It’s a talking point, and the danger with talking points is journalists can stop listening. To avoid a sudden death by sound bite, and lulled by the ceaseless cacophony, we can sometimes fail to interrogate what is sitting right in front of us.

Scott Morrison has shared a few versions of the same organising idea since taking the prime ministership last year, but the clearest articulation of his mantra came during the opening press conference of the 2019 election.

Morrison was asked about the fair go. A journalist asked the prime minister how he intended to counter Labor’s campaign messaging about the importance of fairness. It’s worth recording his answer in full.

“I believe in a fair go for those who have a go, and what that means is part of the promise that we all keep as Australians is that we make a contribution and don’t seek to take one,” the prime minister said.

“When all Australians do that, that’s when we get the fair go mentality and culture that has made our country strong today. So under our policies, if you’re having a go you’ll get a go. And that involves an obligation on all of us to be able to bring what we have to the table.

“It doesn’t matter what level of ability you have, what your means are, where you live in this country. It matters that we all bring our best. Under my government, under our government, under a Liberal Nationals government, we will always be backing in those Australians who are looking to make a contribution not take one and, together, that’s how we make our country stronger.”

Now what this means, if we take a moment to listen, and don’t allow our eyes to glaze over because “here comes that heavily rehearsed line again”, is the prime minister of Australia believes the fair go is conditional.

While Morrison takes care to express his organising idea in a positive construction, not a negative one, his meaning is clear.

Making a contribution without taking one is not what happens in reality

By his own account, the fair go has some footnotes attached to it. The fair go applies if you have a go and if you don’t seek to “take” a contribution. It doesn’t automatically apply to everyone equally.

While Morrison’s construction is designed to prompt a nod of affirmation from the listener, to validate a resting pre-disposition in the community about conniving welfare cheats and dole bludgers, and encourage strivers to feel good about themselves and vaguely resentful about the circumstances of others, if we unpack it, it’s actually a discordant thought to articulate in the Australian experience.

Many of us “take” contributions frequently through public education and universal health care and family payments and childcare assistance – and we do that because it is the Australian way.

These are priorities Australia has set for itself in the way we conceive of the institution of government, and what it does. Making a contribution without taking one is not what happens in reality. Not in this country.

Australians work if we can, pay taxes if we are fortunate enough to be employed and consume a range of government services throughout our lives. If we fall on hard times we look to government to support us. Those are the realities of a long-established social contract, and for many Australians these expectations are not conditional.

Because the government has moved a distance politically from Tony Abbott’s first budget, the one that killed his prime ministership and almost killed the government – we can default to thinking the collective mindset has moved on from Joe Hockey’s declaration in his budget speech of that year that Australia was a nation of “lifters and leaners”.

In practice the government has moved on. Every budget the government has delivered since 2014 has been about trying to undo the political damage caused by Abbott and Hockey’s opening gambit.

But the exclusionary rhetoric persists. This idea that some categories of people are inherently more deserving than others; that finding yourself on the bottom rung of the ladder is attributable not to a set of circumstances that governments might look at correcting for the good of society as a whole, but because of a failure of individual imagination and work ethic.

Morrison’s language, if we decode it, is pernicious at a couple of levels. The first is implicit in the prime ministerial declaration of a belief that opportunity is equal for everybody, and some people just squander opportunity because they are lazy.

Bill Shorten noted at the weekend he was 'not into poor shaming'

The second way the language is unhelpful is the free pass it delivers to governments. By sheeting home responsibility to the undeserving, Morrison (and others before him) fail to properly interrogate what might actually be going on.

If being stuck in a poverty trap is the fault of the individual, then governments, wonderfully, fortuitously, are off the hook. There is no need to investigate whether we are making a choice in this country, either consciously or unconsciously, to fail a group of fellow citizens, and in doing that, failing an important ideal of ourselves.

That mindset – the one articulated in the Morrison talking point about the fair go – means that nothing changes. The dial doesn’t shift.

Bill Shorten, who is nosing his 2019 campaign around the concept of fairness, noted at the weekend he was “not into poor shaming”. Shorten said Labor would not make unemployed people a “cheap target to divide our community”.

“What we want to see is a robust economy. Obviously the best solution to unemployment is a job. But I don’t want to be dividing this country and attacking vulnerable people who could well be unemployed for a whole lot of reasons and making them the target of community resentment.”

Inclusive language is a positive start, but what will be required, if we want to fix a problem that needs fixing, is something more much more wholistic.

It will require more than words.

It will require the political will to get it done.

Reporting in this series is supported by VivCourt through the Guardian Civic Journalism Trust