Illustration: John Shakespeare These does not seem to be coincidences. Australia's long run of economic success bred a complacency that persists to this day. It's a complacency about the state of the nation's prosperity and living standards. It has settled on the Australian people, who now think that economic growth and the world's highest living standards are a given, automatic and permanent. "The long period of growth may be leading all of us as a community to somehow think that's just the natural state of affairs, that we don't need to do anything to achieve it," said the former governor of the Reserve Bank, Glenn Stevens, in his parting remarks last year. "That's not really so."

Little to enthuse voters: Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten. Credit:Andrew Meares And if good times are the natural state of affairs, then nobody deserves any special credit. "We have become more pessimistic about the government's ability to influence economic outcomes," reports ANU political scientist Ian McAllister, custodian of the 30 years of survey results from the Australian Electoral Study. "There is a growing detachment in people's minds between economic conditions and what the government does – people see much less of a connection between the two." McAllister says the disconnect between peoples' conceptions of governments and growth has become clear in voter surveys in the last couple of elections.

But the actual behaviour of the electorate suggests the change in voters' assumptions might well have happened a few years earlier, as early as 2007. At three consecutive national elections – in 2007, in 2010 and again in 2013 – the voters refused to re-elect the governments that presided over these conditions. This is at odds with history. These are the only occasions since the creation of the modern two-party system in 1949 on which the Australian people have rejected a national government at a time of economic growth. First, the people dismissed the Howard government in 2007 although it had presided over an 11-year boom, already the longest on record.

Second, the Rudd and Gillard governments delivered Australian growth even in the midst of global economic calamity in 2008-09, but they reaped no political reward. Rudd was dispatched by his own party before the people had a chance. Gillard lost Labor's majority at the 2010 election and only survived in a minority arrangement. Finally, Labor was swept out decisively in the 2013 poll. The people did return the Coalition under Malcolm Turnbull at last year's election, but only just – Turnbull governs with the slimmest possible margin, one seat. It's not only the people who've become complacent about economic performance. The eminent political economist Ross Garnaut says the Great Australian Complacency, as he calls it, took hold of the political system from 2000. This locates it halfway through the Howard era. How can he be so specific? Because, after John Howard and Peter Costello enacted their landmark reform of the tax system in 2000, they lost interest in further reform, on Garnaut's reckoning.

And this marked the end of not only Howard-Costello reforms but an entire generation of near-continuous reform efforts that started in the years of the Hawke-Keating governments. Australia, famously forecast by Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew to become the home to the "poor, white trash of Asia", was in economic decline in the 1970s and 80s. Keating agreed with Lee. He warned of Australia as a future "banana republic". Crisis begat action. By 2007, Lee acknowledged the success of Australia's reform era. "You have changed," he told Costello. "Your country is a different place now." Success bred complacency. The old policymaker's adage has been proved anew: "Good times make bad policy." By late Howard years, ambition and rigour were lost and spending grew wanton.

Budget night came to resemble "Christmas night in the pirates' cave" in the words of the former Treasury budget examiner Stephen Anthony, as the government lavished handouts and tax cuts in the forlorn hope that it could win the people's gratitude. The former Treasury secretary Ken Henry, who served Keating and Costello, dates the onset of complacency in the political system and the wider public around the same time. "We had drifted into a state of complacency in the years before the GFC [global financial crisis of 2007-8]," Henry says. "Remarkably, the GFC didn't shock us out of it." Why should Australia care? By good management and good luck, the economy continued to grow even as the Western world collapsed. The complacency deepened. So the Australian people relieved their governments of responsibility for the economy. And governments relieved themselves.

This seems to have had a liberating effect on the political class, which has indulged itself mightily. Without a crisis, without a serious purpose, the political parties, Labor and Liberal alike, have indulged personal ambition and factional vendettas in a frenzy of regicide. "So in the century up to 2010," writes Rod Tiffen, Sydney University professor emeritus of political science, "three sitting prime ministers were victims of party coups. Then in just five years three more followed [Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott]." Australia started to burn through leaders faster than the notoriously impatient Italians. The fever spread to opposition parties, state parliaments. Plotting, coup-making became the chief preoccupation. "In the 1960s, there were no successful leadership challenges in the major parties, federal or state, but since 1970 fully 73 leaders have been ousted by their colleagues." Tiffen's Disposable Leaders confirms Australia's dubious distinction as the most febrile, restless and murderous political jurisdiction among parliamentary democracies: "This forced turnover of leaders is not the norm in any other country."

The former Sydney correspondent for the BBC, Nick Bryant, dubbed Canberra the "coup capital of the Western world". He was struck by the contrast between Australia's growing economic and strategic bulk and the derangement of its self-absorbed political class: "As the country has grown stronger, its politics have become nastier." Finally, Turnbull set out the criterion for leadership success in Australia. It was a frank admission of the debasement of the political system. Unhitched from the people's lives, unmoored from any economic benchmarks, Turnbull justified his challenge for the prime ministership by saying that Australia needed a leader capable to telling an economic narrative and capable of winning opinion polls. Not achieving economic outcomes or winning elections. Under Abbott "we have lost 30 Newspolls in a row", said Turnbull. That is, the government was behind in the polls for a little over a year. This is, according to Turnbull, a prime minister's unforgivable sin.

What does it mean to "lose" an opinion poll? It has no effect, no consequence whatsoever – unless the political system chooses to impute one to it. The idea that a prime minister can't afford a poll slump is a new one. Prime ministers usually have suffered midterm poll slumps. Howard, for instance, was unloved for long spans between elections. But it didn't matter so long as he was able to recover in time for election day. If political parties can no longer tolerate a midterm slump, there can be no more John Howards. If "losing" 30 consecutive opinion polls is enough to disqualify a prime minister, there can be no more serious reform. Any serious reform is controversial. This means that any serious prime minister will have a slump in the polls.

Would Hawke and Keating have liberalised the national system of wage-setting, or torn down the walls of protective tariffs and quotas, if they'd been judged by midterm polls? Would Howard and Costello have introduced a GST? No, because any of these decisions would have been political suicide. And Australia's economy would not have been remade with the flexibility to withstand all weathers for a quarter century. In other words, the political system of the great Australian complacency is not problem solving. It's a parlour game of polls and perceptions. Loading And where governments have attempted to return to the task of economic rejuvenation, the people, the Senate, outside interests like the mining lobby, and sometimes their own parties have vetoed any such effort.

If success has bred this complacency, does Australia needs a crisis to jolt it back to reality?