But politics is not a business of absolutes. It's about relativities. Compared to the government led by Morrison, Shorten's Labor party is positively futuristic. The Morrison government reeks of the 1950s, a boofheaded men's club led by a bloke who carried a lump of coal around in the Parliament. When Morrison's staff realised how antediluvian it looked, they thought they'd fix the problem by concocting a clip of the government's members in the House of Representatives raising their hands in the air to a hip hop tune and sending it out by Twitter. It was an instant failure that Morrison on Friday had to disown, retract and apologise for. Scott Morrison's team tried to do an image makeover with a tweet that failed dismally. Credit:AAP Some thought it was a bad idea because the tune, Be Faithful, by Fatman Scoop, contains foul language, though this isn't heard in the brief clip that the prime ministerial office tweeted. Well, yes, but the real problem wasn't that it was in poor taste but that it was so fake. When Kevin Rudd was discovered visiting a New York strip club it actually boosted his approval ratings. Poor taste doesn't matter so much if the people think it's authentic.

There's nothing authentic about Morrison as hip or modern. What's been the biggest noise surrounding the rebadged administration for the past three weeks? That it has a problem with women. One after another, Liberal women have stepped forward to complain of bullying, intimidation and under-representation in their party. Julia Banks says she's leaving Parliament because of it. How many women are in the government's parliamentary leadership group? None. The only female member of the Turnbull leadership group, Julie Bishop, now sits on the backbench. How many women are in Labor's leadership team? Two out of four, Tanya Plibersek and Penny Wong. > Credit:Jim Pavlidis And Labor far outshines the Liberals in overall numbers of women in the Parliament. Labor's gender makeup looks pretty much like Australia itself. Roughly equal numbers of men and women. Or 46.7 per cent female, to be exact.

In the case of the Liberals, women make up fewer than a quarter, only 23.5 per cent. This doesn't look like Australia. It looks like a bias. A relic of the 1950s. The Coalition's coal fetish is another part of the problem. It might be different if the government were able to talk rationally about a technology-agnostic approach to energy. Power line: Penny Wong, Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek . Credit:Andrew Meares But the Coalition's attachment to coal is not rational. It's become a sacred ideological talisman. And Morrison, by holding aloft a lump in the House of Representatives as if brandishing a crucifix in the face of evil, made himself its priest. Why would the then treasurer of Australia pull such a juvenile stunt? To get attention, to court favour with his party's right-wing reactionaries and to impress the so-called conservative "base".

With such ideological feverishness, the base will be all that the Coalition will have left. Not a catch-all party with wide appeal capable of winning government, but a sectional party of no interest to mainstream Australia and relegated to permanent opposition. "The coal thing and the female thing, it just causes people to roll their eyes," says one of the country's leading qualitative pollsters and former Labor party favourite, Tony Mitchelmore, of the research firm Visibility. "The government has to get people to listen to them and take them seriously. But the coal thing is like same-sex marriage. It's so far away from where the public is. The public is past it. It's the same with the women thing. They are past all that." Treasurer Scott Morrison brings a lump of coal into Parliament in 2017. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen One of the defining aspects of Australia in 2018 is the growing conviction that the younger generation will be worse off than their parents for the first time in the country's history. This is keenly felt among voters in their teens and 20s but it's also becoming a preoccupation for their parents and even their grandparents. That is, it's a national anxiety.

Key elements of this anxiety are the outlandishly high cost of housing in the biggest cities and the wilful vandalism to the natural environment. Labor can point to more effective policies in both areas. The government's approach to trimming house prices by tightening regulatory scrutiny of bank lending has been effective in taking the heat out of house prices. But Labor's policy of phasing out negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions will be a more forceful long-term way of containing house prices. If anything, Labor will have to be careful that it's not too forceful. With the market already in retreat, a Shorten government would need to be sensitive in timing and treatment. The last thing it wants is to be blamed for collapsing the housing market and pitching the country into recession. Similarly, Labor has a more plausible policy for addressing climate change. The Coalition has been so busy destroying Malcolm Turnbull by dismembering his final, failed attempt at an energy policy that it has bequeathed the Morrison government no policy at all.

The Morrison cabinet this week formally dispensed the funeral rites to the National Energy Guarantee. This has left nothing but talking points in its place. Business of every type, including the electricity sector, is in despair. There is nothing to guide investment in the energy sector. The government has shown that it is incapable of creating a policy, capable only of destroying one. In the meantime, Labor is committed to retaining the NEG as the core of its energy policy. This opens another opportunity for Labor. It allows Shorten effortlessly to position Labor as the party of rational policy. Labor also agreed this week to support Australia's accession to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the 11-nation market-opening pact. This was achieved against resistance by some of the unions and some in the Labor Left. This showed that Shorten is capable of managing Labor's factions in pursuit of a sensible centrist outcome. It stands in stark contrast to the government, whose factional hatreds have just torn it apart. Shorten is a touch older than Morrison, by one year. But being a leader for the future has little to do with age. Frank Lowy, co-founder of Westfield and one of the giants of Australian entrepreneurialism, is 87. Yet this week he gave a speech showing Australia a positive pathway to the future.

"I have watched with admiration how Australia has changed over the past 70 years," since he arrived as a penniless Jewish refugee from the Nazis. "Australia was open to people like me. It was open to new ideas. And there was a tangible sense of ambition about the place. I want Australia to be even more successful in the next 70 years." He advocated emphasis on what he calls the "three 'I's" - immigration, innovation and infrastructure. He called for Australia to recapture its sense of openness and ambition. "It will require self-confidence, and faith in Australia. In my experience, that faith has always been repaid." Loading It was a speech encouraging the country to grow into its full potential, not shrink into its most fearful prejudices. And perhaps the biggest applause point of his speech in the Sydney Town Hall on Thursday was when he said: "I've always admired Australia’s parliamentary system. But having five prime ministers in five years is not acceptable. Democracy needs to be nurtured and treated with care. We need to give the prime minister of the day a chance. If he or she cannot win an election, so be it. But no prime minister can push through the reforms we need if they cannot even finish a term in office." And this, says Mitchelmore, is the overarching issue for the electorate: "The bigger issue is that the Liberals are doing the whole Rudd-Gillard-Rudd thing." When the Liberal leadership spill was happening, "people were, 'yeah, whatever'. There's a real sense of futility in tuning in because people are all so disappointed."

This problem of perpetual regicide is what a retailer might call a "category killer". It doesn't just damage one brand, Liberal or Labor, it damages the whole category of mainstream politics. The leader of the future will be the person, and the political party, that can overcome this meta-problem of Australian democracy - demonstrate the sanity, the stability, the seriousness of purpose to sustain a prime minister and a government. Just now Labor has the advantage. It has more stability and a more modern set of policies for the future while the Liberals lose themselves in a vengeance cycle of the past. That positions Shorten as the leader for the future. It's up to Labor to give him one. Peter Hartcher is political editor.