'Labor fails to convert widespread support for NDIS to ballot box', trumpeted The Australian's report of the latest Newspoll.
The failure, according to the paper's political editor, Dennis Shanahan, consists in this: an overwhelming majority of poll respondents, 78 per cent, want the proposed disability insurance scheme, for which the Gillard Government has gained Opposition approval. Yet voting intentions have scarcely shifted from the dismal prospect for Labor indicated in the previous Newspoll, taken a fortnight ago when bipartisan support for the 0.5 per cent rise in the Medicare levy that will pay for DisabilityCare was far from certain.
The two-party preferred vote for the coalition is now 56 per cent, up one per cent, and for Labor it is 44 per cent, down one per cent. These variations are within the statistical margin of error, so no change: the government is still heading for a thumping defeat, as polls have been predicting for months.
Well, yes. The puzzle is that Shanahan thinks that this translates into a story about the government's 'failure' to gain any traction from its win on disability insurance.
The reality is that an election is not a referendum on a set of policies. People typically vote for whoever they trust to govern, and the votes that decide elections are rarely cast by citizens who could give a detailed explanation of the rival parties' platforms.
There is no shortage of academic research to support this contention, but anyone who has handed out how-to-vote cards on election day knows it to be true from experience. Politicians and journalists must know it, too, but it is an oddity of modern democracy that both groups frequently act as though it were not so.
To say people vote for the party or candidates they trust — or more precisely, for those they trust more than the alternative — is not to say voters are stupid. On the contrary, it reflects their instinctive understanding that implementation of a political party's platform is not a necessary consequence of that party winning an election.
Nor, in this context, should 'trust' be understood to mean 'like'. Tony Abbott has often trailed Julia Gillard in personal approval ratings, but even when her net approval rating has been higher than his the two-party preferred vote has usually indicated that voters intend to hand him her job at the next election.
None of this means that policies don't matter, of course, or that voters always place their trust wisely. But it does mean that a transfer of power isn't to be explained simply by the fact that when policies are in dispute the alternative government has accumulated more ticks from voters than the incumbent.
There are elections when such disputes loom large, as the Howard Government's workplace laws did in 2007, or the Chifley Government's plan to nationalise the banks did in 1949. But these were exceptional polls, and in each case it can be plausibly argued that the contentious policy assumed the significance that it did in voters' minds because it unleashed a deeper discontent.
Many people who were not union members voted Labor in 2007 because the Howard Government's radical deregulation of the workplace aroused fears about job security. And in 1949, at the end of a decade marked by war and the steadily expanding role of government, the Coalition's call for the unshackling of the economy eclipsed Labor rhetoric about the need for democratic control of 'the money power'.
Much more typical have been the defeats of governments whose store of trust among voters had run out. In 1972 the ALP under Whitlam offered Australians a comprehensive agenda of reform, but more potent in the defeat of the Coalition after 23 years in government was the most memorable slogan in Australian political history: 'It's Time'.
A similar mood for change swept Labor away three years later, and then back into office again in 1983. In each case, what sealed the incumbent's fate was a growing sense of economic insecurity among voters, rather than disputes about the merits of rival platforms.
The next change of government, in 1996, was even more notable for an absence of substantive policy debate. John Howard became prime minister chiefly by reminding voters that he was not Paul Keating.
The 2013 election campaign won't be a policy-free zone, but if voters opt for change, as polls strongly suggest they will, they will very likely make their choice on grounds other than their assessment of particular policies.
Of course most people see the need for a disability insurance scheme, and accept that they will have to pay for it. The Prime Minister's adroit manoeuvering of the Opposition Leader and his colleagues into supporting the scheme and the levy, however, was never going to instil confidence in her among voters who mistrusted her anyway.
Their lack of trust is a deeper, more intractable problem for the Government, because it ultimately derives not from policy or the legislative record or even the state of the economy. It derives from continuing unease about the circumstances in which Gillard became prime minister in the first place.
The disconnect between debates about policy and the decisions voters make also has consequences for Abbott. There have always been some on the opposition benches who think that the Coalition's plan for six months of paid parental leave should be scrapped because it is too expensive. In the past week that internal debate became public, with the consequence that Abbott found an unaccustomed ally in the feminist advocate Eva Cox.
Most feminists, Cox wrote, only opposed Abbott's plan because he had proposed it, and they should cease supporting the Government's cheaper but inferior scheme. She is right about the inconsistency. But will feminist activists now be rushing to cast a vote for the coalition on 14 September? Somehow I doubt it.
Ray Cassin is a contributing editor.