Illustration: John Shakespeare The only good thing about the pre-budget dance is that it keeps journalists in business, and everyone knows we need that now more than ever. But in terms of advancing public debate, it feels Sisyphean. This year, the pre-budget debate has settled upon a real chewed cud of an idea, a policy that has been kicking around in conservative circles for years – to allow young people to access their superannuation 30 or 40 years before retirement, to use as a housing deposit. This putative policy was leaked to the News Corp papers ahead of Treasurer Scott Morrison's talk on Monday to the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, the strictly-choreographed "pre-budget speech", which is Sco-Mo's version of that part of the tango where the dancer stomps about with a rose between her teeth.

The government isn't doing enough to support affordable housing providers – or creating the climate of certainty necessary to give potential investors confidence to provide finance, according to a new report. Credit:Illustration: Jim Pavlidis. This superannuation-raiding idea has been laughed out of town by every economist and political commentator this week, and firmly rejected by frontbenchers including Christopher Pyne and the actual Prime Minister. Of course, it is the sort of idea that brings a rush of personal-responsibility pleasure to libertarians and pure liberals. Scott Morrison's second budget, to be handed down next Tuesday, is set to forecast a surplus in 2020-21. Credit:Louise Kennerley It's your money, so why shouldn't you use it when you want, and for the purpose you choose?

But like most libertarian ideas, in order for it to work, we all have to pretend the buck stops with the individual. When it comes to the social value of superannuation, it clearly doesn't. Superannuation exists to keep people off the taxpayer-funded age pension, and to afford workers a dignified retirement. If they wanted to be ideologically pure, those advocating the idea would include a caveat – anyone who takes advantage of the scheme is not allowed to draw on the pension in his or her old age. Or if they do, they have to sit out a waiting period of months, or years. The Coalition government has proposed onerous waiting periods for other forms of welfare, why not the aged pension too? Which brings us neatly to the 2014 budget, in which then-prime minister Tony Abbott and his then-treasurer Joe Hockey scared the population witless by proposing Hunger Games-style welfare waiting periods, health and education budget cuts and a Medicare co-payment that voters came to regard as just one notch above baby-hunting in terms of outrageousness.

Is it that this government remains so traumatised by the experience of the 2014 budget, which contained all those nasty surprises, that it prefers to float its worst ideas before the budget? That way it can test public opinion and scurry away if necessary, without getting locked into any policies that may have an outsize political effect next polling day. Perhaps it is simply that anti-Turnbull forces within the party are using the super-raiding policy idea as a stick with which to beat the Prime Minister. It's also possible the government, having ruled out changes to negative gearing, doesn't have any actual good ideas on housing affordability, but it needs very badly to look like it's doing something. I recall a conversation I had with a senior Turnbull staffer before last election. I asked what policies they would put forward on housing affordability? Nothing, came the response. It's not something government should get into.

The Turnbull government was late to respond to what has become one of the most dominant voter anxieties, and it is difficult to escape the conclusion it's because its members are, at worst, out of touch or, at best, reluctant to do anything to affect soaring house prices, because their voter base largely comprises financially secure home-owners. The Labor opposition has led the debate on this issue, but it will not admit that "housing affordability" is a euphemism for bringing down home values, at least in real terms, relative to incomes. Witness Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's squirminess when questioned along these lines on Wednesday. "If we reduce negative gearing in the future, we'll help reduce some of the over-inflated prices that we're seeing," he said vaguely. Neither side will acknowledge that even if they take the toughest, and most politically courageous measures to address the housing affordability crisis, there is no guarantee the measures will work.

As the Grattan Institute's John Daley says of the debate: "All politicians have done is increase expectations about how much difference governments can make, in ways they can't possibly fulfil. "When they build those expectations and inevitably those expectations are disappointed, it just further erodes trust in government." And so we keep dancing. Loading Twitter: @JacquelineMaley