It really is one of the more head-scratching trends in national politics: a government seemingly prepared to squander genuine opportunities to execute policy reform in the national interest, for reasons that are not entirely clear.

Let me give you a couple of examples. The first relates to housing and the second relates to energy.

Everyone in the country knows there is a serious problem with housing affordability in Sydney and Melbourne, and speculative activity by investors is one of the dynamics driving what looks for all the world like a bubble.

If we take the advice of the treasurer, Scott Morrison – who on Tuesday urged journalists to find essential wisdom about economic policy in the pubs of Australia, rather than in econometric models – I guarantee people in the front bar will be talking about housing prices.

The latest data points to price growth in Sydney of close to 20% in a single year. Two regulators – the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission – are sufficiently concerned to look at current activity in interest-only lending practices.

A host of experts have told the government to look at the current tax concessions for investors as an important component of solving a complex problem.

This isn’t ideological advice from wild-eyed lefties. It’s from people like David Murray, who used to run the Commonwealth Bank, and from conservative groups like the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

And, by some miracle, the government has ample political cover to go after reform of the offending tax concessions, because Labor has already occupied the space, like an advance party, setting up camp in a clearing.

Let’s be frank: in politics, you don’t get this sort of luck all that often.

And yet we have a strange, seemingly never-ending, interregnum, where Treasury is clearly quietly working up options to limit the capital gains tax concession. (We know this because two freedom-of-information requests, one from the ALP and the other from the news wire service AAP, indicate modelling work on CGT has been carried in the early months of this year.)

But there is no definitive resolution and the government’s two economic spokespeople are singing off different song sheets.

The song is subtle; no one is crash-tackling anyone else to the ground, or trolling each other on Twitter, but, if you speak Canberran, the schism is evident.

It’s abundantly clear the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, does not want the government to reduce the capital gains tax discount, or hack into negative gearing – but Morrison has been more equivocal.

It’s not clear whether the gritted teeth resistance stems from concern that the sudden appearance of decisive policy action could pop the bubble, (which keeps expanding as the indecision persists); whether this is concern about breaking an election promise; whether adjusting tax concessions could trigger yet another breakout by restive conservatives; or whether the government has actually been taken hostage by its own reductionist mantra of taxes on investment being the equivalent to thought crimes.

The best we can currently hope for is the May budget will solve the mystery.

In the meantime, let’s keep our fingers crossed for an outbreak of measured good sense.

The same otherworldly dynamic exists in energy policy.

In the lost near decade where one faction of the Liberal party made carbon pricing a mechanism to oust Malcolm Turnbull from the opposition leadership, then invented a carbon “tax” to run a riven Labor government out of office, the rest of the country proceeded to ignore the hyper-partisan rubbish in Canberra and attempt to work out what to do.

Amazingly, groups that willingly participated in Carbonaggedon in 2013 are now urging the government to wise up and look at a market mechanism for the electricity sector.

Again Labor has been an advance party on the rebooted emissions trading debate, setting up camp in a clearing and waving back at the Coalition just in case someone can look up for five minutes and see not only a valuable consensus emerging in the wreckage of a brutal, zero-sum, oxygen-thieving contest – but clear political opportunity.

If you were a government battling a host of problems, you really would kill for that sort of luck. But again, the same, strange, meh, vacancy.

Honestly, some days you really do feel like screaming.