POLLING says Labor is falling short, that the marginals are not reflecting the 50-50 split in the national election surveys.
It says that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is going to win at least 80 seats, at the bottom end of where he would want to be to feel confident he can govern with authority. 
However, there was none of that reflected at Dame Joan Sutherland Hall in Sydney's western suburbs yesterday.
There, Bill Shorten gave one of the best speeches of his public life. He held out hope for Labor and gave them a fighting message that depended on three major themes.
Top of the list is Medicare. This is Labor's most symbolic and treasured achievement of the last 40 years - more so than Hawke and Keating opening up the economy in the 1980s, which was so much more consequential.
Labor says if you vote Coalition you vote to privatise Medicare. It is a blatant scare campaign but Labor is doing little more than giving back some of the great scare campaigns they've had thrown at them in the past 30 plus years.
There is a kernel of fact because there is work being done on outsourcing human resources and front of house stuff for the universal health care system. That's all Labor needs and it has a powerful ad from Bob Hawke backing it up.
The second is schools and funding education. Shorten's pitch here is the Coalition has a plan for a $50 billion tax cut - 60 per cent of which will go overseas - for businesses, small, medium and then large, while Labor has a $37 billion plan for funding schools.
The last theme is jobs - real jobs and apprenticeships, as Shorten says - which can work for the party at a time of cost of living pressures.
The best line of the speech was when Shorten said he only wanted to hear one three word slogan under a Labor government: "Made in Australia"." Don't miss Dennis Atkins and Malcolm Farr's podcast Two Grumpy Hacks, free on iTunes and Soundcloud.