In some ways, the next election is shaping as a battle between head and heart.
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Home owners warned to prepare for rates rise
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull warns families not to borrow too much money amid fears of a hike in interest rates.
Thanks to Bill Shorten's "scene-setter" speech in Melbourne on Friday, voters could face the starkest choice in decades - either to stick with the low-tax, pro-business, growth model despite its underperformance, or junk all that in favour of a strengthened social safety net funded by higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.
Amid the torpor bedevilling the global economy, Malcolm Turnbull is searching for a consistent line, declaring himself an "optimist" while warning that household budgets could be further strained, meaning borrowers should be "prudent" about their indebtedness.Â
Clearly, this sentiment is ill-suited to jolting a flat-lining economy into sudden and care-free effervescence. The personally comfortable Turnbull might call himself an optimist but his government's failure to prevent soaring household electricity prices and now, the threat of higher mortgage rates, will more likely entrench voters as pessimists. It is an incompatibility that favours Labor.
Increasingly, an emboldened Shorten is eyeing the redistributive manifestos of Bernie Sanders in the US and Britain's Jeremy Corbyn.
The Turnbull government, he charges, is "accelerating inequality"Â and that "kills hope".
Anecdotally at least, many would agree. If the runaway greed that sparked the 2008 sub-prime credit crisis was not itself a structural blow to the neo-liberal edifice in Western economies, the underwhelming period since the GFC has undermined its foundations further, destabilising its adherents along the way.
Governments are the new black - even when they're in the red.
"A belligerent defence of trickle-down economics is no kind of plan for Australia's future," Shorten observes, casting the PM as an ideologue.
Turnbull counsels against simplistic fixes, saying we should not "kid ourselves" that the answers lie in new trade barriers or in denying technological disruption.
That may be right, but the lived experience of flat wages, under-employment, and rising living costs will leave theoretical remedies in the shade.
Shorten's promise to address a "two-class tax system" where high-income earners pay accountants to minimise their liabilities, speaks to this grievance.
Conversely, Turnbull's plan to cut big business taxes to deliver better wages and more jobs, is counter-intuitive and thus a political liability.
A populist Senate and an opposition moving to the changing tune of the times - however cynically - can show the kind of agility the PM once dreamed of.
Probably a good thing he's an optimist.
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