The media have turned on Tony Abbott, but are his troubles symptomatic of a bigger problem with the way politics is now played? Tim Dunlop writes.

Tony Abbott is not the problem.

Watching the media, particularly the rightwing media, turn on Tony Abbott over the last few weeks has been a sight to behold, and it didn't get any funnier than this particular piece in The Australian.

Under the headline, "How The Oz belled the cat on Tony Abbott five months ago", they re-ran an article from July, saying:

FIVE months ago, The Australian warned Tony Abbott that he was still behaving as if he was leader of the opposition, locked into the daily tactic rather than a long term strategy with a team characterised by zealous centralised control. As the Prime Minister ends his first year with discouraging polls and dissent among his MPs, our original article is well worth re-reading.

How bad have things become when the PM's biggest spruikers are suddenly busting to tell us, hey, we actually don't like him either!

And seriously, five months ago? They are boasting that they figured out five months ago that Emperor Abbott is stark naked? (What's their next great insight, that the Beatles are likely to be big?)

I mean, didn't it occur to The Oz at the time of, say, Mr Abbott's interview with Kerry O'Brien in May 2010 - where the then-Opposition leader admitted that he said things for the sake of expediency - that just maybe there were problems with Captain Tony?

Apparently not.

Even the Budget wasn't enough to make The Australian reconsider their commitment to the PM and all his works and pomps. In fact they offered this when the Budget was brought down:

The Green-Left critics and Fairfax Media and ABC sympathisers badly underestimated John Howard. They are making the same mistake with Mr Abbott. Rather than sealing its demise, this first Abbott-Hockey budget gives the Coalition a strong sense of purpose and a serious reform agenda that, in the medium term, could sideline its opponents. The Australian believes most voters will embrace the budget repair task, so long as the government brings them along in the discussion.

Not exactly belling the cat, is it?

In fairness, The Oz is hardly alone amongst the media in battling to come to grips with the Abbott train wreck. Having carried him on their shoulders all through the Gillard years, you can see them wondering what went wrong, what might have been.

Just this week, Fairfax political correspondent Latika Bourke tweeted wistfully:

Perhaps if PM Abbott hadn't kept ending his media conferences as [Opposition leader] before journos questions finished we might have had time to ask him....

Honestly? You think a few more questions at his showbiz press conferences would've made a difference?

Here's an alternative thought, Latika: maybe if the media had applied the same level of scrutiny and aggressiveness to Tony Abbott that they applied to Julia Gillard they might've uncovered the agenda that only became apparent once his Budget was delivered.

Call me crazy.

Even last week - as Mr Abbott finally admitted that he'd had a "ragged week" and that, yes, just maybe he had been a bit misleading in his comments on funding the ABC and SBS - there were journalists who were still buying what he was selling.

So while Lenore Taylor had the nouse to notice that besides a minor concession on Australian Defence Force allowances and accepting the bleeding obvious about his broken promise on the ABC, there were no actual changes to give effect to the "reset", Phil Coorey from the AFR lapped it up:

Today was a good start to getting back in favour with voters. Bare your soul, admit you were wrong, make a few concessions and speak to them maturely. It can work wonders.

The truly depressing thing about all this (noble exceptions like Lenore Taylor notwithstanding) is that it shows just how shallow most political commentary is and how it fundamentally misses the point.

You can see it again this week in comments about the recent bad polls for the PM. In a much retweeted article about the latest Fairfax poll, Peter Hartcher journosplained that:

Today's poll starkly identifies the people's problem with the Abbott government. It's Tony Abbott.

That is a painfully superficial reading of the situation. Yes, the PM is unpopular (duh), and is increasingly looking out of his depth, if not incompetent.

But Tony Abbott is not the problem. He's a symptom. Actually, he is more than that: he is a reckoning. He is what you get when politicians lose touch with the electorate and get lost in the echo chamber of the concerns of the broader political class.

He is the logical consequence of a system of government that is weighted in favour of two major parties that no longer command majority support, of a system that no longer reflects the views of voters.

He is what is left when the parties can no longer inspire us with a positive view of what they stand for, but can only rev us up with attacks on what they are against.

He is the detritus of system that has reached the bottom of the democratic barrel, where a "leader" is the person the party factions and News Ltd can live with.

The simple fact is, the electorate has moved on. We show in our voting patterns and other behaviours (including our media consumption) that we have fragmented in a way that is no longer captured by the two-party system, that no longer drops neatly into the boxes labelled Liberal and Labor.

Unfortunately, these changes in the electorate are not reflected in our democratic institutions.

The preferential system in the lower house, for instance, delivers our votes to parties we no longer fully trust or respect, and to politicians who show more allegiance to the economic system of market liberalism than they do to voters views on what makes an acceptable society.

As John Quiggin noted recently:

[After] decades of experience with the policies of deregulation and privatisation, voters don't believe that these policies have delivered the benefits that were promised, don't want any more of them, and would rather see them reversed than extended. But "governments don't do that any more".

To say "Abbott is the problem", then, is to ignore this underlying dissatisfaction. It is to ignore the fact that that dissatisfaction will not simply disappear if the Government changes leaders, or indeed, if we change governments.

Until the political class address the deeper issues affecting our democracy and re-engage with the actual concerns of the electorate, the system will continue to throw up hollow men like the current PM because that is all it can do: reproduce itself.

If you doubt that, then just remember that as it stands, the alternative prime minister is Bill Shorten.

Tim Dunlop is the author of The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience. Read his full profile here.