By Shaun Carney
Going sour on those in power is nothing new - but in 2010 it coincided with an election.
The 2010 election result was a long time coming - 20 years, actually. It has been a regular feature of our national political life for quite a while now for voters to go seriously sour on each government. During each of the past seven electoral terms, going back to Bob Hawke's final period as prime minister, the incumbent government has at some point looked to be headed for the exit door.
Illustration: John Spooner
Our compacted memories of the recent political past tend to focus on the continuity of governments. It's human nature: we subconsciously blank out the dark bits. But each government has flirted with, or been consumed by, a sense of political crisis throughout the past two decades. The descent into unpopularity between elections has been as regular as clockwork.
In 1991, Hawke, mugged by John Hewson and Fightback!, lost public support and was forced to make way for Paul Keating, who looked like he was done for right up until a day or so before the 1993 election. In 1996, after three years in office during which unpopularity for Labor became a feature, Keating was dispatched in a landslide.
John Howard's first term saw him lurch through a raft of troubles, culminating in the Coalition scraping back in with only a minority of the vote. In his second term, problems with the GST looked to have sunk him until Tampa and September 11 came along.
In his third term, voters embraced his new opponent, Mark Latham, for months until they worked out that Latham had faulty wiring. During Howard's fourth term, once Kevin Rudd took over as Labor leader, the Coalition was toast. And Rudd lasted a little over two years before a majority of voters turned on him to a decisive and irrevocable extent.
And now, perhaps inevitably after so many instances of passing disdain or outright rejection for various governments, that sense of crisis, or unhappiness or discontent, has found its way into an actual election result. This time, it wasn't a mid-term phenomenon.
What we can see from the history of the past 20 years is that the wider electorate can never be counted on to stay contented for very long. It's not all the fault of politicians and the major political parties.
The sense of entitlement within the Australian public is almost off the scale sometimes and the notion of sacrifice for the greater good is generally more honoured in the breach by voters. For example, parents who send their children to private schools speak of the sacrifices they make to pay the fees and then expect to be compensated from the public purse, which some might say negates the sacrifice.
Adult Australians at every stage of their lives expect to be looked after by the state. We want governments to make hard choices but are squeamish about the costs. Once the financial costs of an emissions trading scheme started to become more evident from the end of 2008, when the Rudd government issued its first ETS model, published polls showed support for a carbon trading regime falling.
After Rudd took it off the policy table and placed it in deep freeze in April, public support for an ETS started to rise again. A substantial majority of voters like the idea of an ETS more than the genuine prospect of it.
Again, this is human nature and it is not an excuse for Labor to have taken the course it did on this issue. The idea behind democratic politics is the same as the practice of commercial butchery: we entrust fellow citizens to do things we wouldn't or couldn't do.
It is absolutely reasonable to expect political leaders to take risks with their own careers on our behalf. But voters must meet them some of the way by engaging in the political process. Does that happen in Australia in 2010?
Contemporary Australians do like to join organisations - but not political parties. The big AFL clubs each have more members in Melbourne than the Australian Labor Party has across the entire country.
Clearly, a large proportion of Australian voters are disillusioned with the way the major parties have conducted themselves - many more on the Labor side than on the Coalition side. And fair enough, too. In this campaign, positive messages were an afterthought for Labor. But the Coalition parties were also relentlessly negative. It was a miserable contest.
Appropriately, there is a lot of concentration in the media this week on Labor's campaign and where it fell down. You can start anywhere: the delusion that the part of suburban Sydney that listens to talkback radio embodies the national mentality; the obsession with aping the Liberals that goes so far that the ALP has adopted blue as its dominant colour on its signage and how-to-vote cards.
But the Liberal strategists also made some costly errors. Could Tony Abbott have got himself over the line in his own right if he'd agreed to debate the economy? It might have been enough.
With the votes in the undecided seats now being counted and the independents considering their options, politics is now in its Kumbaya moment. To varying degrees, each of the independents is calling for much greater co-operation within the Parliament and talking about blended governments and greater power for private members.
Seeing how this plays out once the numbers are finally worked out and they have made their decision about whom to support will be fascinating. What we know from recent experiences in the states where minority governments have ruled is that soon after the governments are commissioned, normal political combat is resumed.
The baiting and the chiding and the exaggeration all return. And the cycle of narrow campaigning and public disenchantment gets back into gear.
Shaun Carney is Age associate editor.