Ever since Bill Clinton defeated George Bush snr in the 1992 US election, politicians in the US and here have been obsessed by the campaign phrase, "It's the economy, stupid".
That was 25 years ago, but things are very different now.
Politicians - and journalists for that matter - who obsess about the budget, fail to understand the key motivation of most voters. Nowadays, it's definitely not the economy, stupid.
So, if it is not the economy that drives most people, what is it? Put simply, politics is about identity, not economics.
Most voters are smart enough to know that politicians don't actually create many jobs. Voters know that the more politicians claim to create jobs, the more they are lying to them.
The voting public has also seen that undoing milk marketing arrangements brought about the downfall of dairy farmers across the country, just as unwinding sugar arrangements delivered the sugar processing industry into the hands of foreigners.
It just proves how far economic theory is from social values.
You can argue as much as you like about whether this delivers good economic outcomes across the whole economy. At some point, people cease to care.
This is the age of the tribe, and voters want to know that politicians belong to the same tribe as they do.
In last year's US presidential election, Louisiana voted 58 per cent for Trump and 38 per cent for Clinton, even though Trump's policies of reducing environmental regulation, and reducing welfare benefits would hit that state hard. Many voters knew their choice would leave them worse off economically, but they didn't care because Trump appealed to their innate tribalism.
In the recent French presidential election, Marine Le Pen garnered almost 34 per cent for a party founded by people who collaborated with the Nazis during the Second World War, and who were virulently anti-semitic.
That is extraordinary, but not frightening. Most of the voters were voting against the major parties, not necessarily for Le Pen's policies.
However, identity politics is the Trojan horse by which some truly horrible people can gain power. You can use and abuse your own supporters, give multiple explanations about gifts to your party, and have no real solutions to the problems you discuss, as long as you accuse your opponents of being more cynical than you are.
If we don't want a repeat of French or US politics here, our politicians need to understand that, for many people, what they say about principles and identity are much more important than what they say about the economy.
That doesn't mean pandering to blatantly racist stereotypes as Bill Shorten's abysmal "Australians First" television advertisement recently tried to do. It just means acting with empathy and integrity.
Politicians can start by being willing to cross the floor for their constituents, and showing they really care about the people who vote for them. Political parties also need to stop punishing our representatives when they do so.
Most importantly, politicians need to stop telling us what is good for us, and instead what they are doing for us. It's so very simple, you wonder why so many of them don't get it.
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