Sigmund Freud offers the best explanation for the reaction recorded to the new Liberal party election TV ad that first aired on Sunday night. Familiarity, Freud posed, is disconcerting when we see it an unfamiliar way. The man on the television wearing a high-vis vest certainly looked a bit familiar, with his powertools, bench and humble mug, as well as willingness to spout an unasked for political opinion – in his case, that Labor leader Bill Shorten had declared “war on everything”, and, as such, he says: “So, I reckon we should just see it through and stick with the current mob for a while.”

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Certainly, there are no shortage of conservatives in the labouring classes, and as confounding as the phenomenon of the working class Tory may be to the champions of social progress, more than one socialist has been forced to accept that they exist.

Yet a confluence of elements in this simple, single-speaker ad were so dissociative from real-life, blue-collar conservatives that social media dubbed the star of the ad #faketradie.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Liberal party advertisement starring the #faketradie.

Even when advertising guru Dee Madigan insisted there was no way that a real actor could be so awkward with his lines, a rapidly agglomerating crowd of unbelievers pointed out the man’s watch and bracelet were a saw-operation “catch risk”, that his bench was too far from the demarcated worksite to be considered safe, and that ceramic cups were implausible in that workplace. They identified packing creases in his trousers, unsafe short sleeves and lack of safety goggles – even his “too clean” hands. Myself, I could not recall even the most avowed working class Tory ever expressing a deferent, defensive love of their bank.

Bill (@Billablog) Also, why is his saw-stool set up in a lane outside the fencing? And who has a ceramic cup on a building site? pic.twitter.com/pZEs7TPk0T

The context of the election has established that the Liberals are not averse to making appeals to the crucial working-class votes with no small amount of fakery – invoking manufactured truckie crises, opportunistic photoshoots with hardly impartial firefighter volunteers and the cringeworthy “poor Malcolm” videos with much attention to ornament.

At this stage of a long campaign, it’s difficult to determine whether the “fake tradie” ad is a campaign misstep, a tight and clever small-target appeal to a narrow demographic or another dead cat thrown on the table.

In the case of the latter, the feline feast is an understandable attempt to distract from one of the great literal ironies of the campaign; weeks ago, I responded to Turnbull’s promise of “jobs and growth” with the question “what kind of jobs?”. Weeks later, he is still saying it, I am still asking, the government is presiding over a collapse in the growth of full-time jobs and hiding them under part-time work figures and the elephant in the room of the accelerating decline of Australian manufacturing has not gone away.

Giovanni Torre (@GiovanniTorre) The actor playing #FakeTradie wears a loose bracelet while on his break from operating power tools. That's an OHS issue.#auspol#ausvotes

Because it’s not been lost on the Australian working class and the communities in which they live that the old Australian promise of blue-collar jobs that would earn someone born without wealth enough to “get ahead” is one failing to be fulfilled.

While the tradie on the telly pursues a property portfolio, the ability for his likely cousins in traditional manufacturing areas to do so has been falling since the global financial crisis in 2008. Under the Liberals, the decline has accelerated – even without counting the imminent demise of manufacturing jobs in the car industry.

Since the Liberal-National Coalition government was elected in September 2013, employment in manufacturing has shed 50,000 jobs. Only the week before last, another workforce of 62 maintenance workers were laid off at Carlton & United Breweries Melbourne. This, despite the Liberals’ stated election pledge of 2013 that they’d create “a million good jobs in five years”. Oh, yeah? Tell that to the real tradies now on a picket line at CUB. Or just about anyone in South Australia.

The mythology that it’s fine to shed jobs in manufacturing because it’s an “old” industry, unworthy of resurgence in an “innovative” modern economy like Australia’s was exploded in recent comprehensive research by the Australia Institute.

The AMWU (@theamwu) he just wants a fair go dinki di VB cricket shannon noll BBQ crack at negatively gearing his 5th home #faketradie pic.twitter.com/vHRTRlOEkS

The researchers make the point that not only is manufacturing the greatest driver of research innovation in the economy, but manufactured goods account for over two-thirds of the world’s trade in merchandise. This is why many industrial countries are expanding their manufacturing output – both to boost the boon to communities from the provision of good, well-paid and stable local jobs, and also to increase their export output with manufactured goods.

While the Coalition insists on its superior “economic management” by its policy flattery of the mining and resources sectors, Australians imported $246bn in manufactured goods last year, but exported only $100bn of them. This trade deficit of near $150bn grew by 40% between 2011 and 2015 and it far overwhelms the revenue returned to Australia by exports of resources.

As the Australia Institute warns, extracting and selling an ever-greater quantity of non-renewable resources is not enough to pay for the “growing flood” of manufacturing goods coming into Australia because we want to buy things that our own country is not making. This is a fundamental economic instability that will not and cannot provide the foundations for growth unless it is addressed – and it needs to be addressed soon, because as of today, Malcolm Turnbull’s “innovative” Australia has smallest share of manufacturing as a percentage of total employment of any OECD country. We are being outproduced by Luxembourg.

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And anyone clinging to the neoliberal fairytale that high union wages make Australian manufacturing uncompetitive need only compare Australian output to that of our high-wage, high-union-density cousins in Japan, Korea, Germany and the Netherlands – all of whom continue to expand their manufacturing production with the direct policy intervention of government.

These, however, are not the interventions that Turnbull is promising, waving instead at his $50bn tax cut to big business as the ultimate deferral of responsibility for job creation to someone else, somewhere else, than at the behest of a government that’s elected to, you know, make decisions about what the future looks like and to lead people to it.

Whether Turnbull’s tradie is real, fake, a confection of the internet or one of a political campaign trying to hide in plain sight, someone needs to tell him that if he’s worried about blue-collar jobs, the last thing he should consider is voting for more non-solutions from this mob.