Back-foot batting Bill Shorten has time to mend mistakes

Bill Shorten has performed the first big about-face in substance and style of the campaign but should emerge the better for it.

In 24 hours, the Opposition Leader went from combative, almost smugly dismissing questions about economic detail to chastened campaigner admitting he got it wrong.

On Tuesday, he assumed his elusive non-committal answers without detail would overcome aggressive queries by playing off journalists and then complacently agreed with a thoughtless “sure” to ruling out new superannuation taxes.

It was the behaviour of someone not used to close scrutiny, a frontrunner — and smacked of complacency. Any complacency was shaken from the Labor camp when Shorten’s refusal to provide economic detail on climate-change policy became a hot item. His lame excuse that Labor’s negative gearing policy was off the website because it was “being updated” was seen as such and headlines with “$34 billion gaffe” set the agenda for the day.

It got worse as other Labor frontbenchers had to explain what he meant. So Shorten sought to kill the appearance of an unravelling economic agenda.

Admitting he got it wrong in denying any new Labor taxes on superannuation — when there are $34bn worth — and suggesting he’d “misheard or misunderstood” was a necessary humiliation. The sudden release of estimates for the economic cost of Labor’s climate-change policy went less well, raising more questions than answers.

But early in the campaign is the time for cleaning up mistakes and Shorten’s got time to land back on his feet.