The opposition leader is ascendant in the opinion polls, but many voters are still unsure about what he stands for in the absence of clear policy directions and seemingly contradictory positions

By the measure most often used to judge political performance – opinion polls – Labor should be pretty happy.

At a time when a new government would usually be just finishing its honeymoon with the voters, the Coalition is lagging the ALP on the two-party preferred measure – 48.3% to 51.7% according to the weekly weighted average calculated at the Poll Bludger blog. By comparison, six months after the November 2007 change of government Labor remained ascendant, the opposition under Brendan Nelson trailing the Rudd government on two-party preferred terms 47% to 57%.

And Labor is heeding the free advice often given to political parties after the brutal shift to opposition from government: take time to rethink and renew policy, stay united and don’t try to come up with an alternative answer to every problem that arises – that’s the new government’s job.

But senior Labor figures fret that their responses are sounding hollow, and that their leader, Bill Shorten, sometimes sounds “half-hearted”, as if he “hasn’t quite switched on yet”. He denounces the government, but not always with overwhelming conviction. He pronounces an intention to “fight for jobs” without explaining how.

Abbott, on the other hand, has his own story about Labor, which he is using to try to fill in the blanks – especially about the Labor leader.

Labor is beholden to the union movement and Shorten more so than anyone, the Coalition script says. “He cannot rise above his background. He is a union official supporting union officials. He is running a protection racket for a protection racket.’' He is the “faceless man” who helped depose two prime ministers and then rose to lead the party.

Kevin Rudd, just seven weeks after he became opposition leader, aired television ads to make sure voters’ crucial first impressions of him were the kind he wanted them to have, introducing himself as the son of hard-working country folk and sketching a “positive plan” for the nation’s future to a backdrop of bucolic scenes and the soundtrack of a gently strummed guitar.

Shorten provides some similarly soft-focus self-definition, when Guardian Australia asks what he would say in such an ad.

“I would say I was a consensus builder,” he says. “I am middle of the road, I am pragmatic, I am future focused and I would use as an example of that approach the NDIS.”

As a junior minister Shorten doggedly built a case for the national disability insurance scheme.

On the campaign trail ahead of the 5 April Senate ballot in Western Australia he has been pointing out how he “means to be a bit different to Tony Abbott” in that he won’t be “negative about everything”.

“I’m a new opposition leader. People are still getting to know me. Not everything the government does is wrong. Not everything in life involves a black and white answer.”

He says, by way of example, that Labor “hasn’t given [the government] a hard time on their relationship with Indonesia that some would have expected, on drought relief we have been clear we will speed it through, so there are plenty of issues where we work together”.

The strategy seems to be to turn one of Abbott’s biggest flaws in the perceptions of voters – that he is negative – into a positive for Shorten, by comparison. The trouble could be the absence, as yet, of clear policy directions to be positive about.

On many big issues, Labor seems either timid or tongue-tied as it deals with the policies still disputed from its time in government.

When pressed on climate change, Shorten says his new policy (presuming that, despite Labor’s continued opposition in the Senate, the existing carbon tax is eventually repealed) will be based on the “principle that climate change is serious and real and that we need to something real in response. We will be guided by best science and best economic argument, which is a market-based system.”

That means Labor is sticking with some form of carbon price, but leaves the scope of an actual policy wide open.

And for the most part Labor prefers not to talk very much about the subject. It often says it, too, favours abolition of the “carbon tax”, by which it means the fixed price, but clearly hopes at least some voters will think it means the whole thing. It’s a kind of “tuck and roll” political positioning which Labor hopes will see it through until such time as the Coalition’s “Direct Action” alternative is shown to be as inadequate as many experts believe it to be, and the whole sorry debate can be reset.

But as Bernie Fraser pointed out in an interview with Guardian Australia on Wednesday, the fact that Labor has been either confused or missing in action on this debate for some time is a large part of the reason that those proposing Australia does nothing effective – the people Fraser describes as “bad guys” – are winning.

Similarly, on the mining tax, Labor will vote against the repeal of its own mining resource rent tax – despite its obvious deficiencies – but Shorten is clearly indicating that future policy might look quite different.

He says he wants to “reboot” Labor’s relationship with the mining industry, that he supports “the principle of a profits-based tax to ensure we share the resources we all own” but is not about to announce his policies for the 2016 election.

On asylum seeker policy, the Rudd government’s last-minute jump to the right to send all asylum seekers offshore leaves Labor with little room to criticise the Coalition’s policy, other than to take issue with the way Manus Island is being “managed”.

And when Tony Abbott deliberately derided a decade’s efforts to achieve “peace” in the Tasmanian forests dispute, and declared Australia actually had too much land locked up in national parks, Labor was largely silent, unwilling to take the bait ahead of the Tasmanian election where Labor’s alliance with the Greens was so unpopular it “sacked” its Green ministers just before calling an election.

Shorten says the comments prove Abbott is “reckless” and a “wrecker”.

But the central political contest is over economic policy.

Abbott’s post-election embrace of an economically dry agenda leaves plenty of room for Labor to articulate an electable progressive vision.

Before the poll, the Coalition’s position remained unclear on a whole raft of policy issues. Even Abbott’s colleagues were not sure which way he would jump. Now he is fulfilling the wildest dreams of the “dries”: no more government handouts to business, oodles of deregulation and a clear intention to pursue industrial relations reform as quickly as those pesky pre-election promises will allow it.

The new stance finally gives the new government a story – a difficult story to sell, but a story. And on carbon pricing, with less by way of actual policy or facts to work with, Abbott’s tireless repetition, his politics by attrition, eventually dominated the national debate. The anti-interventionist stance is now firmly bolted to the “everything will be better if we repeal the carbon tax and the mining tax” mantra.

“It is not the government’s job to prop up individual businesses; it is the government’s job to try to ensure that the overall economy is strong,” Abbott says. “We want people to be able to move from good jobs to better jobs and that means a strong and dynamic economy.”

Some within Labor worry its counter-position is vague and reactive. It will “fight for jobs” by continuing industry assistance in some undefined circumstances. It favours foreign investment in Graincorp but not majority foreign ownership of Qantas because that would require the breakup of the national carrier. It is against deep immediate spending cuts because there is no “budget emergency”. But there isn’t an alternative story to explains these positions, how they fit together and what that says about the party and the leader.

Shorten says “fighting for jobs” is about “good productivity-building infrastructure, well-funded education and skills, innovation, science and research and a commitment to start up businesses”.

He attacks the government for refusing to continue subsidies to the car industry because other countries provide subsidies and asks: “How much are they expecting to spend on centrelink payments for all of the workers?” He nominates car workers and aviation maintenance engineers as workers whose jobs have been “sent overseas” by government decisions.

But asked whether government policy could always prevent such job losses, he says “government action could delay it, could work it through could make sure there was time for the workforce to find new jobs and skills”.

Dissatisfaction with Shorten is rising in opinion polls – 43% of voters told Newspoll they were dissatisfied with the way Shorten was doing his job as opposition leader. But 50% said they were dissatisfied with the way Tony Abbott was doing the job as prime minister. And when asked who was their preferred prime minister, 42% nominated Abbott and 36% Shorten, which puts Shorten well ahead of Nelson at the same time after the 2007 election. A miserable 12% of the electorate wanted Nelson as prime minister.

The polls, and the absolute resolve to remain united and avoid any rerun of the self-destructive leadership disasters of government, mean the concerns within Labor remain muted.

The nation is in the middle of competing election campaigns. South Australian and Tasmanian state elections this weekend are likely to deliver the Coalition a clean sweep of state governments. Labor is more hopeful of gaining ground in the Western Australian Senate rerun, which Shorten is calling an “opinion poll on the Abbott government”.

But along the way Tony Abbott is gaining resolve and direction, and some within Labor are impatient for Shorten and his team to do the same.