Government is embracing tabloid politics, where policies are reduced to a three-word slogan. But some issues demand a greater public presence than slick phrases and policy tailored to match, writes Jonathan Green.

It took Tony Abbott less than a week to reduce the emotional and logistic complexity of the Australian mission in east Ukraine to a three-word slogan.

And so we began Operation Bring Them Home (subscript: If Only It Were That Simple), the latest example of the creeping tabloidization of our public life.

This a trend that began somewhere beyond the mind snapping Rudd repetition of "working families", reaching something of a crescendo with "Stop The Boats" and still has room for refinement.

At any moment the troubling vagaries of the Government's mooted "reforms" to the payment of pittances to the unemployed may be repackaged for the benefit of Daily Telegraph readers as Operation Starve Them Out. We shall see.

Politics as headline. It's a final melding of the political dialogue and the partisan, prosecutorial press, a meeting of mindsets with government seeing the simple virtue of masking the irregularities, inconsistencies and awkwardness of angular policy problems under a glib and memorable shorthand. The tabloid press does it for a living. Politics now does it for convenience.

And it goes beyond the labels. Tabloidism trades in the half baked impressions that feed prejudice ... unemployed people on benefits are bludgers, boat people are queue jumpers, climate change is a leftist delusion; it's becoming harder to pick the lines that work in mass market journalism and the lines that work in political messaging. One might be tailored to suit the needs of the other of course, or perhaps politics has learned the great and liberating tabloid lesson: that the impression is its own reality. That the truth is what you say it is.

And it works in the sealed environment of domestic politics, where the political myth is perpetuated by a sympathetic and colluding media.

Though, that said, "works" is a funny word for it. Most policy issues actually confront a nagging greater truth, a dilemma that actually needs solving, and probably won't be solved by the rote repetition of catchphrases based on the political equivalent of superstition.

Winning the media cycle is not ultimately a conclusive policy outcome.

In many of our discussions that arrangement between problem and rhetorical response is becoming dangerously circular, with real policy being based on airy populist impression ... Operation Starve Them Out is the obvious current example.

As Greg Jericho pointed out on these pages yesterday there is precious little evidence to support work for the dole as a policy tool that will help the unemployed back into work. And as Guy Rundle wrote yesterday too, there is no end of absurdity and unforseen consequence in the simultaneous proposal to have the unemployed apply for a minimum of 40 jobs a month. And yet, both ideas ring true in the closed and mutually reinforcing circuitry of the tabloid political world.

Which is what makes Operation Bring Them Home so interesting, an example of the tabloid political mindset meeting the greater and unforgiving realities of the slogan-impervious world. The limitations are obvious enough, but we should take lessons from the east Ukraine stalemate, a situation apparently resistant to any amount of our pseudo-militarist Operation This And That posturing.

They may lack the simple sadness of MH17, but the issues addressed in similar terms back home are at their root no less real, and are just as poorly served by being packaged in slick tabloid insincerity.

There are 728,500 Australians looking for a job, that's the deeper truth behind a policy discussion that, on the evidence, may please the "shoot the bludgers" mindset of the tabloids and the shock jocks but will do precious little to help anyone find work.

The budget is in a precarious state of imbalance, that much is true, but it's arguable whether the Government's strategy of "fixing Labor's mess", that much discussed "budget emergency", will sooth the bottom line while it contains such arrant contradictions as abandoning a carbon pricing scheme that actually returned more than a billion dollars to Commonwealth revenue, or charging a diabolically unpopular Medicare levy while withholding the proceeds.

Outside of the world of rhetoric and the imagined but pervasive pseudo realities of tabloidism, these things just don't make sense. But like bodies and wreckage in an east Ukraine field, they are real enough, and demanding of a greater public presence than slick phrases and policy positions tailored to match.

Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.