By Shaun Carney
Our leaders are expected to juggle voters' personal policy obsessions while putting on a show to rival MasterChef.
This is the first election of the MasterChef era, and a lot of Australians appear to be unhappy about it. MasterChef is a social phenomenon. It takes an everyday process that is intrinsically pedestrian - the collating and presentation of food ingredients - and turns it into a journey of self-realisation, personal inspiration, high drama and artistic invention. The program's inherent hyperbole is boundless; one of the show's judges praised this year's winner for his intellectual approach to cooking.
How we laughed and cried and gasped and shook our heads in bewilderment - she told you not to make custard! - as we watched these ordinary people pursue their ''food dream''. This is what so many of us want: lots of pictures, lots of movement, lots of emotion - and so inspiring.
Compared with MasterChef, this election campaign is a boring dud. The pictures look pretty much the same every day, the leaders keep changing location but there's no apparent movement, and the drama and inspiration is in short supply, almost to the point of non-existence.
It is in many ways an unconventional campaign. For many elections now, a number of ritualistic utterances have been de rigueur, but not this time; even the cliches are suffering fatigue. Two weeks in and we have not yet heard ''when you change the government, you change the country''. Nor have we been told by anyone that this is ''the most important election in a generation''. The past eight or nine have been, so why not this one?
The truth is that this election is just as vital to the direction of this country as any other, even if, so far in this campaign, it might not have felt like it. It's clear from the opinion polls, from reader and audience feedback in the media, and from standing in the supermarket queue that ennui, disaffection and disenchantment is prevalent across part of the electorate, especially among those who would generally be regarded as falling into the Labor column.
Complaints about the election are that the policies on offer from the major parties do not differ enough, that other policies are too narrowly targeted, that the leaders are trying too hard not to make mistakes, that the Prime Minister especially is determined to be facile and is bogged down with her ''Moving Forward'' slogan, and that the urgent policy challenges facing the country are not being addressed.
These sort of complaints are a particularly grim portent for the government. The Labor base is fracturing, with its middle-class segment transferring to the Greens. On the non-Labor side, there is no similar second-choice party to provide a haven for unhappy Coalition supporters.
Labor is also increasingly a victim of its own mythology. Many Labor supporters - too many for the party's own good - are hooked on the idea that political leaders must provide inspiration for voters. It is not enough for leaders such as Julia Gillard to put aside a normal life with regular hours and family time in order to pursue a political career; they must raise the heart rate whenever they speak.
This expectation owes something to two forces: the deification of past Labor leaders such as Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, who with each passing year are accorded greater stature as orators with the hearts of lions; and the ever-growing desire for emotional uplift and personal affirmation.
This is the MasterChef phenomenon at work. Politics, even in the contested atmosphere of an election campaign, is habitually not especially enthralling.
The leaders and frontbenchers make announcements. Often they make speeches. Pretty much no one listens to the speeches. Very few bother to look at the detail of the policy announcements. The modern media as a rule does not report the policies in a consistently detailed way. Television news bulletins do not even run full sentences from politicians in their news reports; they run phrases.
Politicians are performers and politics is a form of entertainment. Successive generations of political leaders and the political professionals who guide them have certainly made a fair-sized contribution in bringing this situation about. At each election they have become more and more risk averse, less willing to take their chances with the public, and afraid to face off against their direct opponents outside strictly controlled conditions.
But the mainstream parties are not solely to blame. Society is changing at an incredible rate and they are trying to keep up. It has been observed during this campaign that the parties' slogans have now found their way into the leaders' speech, and that in 1972, for example, Whitlam ran on the ''It's Time'' theme but did not need to mouth it constantly, if at all.
True enough, but in 1972 vastly greater proportions of voters read newspapers and attended public meetings and joined political parties. They did not have a client-provider or entertainer-audience approach to politics. Nor were there the distractions in their lives that exist today: YouTube, email, multi-channel TV, digital recording, DVDs, mobile phones, round-the-clock liquor licensing, seven-day retail trading.
In 2010, there are thousands of ways to avoid being informed and millions of Australians take advantage of them every day. For better or worse, that's one of the key reasons Gillard started off by saying ''moving forward'' so much and why Tony Abbott refers to the mining tax as a ''great big new tax on mining'' and a carbon trading scheme as ''a great big new tax on everything''.
The fashion now is to disdain the way politics is practised, to sound off indignantly about the way one's personal policy obsessions are not addressed. This is an extension of identity politics, in which the voter is a passive participant seeking the reflection of his or her self-image from the political system. These voters are bound to be disappointed because pluralist, democratic politics has never worked like that.
It is a slow, mostly dull grind and, unlike MasterChef, the reality cannot be edited into an uplifting, entertaining package.
Shaun Carney is Age associate editor.