Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has promised to tackle Australia's rising inequality crisis if he is elected to govern at the next election.
He told party faithful at the Queensland Labor conference in Townsville on Saturday he wanted to improve the lives of "working and middle-class Australians", rather than the top one per cent.
"Tackling inequality is a mission as old as our movement, it's about who we are, it's about where we've always been," he said.
Mr Shorten called out Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's government over its focus on how much money people earned and said that was the key difference between it and Labor.
"(They think) that somehow success is defined by your mansions, your bloody jet skis, what they think that gets people up in the morning," he said.
"If you're looking after my kids, or anyone else's kids, you're a success no matter what you earn.
"If you're a truck driver on the Bruce (Highway) you're a success. My goodness, you're a success".
Mr Shorten reiterated his commitment to reinstating penalty rates, creating secure jobs and fixing Australia's "two-class" tax system.
But the opposition leader said inequality was about more than tax reform.
"It's about wages and conditions," he said.
"Inequality in power and bargaining, in safety at work and security at work.
"Inequality in the pay gap between men and women, inequality affects us all.
"It erodes confidence, it erodes the sense of the fair go, it erodes that generational DNA proposition that we'll always hand on a better deal to our kids than the deal we inherited from our parents."
Mr Shorten also used his speech to promise to hold a national vote in his first term on whether Australia should become a republic, saying it was time for the country to have its own head of state.
"It does not change our respect for the Queen, for her service," he said.
"But we're not Elizabethan, we are Australians.
"Our head of state should be an Australian too, it's time we got on with this and we will."
