I heard that "working families" make up 35% of the population. Pity the invisible not working, single adults who aren't eligible for government income support.

What are working families? It’s a good question. One I asked myself last night when it was mentioned on the news for the umpteenth time.

The answer seems to be somewhere between workers struggling on little more than the dole, up to highly paid professionals and politicians. And, yes. What about pensioners and self-funded retirees?

The ALP MIGHT help the lower paid a little and the higher paid heaps!

Isn’t nice that there is still at least one contributor who can say what he has to say on one page

No different really from Howard's 'battlers'. All governments, regardless of hue and creed, feel the need to adopt a mantra, to project a brand. Call it the corporatisaion of politics. The more the govt syas the wrods' working families', the more likley we are to think they are doing something about it.
Just pure spin of course, but no one party is any worse than the other at this...

Working families is the current buz platitude, not so long ago it was "Traditional Labour Values"
This was repeated so ofter that I just had to find out what they were.
They were not warm fuzzy things like love, hope and charity but Solidarity,Socialism,Unions,Brothers,Fight the Righteous etc.,
So both platitudes are just twaddle.

The reason Labor focuses on such an irritating and meaningless platitude as "Working Families" is that they are trying to portray an inclusive message, compared to the divisive messages promulgated through the Howard years.

Howard gained support of the 'average Australian' by identifying enemy groups: first the so called 'elites', i.e. tertiary educated, inner-city dwellers who cared about social justice (strangely omitting the real elites - the big business owners, extraordinarily well paid shock jocks and cabinet ministers of course). Next on his hit list were asylum seekers. Then came Moslems and finally Trade Unionists, which is where he'd clearly gone too far for most people.

Each time he was inviting the general population to assume he was championing them by opposing these others.

Rudd is, on the contrary, trying to make us believe he is on our side by using a phrase that can be construed to include pretty much everyone. Meaningless but far less damaging than the Howard approach.

In addition to the excellent comments above, I'd also suggest that the lack of scrutiny of this term is due to the media's general laziness and lack of interest in digging up these projected fallacies.

This is also something probably that wouldn't have worked without the last government offering opportunity to practise leaving these ridiculous phrases to be ingested without a second thought... Right from 'core' and 'non-core' "promises".