Aussie version of 0bama?
Abbott certainly isn’t. He’s a genuine conservative and a decent man. He just isn’t doing a good job of selling himself or his policies.
I haven’t made up my mind on Shorten. At the moment, his strategy of doing nothing but oppose and attack, and promise to spend money, is electorally successful, so it’s hard to blame him for doing it from a political perspective. If he actually had to come out with his own policies and stand for something, he might not actually be too bad - at least in a relative sense (he’d still be a left wing unionist).
Not even the left-wing media would laud Bill Shorten for his vision, policies, or charisma (he has none).
He just has Bill’s Zingers — a bunch of lame one-liners
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/bill-shorten-mocks-bill-shorten-over-infamous-zingers-20141202-11yhhz.html