Turnbull agreed to govern on the conservatives' terms, yet even then they were not content and tossed him aside when they could stand him no longer. Now Scott Morrison has a few weeks of campaigning to try to overcome a few years of alienation. He derided the Liberals' conduct during the leadership coup as a "muppet show". Can you turn a muppet show into a political tour de force in a matter of weeks? Illustration: John Shakespeare Credit: Can the government save itself with a final fiscal frenzy – tax cuts and big spending? Of course not. This is a peculiar fetish of the political class. It wasn't enough to save John Howard. Why would it be enough to save Scott Morrison? And Howard's offer was much bigger. Only politicians and their hired help believe that voters are so venal.

It's like a man facing a determined assailant who pleads, "No, please don't hit me, take my wallet." It's pathetic. As a reader under the name of Axis commented on the budget this week, "I used my future tax cut to buy two future baseball bats." Illustration: Jim Pavlidis Credit: The independent polling expert John Stirton, formerly longtime pollster for Nielsen, says that "when a government is about to lose, you usually see it a long time in advance" in the polls. "The polling has been strongly against the government now for a long time," Stirton says. "It's the longest period of successive losses in Australian polling history. Pretty much nothing has shifted the polling, except in the wrong direction for the government." Will promising people money change the trajectory and save the government? "As we get closer to an election, it's seen as a bit of a sign of desperation," Stirton says, "because it's done by a government in trouble. It's too late and it's too obvious – 'When all else fails, give them money'."

Labor shares the fetish, or, at least, lacks the confidence to challenge it. When the government promised tax cuts last year, Labor promised bigger ones. When the government returned to the auction this week with a bigger bid, Labor immediately outbid it again. And Labor can afford to. Why? Because it has decided to cut some big tax concessions, freeing some $200 billion in revenue for the 10 years to come. This is risky. It's said it will curb negative gearing and reduce the capital gains tax discount applied to property investment, for one. The government will use this as the basis for a major scare campaign, claiming that Labor will destroy house prices. Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Friday, heading into the election leading a minority government. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer When he was treasurer, Scott Morrison also wanted to make some serious reforms to the tax system, but was vetoed by his prime minister. The result? The Coalition, too frightened to attempt any significant tax reform, doesn't have the same degree of room to move. The Coalition can really only afford to return "bracket creep" – the automatic increase in tax revenue that flows as taxpayers move into steeper tax brackets as their pay increases – plus windfalls that chance to materialise in the Treasury.

The net result is that Labor can promise bigger tax cuts and more spending, and that's exactly what it's doing. The government gets a consolation prize – it can boast that it isn't raising taxes, a boast that will be a central theme in its campaign. Even if the government believes that offering money for votes is necessary, it's certainly not sufficient. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten on Friday. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The treasurer who celebrated a lump of coal in the Parliament is now the Prime Minister allocating billions to Snowy 2.0 and Tasmanian hydro projects and promising an electric vehicle strategy. A clean-energy conversion or a deathbed conversion? The shadow minister who was happy to play on xenophobia – remember Morrison's complaint that the government shouldn't pay for 22 asylum seekers to travel to the funerals of their relatives who'd died in the Christmas Island wreck, even as he and other politicians travelled the world on the taxpayer dime – is now the Prime Minister rushing through legislation to protect the dignity of the victims of the Christchurch massacre.

We should applaud his progress towards becoming a national leader rather than a right-wing provocateur. But whatever Morrison says or does, Labor has taken the valuable symbolism of representing the future, and left the Coalition as the party of the past. Loading The government made it easy for Bill Shorten. It was a Liberal minister, Kelly O'Dwyer, who complained to her colleagues in November that the voters now saw the Liberal Party as "homophobic, anti-women climate change deniers". Some of the government's most prominent women – Julie Bishop, O'Dwyer herself, Julia Banks – are voting with their feet. The Labor leader is driving home his advantage as the man representing the future. This is a good trick for a former trade union leader and party apparatchik; only the Coalition's backwardness has made it possible for him to seem effortlessly forward-looking. On the eve of the federal budget Shorten stole the headlines by announcing Labor's electric vehicle plan. He announced that Labor would implement the national energy guarantee that Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg crafted but that the Coalition's conservatives sabotaged. He announced curbs to carbon emissions. And the business sector, desperate for some policy certainty, cheered.

Serial Liberal policy failure over six years has brought the electricity system to the place you'd expect – the brink of collapse. The Australian Energy Market Commission reported this week that "the grid is holding up but only because the energy market operator is intervening on a daily basis to keep the lights on". Loading Even Tony Abbott has awoken to the madness of the Liberal antediluvian detour, getting to the 2019 election via the 1950s. Facing his own reckoning with the 21st century in his seat of Warringah, Abbott is no longer demanding that Australia withdraw from the Paris climate accord. The head of a major industrial group, normally a natural constituent of the Liberal Party, this week said of the Morrison government: "They've been left stuck in the past." And then in his budget reply, Shorten effectively delivered his campaign launch. He emphasised two themes that will run through the election campaign – fairness and health care, areas where Labor is strong and the Coalition weak. Labor's cancer campaign is big, clear and powerful and was immediately welcomed by the Cancer Council.

And, once again, because Labor plans some serious savings through tax reform, it can afford the $2.3 billion for the plan, and much more to come. The government has its own areas of strength, of course. Voters have long seen the Liberals as superior economic managers, and better able to control asylum seeker boat arrivals. The government will play on these themes. But both have lost some salience as the years have passed. After 28 years of continuous economic growth, voters no longer give governments credit. It seems inevitable and natural. And the Liberals were so successful at stopping the boats that this issue, too, has lost some of its force. Morrison, on this policy, is a victim of his own success. The government has spent so long alienating so many people that its best chance will be not to win voters with the power of attraction but to scare them away from voting Labor by stoking anti-Labor revulsion.

You heard a brief curtain-raiser on the negative campaign ahead on Thursday morning when Morrison anticipated Shorten's budget reply with the line that it would be all "lies and taxes". So unless Shorten is promising a new tax, he's telling a lie, evidently. No one would suggest Shorten as a paragon of trustworthiness, but the Morrison line is just a little bit overdone. To anyone thinking of voting Labor because they're interested in Labor's plan for a living wage instead of a minimum wage, or to anyone who's excited by Shorten's promise of low-cost cancer treatment, Morrison needs to come up with something more persuasive if he wants to win them over. A negative campaign can be powerful and effective, and this time it's the government's only real hope. But it will need to be plausible, not silly. The government, already reduced to a minority and behind in the polls for an entire term, is in deep trouble. When Morrison managed to win the Liberal leadership, turning a support base of perhaps a dozen of votes into a triumphal majority of 45, one of his numbers men said: "We pulled off the miraculous." To win the election, Morrison will need a second miracle.