Pity Bill Shorten. So there he is, finally looking like a winner, and who should resurface to stand alongside him? Not just the two PM's he (successively) dispatched but, worse, much worse, Paul Keating, directing a spray at an imaginary anti-China intelligence lobby and doing his best to raise national security as an election issue. The 'big' picture was back!
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Shorten was utterly horrified. He quickly hustled Paul away, tucked him up with some medicine, steering the former PM well away from the microphones. Vibrant debate's the last thing Shorten wants, particularly now, with the foregone result (a draw with his nose just ahead) already in the bag.
Big ideas; real issues to fight over, are a big no-no. The strategy has been carefully crafted and the campaign's playing out beautifully. Stick to the middle; calm the horses; glide into the Lodge, surfing - or perhaps paddling softly - on a wave of vague economic dissatisfaction and real climate concern. That's not quite fair. Chris Bowen's done his best to push out a few morsels of tax policy, but even these meagre offerings have cost the party.
Talking about change, even creating opportunity, is a big idea, and any change means creating losers. Labor doesn't want to be associated with that, because it wants to win. An idea that inspires one voter risks alienating another. Best not have any.
And this is why Shorten wants to keep things sweepingly broad and focus on domestic issues.
What's Labor's view on China, you may ask? Or perhaps defence?
The answer is, 'what's your view?' Whatever it is, Labor will happily reflect it straight back. And that's the reason pollsters aren't picking up any surging wave of enthusiasm for change. The opposition's simply capitalising on widespread dissatisfaction: it doesn't want to offer a target the government can't miss. Will it be enough?
Talking about change, even creating opportunity, is a big idea, and any change means creating losers.
Since the Second World War, political differences have comfortably fitted into a left/right divide: capital against labour, business versus workers. Politicians didn't challenge this - they harnessed it. Both sides insisted growth was good and the real battle was to work out how to share out the benefits of expansion.
Redistributing wealth was the fundamental difference. Working out how to boost happiness was left to the individual, using money as the metric. If someone enjoyed spending, they simply had to work harder.
That old system's broken down. The economy isn't growing the way it used to and new issues - the environment, immigration, the sort of society we want to be - have emerged.
This created a huge problem for the old parties. Their answers are increasingly irrelevant to voters. They're trapped in the very structures that originally provided success, but the old economic framework can't offer answers for the new social questions.
That's why both parties are as silent as they can be on some of the most critical issues we face. They address these issues in code. Scott Morrison won't get the primary vote of someone who's anti-immigration, so he tries for their second preference. Labor's doing exactly the same with people concerned about the environment. These are big blocks of votes but this impoverishes debate. Nothing is viewed on its merits. The debate degenerates into a slapstick of caricature and exaggeration.
Take Labor's pledge (made, incidentally, in marginal Reid, a Sydney seat where three-quarters of voters have overseas born parents) to dramatically slash visa costs and scrap the cap on numbers of in-laws who can come and stay.
Criticise this, for any reason, and you're branded heartless and racist. Both parties deliberately simplify issues back to the simplistic good/bad dichotomy. Voters will be forced to accept the choice on their terms; take it or leave it.
Policies are pushed out to be dealt with as individual issues, instead of relating back to the bigger picture.
The last thing Labor wants is to have environmentalists questioning what an increasing number of immigrants might mean for population numbers or taxpayers attempting to work out the added cost this will inevitably mean for health and welfare systems, no matter how stridently the party proclaims it won't.
The debate remains remorselessly binary. Neither Labor nor Liberal want it any other way. It's also why we're not talking about some other big issues, like how much tax Facebook and Google are managing to (quite legally) escape paying, or how social media is ghettoising society.
By insulating groups of like minded people from others, these allow extremist views to flourish and drive us apart from one another. It's time to deal with big issues and push aside the petty policies directed at swaying a vote here and there.
Aristotle believed the goal of life was to maximise happiness, but that doesn't mean we should just park our vote with the party that's promising to throw the best party. The problem is that boosting economic growth offers a particularly sub-par answer to the real issues that most concern us. Unfortunately both sides have already decided there are too many risks in outlining such big pictures of the future. They just want us to vote and leave it to them how to work out the detail.
