid.

Chuckles, of course, is better known for appointing admitted lawbreaker Nigel Hadgkiss to head the ABCC — which this week lost its top lawyer in relation to that scandal — and, as she admitted today to Senate estimates, helping Hadgkiss out with his legal costs.

What’s the problem with donating to GetUp? I mean, hell, I don’t like GetUp much either, but donating to them is hardly illegal. But Cash claims Bill Shorten might “have something to hide” over the AWU’s donations back in 2005. What, exactly, isn’t clear — it’s a bit like when Tony Abbott said Julia Gillard had “questions to answer” about her role with the AWU in the early 1990s, but when invited to specify what they were, was unable to do so. In any event, right-wing commentators are cock-a-hoop, thinking that this will finally bring Shorten down, or at the very least create a messy, distracting and lengthy investigation for Labor.

Well, maybe. Maybe not. One of the goals of the Trade Union Royal Commission was to destroy Shorten, and it’s true that he hardly covered himself in glory when he appeared before it in July 2015, especially with that seven-years late donation of $60,000-plus that hadn’t been declared to the Australian Electoral Commission. The problem for the Abbott government was it had no effect whatsoever on its political position. In fact, the government’s two-party position worsened after Shorten’s appearance, despite Shorten’s approval numbers falling, leading to Malcolm Turnbull using the abysmal polling as his reason to oust Abbott.

Then there was the AFP raid, at the behest of a politicised NBN, during last year’s election campaign, on Labor’s Stephen Conroy and his staff, followed by raids on Parliament House to try to track down whistleblowers who had embarrassed the company, by examining emails to journalists. That turned into a debacle when the Senate determined that the material had been improperly seized.

Perhaps the heinous crime of donating to GetUp 12 years ago will be the thing that finally gets the electorate to see Shorten how the government wants to see him, as a crooked ex-union leader who is simultaneously a raving socialist and too close to his business mates. It’s not as if Shorten is immensely popular with the electorate as things stand — Labor’s vote appears to be strong in spite of him, not because of him. But if the government believes it inevitably will, it might be confusing the front page of The Australian for either the real world or an accurate guide to what voters are actually interested in.

And it ought to hope that, to the extent any of this escapes the Canberra bubble and into the attention of people in the real world, voters don’t wonder why the government is siccing the coppers onto its opponents.