It’s hard to stand for anything when you’re curled up in a ball. That’s the problem with making yourself a small target in the run-up to an election. You reach across the aisle to shake hands with the Devil, try and blot out as much light between you and your opposite number as physics will allow, and take to the hustings espousing hip-pocket values and making announcements that pave the road to hell with good intentions.

At least with the LNP you know what you’re getting: a magic act where a country is sawn in half and then somehow put back together. If Peter Dutton can pull it off, it’ll be quite the trick. Of course, the country can’t be divided into two equal halves or preferential voting will ruin the effect. He’s got to appeal to heartland conservatives by flying the flag for traditional values and a never-ending bull market while at the same time being woke enough on climate policy to win back the Teal seats. Come to think of it, it’s more a juggling act.

Labor don’t have the luxury of sitting on the wrong side of the chamber and shaking their heads at how ineffective the ruling party is. As the ruling party, they must hold their tongues and point their fingers at the Senate. When Paul Keating called our upper house ‘unrepresentative swill’ back in ’92, he couldn’t have known how flyblown the trough would become over the next thirty years. Of course, Keating was mounting a case for electoral reform, not complaining about the oddity of those on the crossbench or in the minor parties. I pitched a documentary about the Senate to the ABC a few years ago. I wanted to call it Triumph of the Swill. They turned it down and rightly so. There would have been complaints.

The trouble is that voting is compulsory in this country and so neither party can afford to ignore the people they don’t care about. The quiet, forgotten, and marginalised have to vote regardless of how ill-informed they are or how apathetic. The messaging on the campaign trail ends up having to be blunt to the point of having no point to speak of. And they don’t. Debates end up being about optics, policy arguments default to arguments about personality and, this time round at least, stump speeches become Trump speeches.

A leopard can’t change its spots, so it has no chance of altering its political stripe and while both sides of politics appear to have retained their surface differences, over time, those differences are really only about manner and form. The truth is that the Libs and the Labs try as much as they can to appeal to the aspirational middle class. The myth that everyone can accumulate capital and get out ahead of the pack to the top of the tree where they can feast on their very own hunk of wildebeest is writ large on the party room whiteboards. It’s a sell that sits comfortably with the LNP (even as they extend their target audience to include those who aspire to aspire to that aspirational middle), but it’s a look far less flattering when worn on the left side of the body politic.

A Labor PM holding out his own rise from public housing in Camperdown to public housing in Canberra as an exemplar of just what can be achieved in this country if we all get a fair go is casting a fair bit of shade on Camperdown. Not everyone has the wherewithal of George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life to shake the dust of their crummy little town off their feet and see the world (or at least move into the Lodge). Some people don’t even want to. They’re perfectly happy where they are and with what they’re doing (or not doing). The last thing they need is a Prime Minister raining on their parade and telling them they could do better if only they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. Yes, a Labor government is more likely to provide you with some state-sponsored bootstraps if you don’t have any, but like George Bailey’s nemesis, Mr Potter, the LNP knows the value of a thrifty working class.

Labor used to love the working class. Now it’s too scared to even use the expression. It’s pejorative. It’s true, Australia is an egalitarian country if you ignore everyone’s differences, but it gets harder and harder to convince people that equality and equity are the same thing unless our leaders open up the valve all the way when they’re doing their gaslighting.

Labor’s drift away from its roots in the labour movement started early with a change in spelling at the beginning of the twentieth century and it’s been a slalom down a slippery slope ever since. The post-war boom – and its echoes across the next two decades – had workers and factories producing all manner of things we didn’t need to give those who could afford them the illusion of choice, and those who couldn’t something to feel self-conscious about. Marx and Engels were just what the trade unions needed to ensure those making this garbage weren’t killed in too great a number or exploited to too great a degree. Great for the paid up members, but you wouldn’t want the shop stewards running the country. If Stalin and Mao taught us anything, it’s that top-down communism doesn’t work unless you’re very good at digging mass graves and that even the factory-floor-up version is at its best when its precepts are just being yelled at management through a loudhailer. You certainly don’t want these guys in the boardroom. If Bernard Mandeville’s grumbling hive was a syndicalist commune, it wouldn’t have produced enough honey to spread on a crouton. When you’re trying to build a healthy national economy, it’s essential to ease up on the fairness and amp up the greed; and if the aspirational middle class is serious about wanting to embrace wealth creation, then it better be backing private vice to reap the bulk of that public benefit. At the end of the day, giving people the coat off your back gets you nothing but cold during the winter.

As what remains of our manufacturing industry breathes its last and we rely more and more on service industries (and digging things out of the ground, naturally), we lose the optimism and promise of the era that gave the labour movement its genuine blue-collar leaders. These days most of them cut their teeth in the playroom of student politics. Mind you, you can’t blame Labor for being reluctant to recruit from some of today’s trade unions in case they end up fielding a candidate from the Comancheros. Student politics is a far safer bet by comparison (despite the post-modern literary history courses on offer).

It doesn’t matter so much that universities are the feeder clubs for the Liberal party because it’s on brand to look like you’ve just come from a debating society wine-and-cheese evening. I know this for a fact because I went through law school with Christopher Pyne. Labor, on the other hand, is the party that gave us great trade-unionist prime ministers like Frank Forde, a titan of the left who cut his teeth on the bone and gristle of no less than the Australian Worker’s Union. Sure, Frank only served eight days as PM – but, what an eight days they were. The problem now, of course, is that our service industry is dependent on a consumer culture driven entirely by instant gratification and this is not an ideal environment for breeding a leader who will one day need to call for self-sacrifice so that our children may have a future. Australians are still putting Gladwrap in their recycling bins; what chance does Labor have of getting 51 per cent of us to accept that negative gearing and franking credits should get the chop? That’s why they won’t put it on the table. Mind you, it’d make for an excellent dead cat.