During the final leaders’ debate on Wednesday the moderator, Sabra Lane, introduced the novel concept of allowing each leader to ask two questions of the other. Bill Shorten asked Scott Morrison two questions about ALP policy and Morrison asked two questions about ALP policy.

And that is the election campaign boiled down to its essence.

The government for the second election in a row sought to lead off its election campaign with the federal budget, and for the second campaign in a row the ALP’s policies have been the ones that have led the debate.

This year’s budget was such a nothing-burger that it disappeared from human recollection within a week. I spent the hours in the budget lockup reading it, wrote numerous stories on the figures in it and even now, were you to ask me what was in it, I’d be reduced to a long pause and then answer … err, tax cuts and a surplus?

I am not much for predictions but I feel certain that whichever party wins next Saturday will not start the next election campaign off the back of the budget. It leads to an absence of real policy announcements during the campaign and also because you have played your cards first you are open to being trumped.

The government made a big deal about its return to surplus – perfectly encapsulated by Morrison’s mangling of tenses in the debate when he stated “we brought the budget back into surplus next year”.

It meant the ALP was able to hold off and produce a bigger projected surplus – a much bigger one, at 1% of GDP in 2022-23.

Now that is a long ways off, and if it happens we should all be very happy because it would mean the economy had performed much better than we really have any right to hope. But the figures operate on the same parameters the government used in its budget so it can’t claim any dodginess without attacking its own credibility.

It doesn’t hurt that climate change is an issue that should not be reduced to infantile politicking

Having a bigger surplus should in no way be considered the aim of economic policy but if the Liberal party is going to foolishly continue saying it is, then I guess it serves them right to be found out, especially when that is the only real policy.

It is not all that surprising that an LNP government is bereft of policy. When your overriding ethos is that a smaller government is better, you inevitably reach a point where your election campaign becomes a policy abyss.

This situation has caused some commentators around the traps to suggest the ALP have stuffed it up because they should also have gone small – that the voters are tired of the LNP chaos and Labor should have just focussed on that and not given the government any ammunition from things such as franking credits, negative gearing or superannuation changes.

Such opinion is mostly founded on “Rudd did it and it worked” or “look at John Hewson in 1993”, but it requires ignoring that the chaos and instability within the LNP comes from much of what Shorten and the ALP have done with policy.

Consider climate change. It would have been very easy for Labor to play possum and run scared of the shadow of the carbon tax; and yet Shorten did not shy away from raising it – even if he has not sought to reintroduce a carbon price.

This put pressure on Malcolm Turnbull to do something, given his reputation as someone who agrees with the science. And it saw him be absolutely skewered in a manner that would not have occurred had the ALP decided to lay low.

In effect the ALP has realised that given whatever they do they will be accused of doing the “worst”, they might as well actually propose some decent policy.

And it doesn’t hurt that climate change is an issue that should not be reduced to infantile politicking.

But they have not stopped there.

So extensive has been the ALP’s agenda that policies such as imposing a limit on the deduction for the cost of managing tax affairs to $3,000 has resurfaced as though it is a new policy, despite being one that I wrote about two years ago when the ALP first announced it.

Andrew Leigh this week gave a speech where he was able to talk about Labor policies as disparate as gender and racial diversity, taxation, climate change and banking reforms.

The Liberal party in return have been reduced to suggesting Paul Keating somehow has control over foreign policy and will likely go full on with the “unions are coming to take your business” line that they always do in a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency situation.

With a week to go a lot can happen, but the ALP looks confident and the Liberal party has essentially become Morrison on his lonesome scrambling around the country while everyone else in the party looks after their own seat and tries not to be contaminated by the prospective loss.

And a big reason for that is that it’s the ALP who looks like they know what they would do a week after winning an election, whereas the Liberal party has spent so long staring into the policy abyss, that the abyss of opposition is now staring back at them.

• Greg Jericho is a Guardian Australia columnist and economics writer