Rightly or wrongly, many voters just can't shake the perception that Labor isn't good with money. More than anything, this will help get the Coalition re-elected, writes Peter Brent.

The Federal Opposition has its mojo back. It is setting the political agenda and Opposition leader Bill Shorten has seized the economic narrative.

We know these things because those who interpret the agendas and relate the narratives, the press gallery and wider political journalist class, have declared them so - and you can't get more official than that.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's honeymoon is over. Voting intentions for the major parties have even drawn level in some opinion polls, which has facilitated a series of internal mini-rebellions from disaffected Tony Abbott loyalists. Former tough guy Scott Morrison, without the crutch of boats and uniforms, has transformed to 90-pound weakling.

So Labor is enjoying itself. Its members should cherish these moments, pack away some mementos, because they will provide comfort after the election when this is all a distant memory.

By Christmas time, the sugar hit of largely positive media coverage of their negative gearing and capital gains changes will be long gone. As I wrote here recently, these might be precisely what the nation needs, but that doesn't mean taking them to an election is wise.

Still, it is understandable that an opposition facing likely defeat consciously throws the dice. But while their big-target housing policy will figure in the election post-mortems, the main driver for the Turnbull Government's very likely survival into a second term will be something more foundational: voter feelings about economic competence. Campaign policies mean much less at the ballot box than the "vibe" of what a party would be like in government.

And beneath the surface lingers deadly perceptions of Labor's spending record in government and, therefore, what they would do if re-elected.

And tragically for the Opposition's chances of taking office, they don't seem to care.

Back in 1996, after the Coalition won government, John Howard and Peter Costello deliberately, methodically set about destroying their predecessor's economic record. Armed with the force of new incumbency, bragging rights, popularity and machinery of state, they vigorously set up the Hawke and Keating governments as diabolical, reckless spenders who had left the nation with a massive black hole. It helped propel the Coalition to nearly 12 years in power.

This was largely a replay of what Bob Hawke and Paul Keating had inflicted from 1983 on Malcolm Fraser as prime minister and Howard as treasurer. What goes around comes around. After taking office in 2007, Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan attempted to do the same to Howard and Costello, but their skills weren't up to the task.

Then, less than a year in, the floor fell out of the global economy, the Rudd government ostentatiously spent up to stave off recession, surpluses turned to deficits and the soil was tilled for the opposition's spectacularly successful debt and deficits campaign.

Fast forward to the 2013 change of government, and the difference this time was that the hatchet job was largely superfluous, because long before that election most Australians had concluded the Rudd and Gillard governments were hopeless with money. It was a major reason they were voted out.

And it will likely keep them in opposition in 2016.

It is a grossly unfair characterisation of their time in office. The global financial crisis from late 2008 produced a collapse in revenues that would have sent federal coffers deep into the red no matter who was in power - even if not an extra dollar had been spent.

Australia moved from a surplus of 1.6 per cent of GDP in 2006-07 to a deficit of 4.2 per cent in 2010-11, a deterioration of 5.8 per cent. Comparable national governments went south by similar magnitudes. For example, New Zealand's by 7.5 per cent, the United Kingdom's by 7.3 per cent, and Canada's 4.6 per cent. Some moved from surplus to deficit, most from deficit to larger deficit, and at least one (Norway) from large surplus to small one.

(Here's a game you can play at home: replace "Australia" in the url of this site with any country to see graphs of budget balances over the last decade.)

A one-off stimulus of about $50 billion dollars makes no difference to future budget outcomes except in interest paid - on that $50 billion. Never mind, most Australians would tell you that stimulus package damaged future budgets.

Australia seems an outlier in the political damage inflicted on the government of the day by the GFC. One of the reasons lies in Labor's determination to receive credit for presiding over the only advanced economy not to enter recession during that time. Their love of the beauty of the Keynesian equation - our deficits saved the country - has led them to agree with their critics.

So, for example, then treasurer Chris Bowen explained in debate with his shadow Joe Hockey on ABC's Q&A during the 2013 campaign that "one of the reasons we didn't have a recession was because we increased spending and, yes, we went into debt. But let's look at the debt. It is low by international standards..."

Making your opponents' argument for them. Hockey probably couldn't believe his luck.

Forget boats and the "carbon tax", debt and deficits was the biggest political failure of the Rudd and Gillard governments. And in opposition the ALP apparently still believes that if they ignore it voters will too.

But come the campaign all the Turnbull Government has to say is: yes, OK, we appear to be blundering around, but Labor got us into this mess and at least we care about the country's finances.

It's true that there is little this Government can boast about. International economic conditions have been less kind to the Tony Abbott and Turnbull years than the galloping early Hawke and Howard ones. This period is more like the Fraser years, when the promise that getting rid of the Whitlam government would see a return to the post-war economic golden age proved unsustainable.

But four decades ago the memory of that Labor experience kept that Coalition government in power. When push comes to shove, that's likely to happen this year as well.

Peter Brent is a writer and adjunct fellow at Swinburne University. Visit his website and follow him on Twitter @mumbletwits.