Illustration John Shakespeare

But just for a moment let's stop asking about who's winning the politics surrounding all this and think about what it means for politics more generally. Because while the logic of things right now is that the Coalition necessarily loses on all fronts, the long-range consequences will surely damage Labor, too. It's just easy for us to pretend otherwise when it looks set to deliver them government – mainly because the preferential voting system compensates their declining vote.

So the trouble comes not in the major parties winning elections. It comes instead from them doing anything at all with it. In the Coalition's case, this is now cripplingly obvious. Its paralysis is a consequence of the terms on which Tony Abbott claimed victory – promising to crush the deficit while cutting taxes but not education, health, defence or anything else – which was a mass of contradictions that meant his first budget simply had to be a disaster. It's also a consequence of the terms on which Malcolm Turnbull claimed Abbott's scalp – promising his right wing not to do anything that might make the party electable.

But now consider Labor's position. Having seen a quarter of its vote disappear to the Greens over the past 20 years, it is now seeing another of its flanks slope off to One Nation. This should not be a surprise: One Nation is in some ways the ultimate Labor throwback – the ghost of a party whose White Australia Policy sprung from its economic nationalism. It's only natural that Labor voters now awaking from the liberal economic dream of Hawke and Keating might return to these nostalgic roots. For the moment, this is masked because Labor's primary vote is holding (even if at a low level). But that can mean only one thing: that whatever it is losing to One Nation it is claiming back from the Coalition.

Turnbull is therefore facing twin disillusionments. If you're angry, you go to One Nation. If you're just disappointed, you go to Labor. That means a significant chunk of Labor's support is soft. They're not enamoured of Bill Shorten, which is why Turnbull still leads him as preferred Prime Minister even in polls this disastrous. And given that Labor, too, is bleeding votes left and right, it's severely reliant on these mushy foundations. That's a problem when you consider voters are far more easily disillusioned with governments than with oppositions. If and when Labor become the government, how exactly will it stop these people leaving as quickly as they arrived?