The Australian political class has rarely been more disillusioned with the Australian electorate than it is today, to the extent that Brecht’s mordant line about dissolving the people and electing another comes irresistibly to mind. Complaints about volatility, negativity and populism have settled on a single theme: the voters are too soft to vote for painful but necessary “reform”.

The real problem here is not with the voters, but with the word “reform” – a classic example of what philosopher CL Stevenson called persuasive definitions. It refers to policy change, but with the unshakable connotation of “change for the better”. Attempts to use it more neutrally, or to add scare quotes to critical discussion of proposed reform policies have proved unavailing.

For most of the 20th century, the term reform belonged to the centre-left, and was contrasted with “reaction” on the right and “revolution” on the radical left. In this usage, the term referred to gradual change in the direction of more liberal and egalitarian policies, a process that had taken place ever since the mid-19th century. It was assumed to be both desirable and inevitable (assumptions also implicit in terms like progressive).

The 1980s saw the reversal of the decades-long shift to the left, and the emergence of microeconomic reform, a free-market policy agenda including free trade, financial deregulation, privatisation, the end of industrial arbitration, a shift to goods and services taxation, and a general reduction in the size and scope of government.

Much of this agenda was implemented under the Hawke and Keating governments, generally with the support of John Howard in his stints as Opposition leader. In office, Howard’s microeconomic reform efforts were spasmodic, but included the introduction of the GST, the privatisation of Telstra, and, disastrously, WorkChoices.

Microeconomic reform was associated, not merely with a set of policies, but with an approach to politics, in which “toughness” and willingness to disregard the whims of voters was regarded as the hallmark of integrity. The Hawke government set the tone, dumping election commitments after treasury secretary John Stone (later a National party senator) conveniently discovered the original “budget black hole”. This precedent, often accompanied by the theatrical ritual of a Commission of Audit, has been followed by every reforming government since.

More than 30 years later, the term “reform” still refers to the 1980s agenda, and to the attitudes go with it. But everything worthwhile in that agenda was implemented decades ago. What is left are the dregs – policies like privatisation and individual employment contracts – that have failed to deliver improvements in living standards, and on which the Australian public has long since rendered its final, negative verdict.

What hasn’t changed is the assumption that voters are fools, who need to be bribed into voting for a reforming government, then terrified into accepting the radical reforms that are all that prevent us from becoming (in a phrase popular at the beginning of the microeconomic reform era), the “poor white trash of Asia”. Unfortunately, this political script no longer plays with voters.

More importantly, the 1980s agenda has nothing to offer on the big issues of the 21st century, including climate change, the information economy, growing inequality and the instability of the global financial system as reflected in the GFC and its aftermath. The advocates of “reform” are all over the shop on these issues, but most are to be found on the wrong side: spouting climate denial, supporting strong intellectual property, supporting policies that exacerbate inequality and ignoring the disastrous failures of the financial system.

What Australia needs now is a policy agenda focused on enabling Australians to take their place in an economy and society where universal access to knowledge and information is the key to prosperity. We had glimpses of this under the last government – for example with the original NBN – but for the most part Labor remains under the spell of the Hawke-Keating legend. Australian voters have learned to distrust the word “reform”, and routinely vote against those who spout it. It’s time to excise it from the political lexicon.