"This election is about choices," Bill Shorten tells the doctors and nurses sitting around a hospital cafe table.
"This election is about choices," he tells the workers who once made Fords and Holdens in Geelong but now make high performance, high-tech wheels.
"This election is about choices," he tells the woman dying from cancer who says she's out of choices.
Whether he's speaking quiet words of comfort to an older woman who just came to see the doctor and is overwhelmed by the television cameras, or dropping his flat-vowelled "didja knows" before a group of port workers, the Labor leader is adept at responding genuinely to people but also seguing into a stump speech.
It's like he's out to win votes one Australian at a time.
But he also remembers their stories, using anecdotes he's learned in those quiet conversations to emphasise points while answering questions from the media later.
The strongest story he shared this week wasn't one he'd heard in a doctor's room or sitting on the bed of a CT scanner.
It was the one he grew up with.
Usually at a press conference there's a certain low-level fidgeting, inattention, as reporters poise to jump in with a question or broadcast crews adjust gear.
Not so on Wednesday, when the room in the upstairs of a GP superclinic - commissioned when Labor was last in government - grew still and thick with intensity as Shorten gave a detailed account of his mother's life and her persistent striving in the face of every hurdle thrown up in her way.
She only achieved her dream of becoming a lawyer in her 50s, but it wasn't exactly all she'd hoped with ever more obstacles appearing - age, gender, class.
Shorten started the week with a slick and well-choreographed campaign launch.
But as he told his mother's story - rebutting an attack in the Daily Telegraph on his honesty - the politician with his stump speech and slogans melted away to leave a man on the verge of tears, sharing his truths.
The moments that define an election are obvious but also indescribable; you just know them when you see them.
The choice Shorten made to share Ann's story may turn out to be the most memorable of the election.
