Who is to blame for the lack of interest in policies? The media, for not reporting policy? The public, for not being interested in it? Or politicians, for not doing a good enough job of either developing policy or explaining it?

On Monday, Amanda Vanstone suggested on these pages that the media and public desire for "entertaining news" plays a big role. The media do seem to focus less on policy than in the past. When I analysed 600 news reports on elections for my 2011 book, How Australia Decides, I found that news stories with no, or only negligible reference to policy rose by 54 per cent between 2001 and 2007. In the commercial media sector, there is increasing pressure to provide stories that act as clickbait, rather than news reports that give policy detail.

Illustration: Andrew Dyson

But the way politics is conducted also plays into this and it is a self-perpetuating cycle. We are living through a lost era of policymaking. Despite the large egos that often characterise those seeking high political office, politicians seem to be suffering a crisis of confidence about whether their policymaking can make a big difference.

The deaths of former prime ministers Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser are a reminder of this. Whatever their political differences, they were both confident men, sometimes described as arrogant. They were confident they could solve national problems and that government was a tool for making major social, political and economic changes.