We are now watching the politics we deserve, with all its empty chicanery and arrogant, dismissive guile. A little effort, a little commitment, and we might force it to be something better, writes Jonathan Green.

I wonder what it is we think we're voting for?

Not for much, on the evidence of Sunday night's debate, a series of cautious, anodyne platitudes with central policy positions that are broad gestural sweeps - lower company tax, boosted educational spending - defying any precise accounting of effect.

There is no evidence of a firmly held core of belief. No sense that either contender is driven by a coherent and enunciated vision of what the country might be, or become, other than some agreeable elaboration of the status quo.

The sum was to reduce what might have been a moment of national inspiration to some gauche pantomime of evasion.

Through this campaign there are ideas of course, but it's a disconnected litter of detail, much of it tagged special interest or particular constituencies, spending swayed either by electoral geography or the noisy expression of need.

Questions demanding sincerity or detail are met with empty phrases and the charade rolls on.

On Monday the most significant contribution to public discourse came from a pet rat.

By Tuesday came another story listing the routine excess of parliamentary allowances.

Yes, each MP living within 30km of the Parliament can claim $86 day for the simple act of getting to work.

It's better of course if you have a home base interstate. You still get to claim those $86 in expenses, but that's on top of a $270 daily allowance. Yep, the one many MPs claim while staying in homes rented from their spouses.

I know, I know, they work hard. Long hours, day by day in sitting-weeks wrenched from family and friends. But then, as Fairfax reports:

ACT Liberal Senator Zed Seselja, who lives about 17 kilometres from Parliament House has been paid about $10,200 between his election in 2013 and June 2015 to commute to his office there. Labor's shadow assistant treasurer Andrew Leigh clocked up more than $4300 before tax in daily allowances for travelling to APH from his home a few kilometres to the north between July 2013 and July 2015.

Does that strike you as fair? A reasonable outcome when the fundamental message of contemporary politics is caution, parsimony, concern and restraint?

How long will it be before the general sense of disappointed detachment so many feel for politics meshes with the nagging suspicion that we are also being taken for a ride?

How might that end? Disgust and disengagement, or more positively in a resolution that politics might serve us better. And what might we demand from these men and women who are, after all our servants, our employees.

Is it time that voters reasserted their control in the political process?

Somehow even this moment of national decision, this election, is framed as doing us a favour, letting us have a momentary say in the stuff and staff of government.

Well, no it's not. This is a moment of choice and delegation. We choose to second the administration of our commonwealth to the people we elect.

In return, might we possibly require both an honest public conversation based on open and sincere expression, and then, from these people when elected, a modest and dutiful period as our servants in our Parliament?

Our first step would be to take the matter seriously. To engage in the ideas of the public sphere, to propel them ourselves, to force seriousness and honest accountability on the people who seek to represent us.

We should weed out the shonks and chancers, perhaps even wrestle for grass root control of political parties to do it.

We are now watching the politics we deserve, with all its empty chicanery and arrogant, dismissive guile.

A little effort, a little commitment, and we might force it to be something better.

It's a system that thrives on our disengagement, and one that has schooled our expectations to a vanishing point of narrow self interest.

We need to make a connection between our broader suite of concerns - economy, ecology, defence, migration, schooling, health ... whatever they may be - and realise that politics, however momentarily degraded, is the process by which they will be addressed.

There must be a point at which we realise that empty dismissive anger will alter nothing, a point at which we will be reassured, in this suddenly connected and discursive world, that we are not alone, and that together we might force accountability and change.

There must be a point at which we realise that this politics is us.

Jonathan Green is presenter of RN Sunday Extra and editor of the literary journal Meanjin.