The best of the worst of Bill Shorten’s zingers

Bill Shorten announced his resignation from politics as he practised it: with a zinger.

Asked whether he regretted his role in toppling two Labor prime ministers, Shorten turned to the words of Frank Sinatra and smiled like Ol’ Blue Eyes.

“Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, too few to mention,” Shorten said on Thursday. “I did what I had to do, but much more than that, I did it my way.”

The line landed with a laugh among gathered journalists. His delivery had improved with age. Most remembered a different Shorten, one whose prepared witticisms could clang so badly they earned a standing spot on the ABC’s comedy news show Mad as Hell.

“Once upon a time, I thought denial was a river in Egypt – it’s actually the attitude of the Abbott government,” Shorten said in December 2014.

“These people opposite are the cheese-eating surrender monkeys of Australian jobs,” Shorten called the Coalition in March of that year.

Another sledge: “The government’s used the term ‘Team Australia’ a lot. I’m worried about the emergence of ‘Team Idiot’.”

Spontaneous interaction could be worse. “I haven’t seen what [prime minister Julia Gillard] said, but I support what it is that she said,” Shorten told broadcaster David Speers in 2012.

For a factional man, the reflex to loyalty did him no favours. So, too, an unfortunate shopping centre encounter.

“What’s your favourite type of lettuce,” he asked a mother shopping with her children in 2016. “Iceberg,” she replied gamely.

But the lines delighted the throngs on #auspol Twitter, then at the height of its influence. They fit between Tony Abbott biting a raw onion and Malcolm Turnbull eating a meat pie with a knife and fork, seeming to confirm something about the character of a man who wanted desperately to be prime minister but never seemed relatable.

Mad as Hell creator and host Shaun Micallef was the great beneficiary. “I’m sure one of the reasons Mad as Hell ran as long as it did was because of Bill’s zingers,” Micallef said on Thursday. “I owe him a great debt.

“I met [Shorten] once and we talked about the zingers. He laughed about it and said he would try and do better in the future. I told him not to. He appeared to take my advice.”

Though Shorten kept zinging to the end, they came from a different place. First, the lines became self-aware. Then, they came more sparingly, and with the gravitas of a man who championed the victims of robo-debt and worked to fix the staggeringly expensive NDIS for no personal reward.

When a journalist tried to pin Shorten, who is moving to run the University of Canberra next year, on whether he supported the government’s crackdown on foreign students, he had something prepared.

“Let me trump an incoming vice chancellor with a current cabinet minister,” Shorten said. “I support the government’s proposition.”

This time he knew what it was.

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