Bill Shorten has offered one of the more startling defences of penalty rates advanced by a Labor leader, elevating private education as the dream of Australian workers.
"For people on 40 and 50 and 60,000 dollars a year, penalty rates are the difference as to whether they can afford to send their kids to a private school, whether or not they can afford to pay the mortgage," he propounded on Monday. 
Mr Shorten didn't say whether he was talking about a private school of the type he attended - Xavier College, where tuition fees alone for a Year 12 student are $24,000 a year, and another $20,000 for boarders - or a more modest $5000 or so for a suburban Catholic or other non-government school.
Approval of the private school as a motivation for working weekends to pay the fees, however, is a curious departure for a Labor leader.
It appears a new swing on John Howard's successful appeal to "the aspirationals" - working Australians in the outer suburbs who wanted more of what might be called the Australian dream.
Yet it seems only minutes ago that Labor was the party of public education. Indeed, on   May 28, Public Education Day, Mr Shorten and his education spokesman Mark Butler issued a statement saying just that.
Suddenly, with a new prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who polls show is vastly more popular than Mr Shorten, and an election less than a year away, a private education has shouldered its way up there with home ownership.
"Labor is not out of touch with how people make their money," Mr Shorten insisted. "Penalty rates are what make the difference in the quality of life for a lot of working Australians."
That appears indisputable. It is also indisputable that enrolments at private schools have increased at the expense of public schools since the 1970s
But Mr Shorten appears to be sending a clear signal that a private education is superior to public schooling. Though it is the Coalition parties that have skewed the proportion of public funding to private schools over the interests of public schools, it is Labor's Mr Shorten who has chosen private education as his first example of what he believes workers on up to $60,000 a year want to buy with their penalty rates.