Are the Greens finished? The Sun Herald’s Andrew Bolt thinks so. “They are the party for dreamers, not doers,” he says. “Playing with real power has destroyed them.”

Writing in the Conversation, Michelle Grattan says the Greens are now generally on the back foot, widely seen as too hardline and uncompromising. ”It is time for the Greens to do some fundamental thinking about their future.”

Most commentary on the Greens’ performance focuses on political and policy specifics: Bob Brown’s resignation, preference deals, power-sharing and so on. There are other explanations.

Modern politics is not responding adequately to the contemporary human predicament. Less than a third of Australians think quality of life is getting better; more think it is getting worse. This is a foundational feature of politics today, both transcending it and yet also shaping it, but it is widely ignored by politicians and political commentators.

Work and family pressures, greed, consumerism and the cost of living are among the more obvious reasons for this dissatisfaction. But beyond these are deeply existential questions relating to identity, belonging and purpose: who am I? Why am I here?

Modern western nations like Australia do poorly in this area, with too much emphasis on transient personal attributes (money, looks, popularity, status), and too little on deep and enduring personal and social relationships.

Then there are threats of global warming, biodiversity loss and natural resource depletion (including energy, food and water security) – all underestimated by governments.

Current political priorities are the antithesis of what is needed to achieve a higher quality of life. Even on acknowledged goals, such as creating more employment, Australia is doing badly, with a shortfall of up to 1m jobs. So almost anything done within the political sphere will not be enough.

This is the fundamental cause of public disillusion with politics, even if many people don’t fully appreciate it and direct their frustration at specific policies or leaders’ performance. This truth may also be why the Greens, who recognise it better than other parties, have not been able to capitalise on the public’s disquiet. Instead, they have been regarded as just another political party whose policies represent a fairly orthodox progressive/left ideology, one out of favour with the electorate.

Thus the Greens are caught on the horns of a dilemma between policy relevance and response effectiveness: between being relevant to mainstream policy debate and advocating responses that match the magnitude of the challenges.

Given the limitations of modern politics (including the role of the media) and the public mood, there may not be any way out. However, the Greens could consider shifting their focus away from specific policy questions (while continuing to do this where necessary) towards continually articulating a new narrative: a transformation from the dominant narrative of material progress to one of (authentic) sustainable development.

Material progress represents an outdated, industrial model: pump more wealth into one end of the pipeline and more welfare flows out the other. Sustainable development reflects an ecological model, where elements of human society interact in complex, multiple, non-linear ways.

Spanning the gap between policy relevance and response effectiveness would require very careful management. To a degree the two have to be kept separate. There is danger in moving too quickly to policy details; on the other hand, policies have to be consistent with, and true to, the new story of human development and progress.

The focus should be on relating global threats and challenges more closely to people’s personal lives and wellbeing, on showing that the aims of environmental sustainability and enhanced quality of life are compatible and complementary. More emphasis in environment policy on our dependence on the health and resilience of landscapes, and in health policy on the social determinants of health, are two examples of how this might be done.

Addressing such issues requires more than good policies and sufficient funding. They need to become embedded in our culture, including being talked about by leaders in the same way they talk today about the economy and jobs.

It would take nerve to do adopt this strategy, but our future rests on transforming political debate, including election campaigns, from the economic and financial accounting competition that it has depressingly become into a contest of competing political philosophies and worldviews.