So we have the clamorous conservative cheer squad at the Spectator Australia magazine to thank for unearthing Shorten's doppelganger: He's a young Ted Kennedy.

The magazine put the Labor Leader on its latest cover. Wearing a CFMEU hard hat, the illustration portrayed Shorten with a firefighter's axe smashing through a door. The imagery was a riff on Jack Nicholson in the horror flick The Shining but it inadvertently turned Shorten into a Kennedy lookalike.

Below the cartoon were the words: "Nooooooooo! Don't let Labor back in."

Shorten and Labor have copped a lot of this sort of thing from the Australian media in the final week of the election campaign.

Mainstream media outlets almost universally spurned Labor. The only exception was Melbourne's Sunday Age. Its election leader on June 26 concluded: "Labor has risked a big-target campaign by presenting bold policies, and while the party is yet to resolve its vexed relationship with unions, Mr Shorten deserves the chance to govern."

Credible opinion polls unanimously ushered the Coalition back to green leather. As the week progressed bookmakers piled on for their cut, blowing out the odds of a Labor victory to $8.

And then there were the media reports quoting unnamed Labor sources saying the marginal seats were not buying Shorten's message and defeat was in the wind.

Caution too was thrown to the wind:  Once upon a time the media regarded anonymous sources as believable as phantom pregnancies but now weightless opinion and attitude beats shoe leather every time.

Yet, as Brexit and the media's presumption that Labor would win the previous British general election show,  pundits, polls and punters are now as credible as a two-Euro watch.

(In fact, Brexit took a lot of focus off the election although Malcolm Turnbull made certain to assure voters that he was the man to best confront the confusion).

Nevertheless, amid such a welter of bad news and views, the Shorten who attacked the last campaign week gave no indication of a dead man walking.

Labor's crazy brave announcement that debt would blow out to more than $16 billion by 2020 to pay for the ALP's promises to fund  the full Gonski schools package and election spending in health and other areas set the week's tone.

Just as the 1993 Liberal leader John Hewson was pilloried for treating voters to economic home truths, Labor's gambit on debt proved unpalatable to headline writers and manna for political opponents as Shorten suffered the debt of a thousand blows.

By Monday the set pieces were ready to roll off the assembly line. Shorten had sat down with the ABC's Sarah Ferguson and AnnabelCrabb for Four Corners and Kitchen Cabinet and Labor used the interviews to round out their man.

He told Ferguson his best leadership quality was never giving up before he risked the east coast vote by going all AFL: "My view of leadership is to be the coach. I don't have to be the full forward or the ruckman. My job is to coach a team to get the best out of people."

While the contenders are both assassins, it is Labor's blood-soaked past that putrefied the party and Shorten attempted to squirt some fragrance, apologising for knifing Kevin Rudd and Julia Rudd.

Eight weeks earlier, when Turnbull called the election to clean out the Senate of undesirables and pursue union corruption, Shorten started strong.

And as the days – of electioneering, plane rides, bus rides, taxi rides, gaffes, scare campaigns, baby cuddling, school visits, community forums, talkback radio, and television interviews – wore on amid cries of ennui or exhaustion, Shorten confounded many by continuing to get stronger.

He visited a third of the 150 House of Representative seats during the campaign and in the final days hit marginal electorates including Lindsay, Macarthur, Reid and Barton in NSW.

Turnbull had pushed jobs and growth for weeks but Shorten's Medicare scare appeared to gain more traction. This despite the Australian Medical Association's support for Turnbull's position and rejection of Shorten's claims that government proposals amounted to the privatisation of Medicare.

Same-sex marriage did well for Shorten, even though the issue is predictably divided by age, education and class.

Shorten is promising a parliamentary vote but the Liberals look pretty vapid on the issue, especially after Julie Bishop and Scott Morrison refused to declare if they would support a vote to legalise same sex marriage if the promised plebiscite resulted in support for the legislative change.

Then the Australian newspaper came out with 2013 footage of Shorten saying he supported a plebiscite. A  gotcha moment? Not really. Shorten said he simply changed his mind.

On Wednesday, Shorten had his own Godwin Grech moment during his National Press Club speech.

He accused Turnbull of a credibility-smashing gaffe that he said would "go down as the defining moment of the campaign".

He said Turnbull had said: "…what political parties say they will support and oppose at one time is not necessarily ultimately what they will do."

Shorten told the NPC: "Malcolm Turnbull had simply said, 'Don't bother [with the Coalition platform]. It's a lie.'"

However, the the Prime Minister had not been talking about his own policies. He was was talking of Shorten's team.

"You have seen the Labor Party has opposed many measures of ours which they have subsequently supported or subsequently changed their position on," Mr Turnbull had told reporters earlier.

"The best-known of those is obviously the School Kids Bonus, which they made an iconic issue and launched petitions and campaigns and said they were going to fight all the way to election day to restore it and then did a very quick backflip on that."

When the ABC's Sabra​ Lane filled in the context Shorten appeared nonplussed.

Shorten also mis-hit on superannuation and Turnbull's decision to crack down on welfare payments.

The poor tired huddled masses have usually been more Labor's constituency but when Treasurer Scott Morrison announced a $2.3 billion welfare crackdown on families, the disabled, pensioners and the unemployed (veterans were spared), Shorten stayed mum, not even wondering how the downtrodden had managed to get away with pocketing so much money during the Abbott/Turnbull years.

And when it came to superannuation, surely one of the big ticket items for self-funded retirees and small businessmen and women, Shorten ran dead.

He said Labor will wait until the 2017 federal budget to decide whether it will adopt the Coalition's proposed cuts to superannuation concessions, saying Treasury will conduct a full review first and there will be consultation with the industry.

The issues portrayed as Shorten's achilles heels, fiscal responsibility and boat people, seemed lost amid the same-sex marriage plebiscite, the so-called privatisation of Medicare, cuts to the arts and Victorian Premier Daniel Andrew's vendetta against the Country Fire Authority (shorthand for union abuse of power) and a barrage of Liberal advertisements warning voters not to vote for nobodies (shorthand for people fed up with mainstream political parties).

Meanwhile the price of gold climbed, people dreamed of taking on more debt to buy the houses of their dreams and foreign debt topped $1 trillion as Brexit made investment in Australia a big unknown. Who would want to govern in a post-Brexit world?