Anthony Albanese, the knock-about politician who lists his life-shaping faiths as the Catholic Church, the South Sydney Rabbitohs and the Labor Party - not necessarily in that order - has no time for those who might judge the worth of a family by the number or gender of the parents in it.
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He was raised by a single mother at a time - the 1960s - when a woman who had a child out of wedlock was socially unacceptable in Australia.
The memory of his mother's sacrifice and her unconditional love has led Albanese to scorn those who would denigrate a family because it has only one parent, or two fathers, or two mothers.
Love is all that's needed, he says.
All of which, he revealed on Thursday, adds up to his reasons for rejecting the idea of a plebiscite on marriage equality.
"We shouldn't be having a public vote where we get to judge other families," he said at the launch of a biography that traces his own search for identity and family.
Albanese, Telling it Straight by Canberra journalist Karen Middleton, was launched by former prime minister Bob Hawke.
"You are," said Mr Albanese of Mr Hawke, 86 now, "Without doubt the father of modern Labor. You are a giant of the movement."
The quest for another father - Albanese's own, who he had believed for his first 14 years to have died in a car accident overseas - sits at the heart of the book.
Even deeper in its heart is Albanese's mother, Maryanne, who wove the fiction of the death overseas of a man she had married and who was Albanese's father.
The fiction was necessary if Maryanne was to be able to keep her son Anthony from being taken from her and adopted in those far-away years.
Maryanne waited until her son was a teenager before revealing she had not married his father, an Italian steward aboard a cruise ship with whom she had a brief fling, and that he had not died.
A child born outside marriage in the 1960s - Albanese was born in 1963 - was declared illegitimate.
"Illegitimate. Not real," Albanese marvelled.
He could not let go of the idea he might have a father still living somewhere. And finally, years after his mother had died and he had become a father himself, Albanese found his father in southern Italy, allowing a relationship to build before the old man died in January, 2014.
The biography ranges much further than that, of course.
Albanese has been a highly influential Labor politician for decades, and was deputy prime minister during 2013. He stood against Bill Shorten for the Labor leadership, and is considered to still harbour leadership ambitions. Shorten did not attend the launch of the Albanese biography, citing other duties.
But those searching the book for leaks about political intrigue will be disappointed, Albanese said.
"I believe if you have a private conversation it stays private."