The Australian democratic system has taken a few kicks to the cods in the last decade.

But one of its special superpowers has remained — preserved, miraculously, like a half-played game of chess found in the ruins of Hurricane Katrina.

And that superpower is: the capacity to reduce any political question to an equation employing the metric of utes.

On Monday, in Queensland, the Prime Minister spoke in depth about the Opposition's aspiration for 50 per cent of new vehicles in Australia to be electric by the year 2030.

The verdict? Bad for utes.

The Australian democratic system has a special superpower: the capacity to reduce any political question to the metric of utes. ( ABC News )

"Your Hilux? That's out, according to Bill Shorten," declared Mr Morrison, building on his thoughts from several days earlier, in which he expressed his sombre view that Mr Shorten's real agenda was to "end the weekend".

"So the cheapest car you can currently buy, as an electric vehicle, presently, my understanding is, including all on road costs and the rest of it, is about $45,000 to $50,000 a year," said the PM on Sunday.

"That's the cheapest car Bill Shorten wants to make available to you to buy in the future, and I'll tell you what — it's not going to tow your trailer. It's not going to tow your boat. It's not going to get you out to your favourite camping spot with your family.

"Bill Shorten wants to end the weekend when it comes to his policy on electric vehicles where you've got Australians who love being out there in their four-wheel drives."

The Hyundai IONIQ was recently billed as the cheapest electric car available in Australia, retailing at around $50,000. This is unsettlingly close to the average price for a brand new Toyota Hilux, which carsguide.com on Monday estimated at $45,990.

What do they know anyway?

Let's not mess about here.

The working acquaintanceship of both men with the practical details of the vehicular experience is — at best — questionable.

Mr Shorten, in the last week, has ventured the estimate that an electric car takes about eight to 10 minutes to charge.

Scott Morrison is a big fan of the aeroplane. ( AAP: David Mariuz )

Mr Morrison's sense of buses is that they work better if you use a plane for most of the journey and have the bus pick you up right near your stop.

Neither is an assessment that would gel with popular user interface, but what can you expect from a couple of blokes who haven't had to hail their own taxis in a while?

The Utey Myth has a long history

The greater puzzle is the extent to which The Utey Myth has become an unanswerable metric of political judgment.

Just last year, Mr Morrison — then treasurer (just before he was accidentally made Prime Minister totally against his will) — identified ute sales as a key indicator of economic growth.

"Every time an Australian sees a ute driving around a suburb of one of our metro areas or regional towns with a phone number on the side, that's the sign of a stronger economy," he said in June.

"We are seeing this played out with all of our trades, we're seeing it played out across the economy, and the fact that people are building up their inventories to sell more utes, that businesses are out there buying more utes, they can do that because they're working on sites or they're working in sectors that are providing their businesses with the future as a result of the investment we're seeing take place in the economy. They are good signs."

Brendan Nelson, who took over as Liberal leader from John Howard in a brief-and-ultimately-doomed social experiment in 2007 after the election of Kevin Rudd's government, invented the concept of "Ute-Man" to hold to account Mr Rudd's sorry-saying, high-taxing ways.

In Dr Nelson's hands, Mr Rudd's proposed 2008 tax on luxury cars became a tyrannical Tarago Tax, his excise impost on the teen scourge of pre-mixed alcopops a deeply un-Australian assault on "responsible Australians who happen to enjoy a pre-mixed Bundy and coke or a scotch and dry".

Dr Nelson's response to the 2008 Budget was a legendary primal scream in which he invoked voters "lining up in their 20-year-old Mitsubishis … in their 10-year-old Commodores with three kids in the back … in their Taragos with a wheelchair in the back and five kids" and demanded a five-cent cut to petrol excise.

In 2009 — by which time Dr Nelson had been dispatched by Malcolm Turnbull with all the transfixing violent non-violence of a python consuming a hen's egg and the global financial crisis had properly hit — the niceties of rescuing the Australian economy through a targeted programme of public spending telescoped itself neatly into one burning question, directed at the then prime minister Kevin Rudd: "Yeah. But did you get a free ute!?"

Utes can pacify a nation

In times of uncertainty, we look to the ute. Is it still there? Are its drivers happy? Is anyone getting a ute to which the rest of us are not entitled? It's our national sleepy-toy; also, our political panic-button.

Utes-R-Us!

Now that would be a good campaign slogan, were it not for its unfortunate resemblance to the name of a body part possessed by approximately zero per cent of the intended target audience.

To be clear: both parties are excited about electric cars.

Bill Shorten has estimated an electric car taks less than 10 minutes to charge. ( ABC News: Marco Catalano )

The Coalition's policy assumes electric cars will proliferate to become 25 to 50 per cent of new car ownership by 2030, and various senior Coalition figures have been photographed riding in, admiring and practically snogging the things.

None of which is controversial; electric cars are a cool idea, and for a modern society whose ancestral hopes of jetpacks have been cruelly thwarted, they are the next best thing.

Beware the threat from electric cars

Not controversial, that is to say, until — with one eye upon certain crucial Queensland electorates — you knit yourself a little argument that says that electric cars are an offence against ute drivers and thus against the things that ute drivers like doing and thus against the days on which the ute drivers like doing those things.

And once you're on that track, you've just got to keep on knitting, until climate change action is an insult to the Australian way of life and will probably lead to $100 lamb roasts.

Stop me if you've heard this before.

The weird thing about the past 10 years is that for most of them, the Australian Parliament has actually agreed on more than would seem readily apparent.

If you took a straw poll of MPs and asked them if climate change was real and if a market mechanism building the cost of carbon emissions into the economy was the most long-term practical idea, I reckon you'd have a response rate north of 50 per cent for the whole decade.

Hell, even Tony Abbott would be a "yes" for chunks of that time.

But we live in an age where political discord is easier and more profitable than consensus.

You can agree all you like that electric cars are awesome and very likely a big part of our nation's automotive future, but the second that it becomes easier to sidle up to Ute Man and say: "Hey mate. I just saw Bill Shorten in the car park trying to nick your Hilux", then you can kiss all that goodbye.

All of which could just be accepted as an unavoidable part of our adversarial democratic process, until you remember that for the 226 people we send to Canberra every three years, identifying the things they agree on and doing those things is pretty much their one job.