Bring it on: Shorten

Defiant Labor leader says party ready for election showdown

A FIRED-UP Bill Shorten says Labor is ready to take on the Turnbull Government at the Super Saturday by-elections and at the federal election.

“We will deal with these byelections with the same fighting spirit, no matter what obstacles the Government puts in our path, and after those byelections, we will then be ready to fight the next general election”, he told the Victorian state Labor conference yesterday.

Labor has accused the Government of deliberately picking the July 28 date of byelections in Tasmania, Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia to disrupt the ALP’s national conference.

Mr Shorten blasted the timing of the by-elections, which has forced Labor to reschedule its national conference that was due to be held in Adelaide that weekend but said “our business now is by-elections”.

“I have to say to people who have, perhaps frustrated by the other bloke’s Deirdre Chambers’ moment, ‘Oh, goodness me, imagine having five byelections at the time of your National Conference’ ... just ignore it,” he said.

Mr Shorten said the decision wasn’t fair, but he would use the nine weeks of campaigning to present Labor’s story to the electorate – and to paint Malcolm Turnbull’s Government as locked in with big business and the well-off.

“We choose to fight for everyday people, workingclass people, middle-class people, the people who want to work, who are working, who have worked in their life,” he said. “We stand for the people who don’t have the vested interests.”

The ALP will change the date of its conference to avoid a clash with the by-elections, but the Prime Minister says it’s Labor’s fault the polls will be held so late.

“If Bill Shorten had wanted to have the by-elections … earlier, his members should have … resigned last year,” he said.