Maybe now political parties are twigging that people are getting sick of hearing about "transition" and talking of a vibrant new economy. Theories don't carry the weight they once did, writes Greg Jericho.

Who knew telling voters that economic theory would deliver good times no longer had the same potency it once did? Well, everyone it would seem, except the Liberal Party.

First we watched the Canadian election last year, in which a government very much of the "austerity pain is for your own good" school of economics was ousted. Then there was the Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders phenomena in the US, with its mix of racism and xenophobia from Trump and anti-free trade deals from both him and Sanders. And most recently we witnessed the Brexit vote in the UK, which went against all advice from economic experts.

Having sized them all up, Australian voters said: "Me too."

The phenomenon is not a new one. It's been happening since the 1980s and the great dislocation caused by economic rationalism.

Back in that decade Sting wrote in a song about the end of the UK coal industry:

This place has changed for good/ Your economic theory said it would/ It's hard for us to understand/ We can't give up our jobs the way we should.

Maybe now political parties are twigging that people are getting sick of hearing about "transition" and talking of a vibrant new economy. Certainly the Liberal Party should be realising that now.

Among the biggest lessons of this campaign is that basing your entire campaign on the budget is stupid, and having that budget's big ticket item be a company tax is just stupid repeated.

There's a reason every media organisation runs a "winners and losers" column the day after the budget - all most people care about when it comes to budgets is the impact on their income. In that sense, although budgets cover every portfolio they are a very narrow aspect of life.

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Starting the election campaign with a budget meant the Government had that very narrow focus on what constituted people's lives.

Yes it fed into the Liberal Party's slogan of "jobs and growth", but what would be those jobs and who would achieve that growth never really connected.

It was someone's job, and growth for someone, but unless you were agile, tech minded and possibly about to begin a start-up company that made use of the China free-trade agreement, then that someone seemed to be somebody else.

The sales pitch for the company tax cut was itself a classic of the neo-liberal-macroeconomic-trumps-all genre. There was talk about GDP and GNI improvement, foreign investment, productivity improvements and then employment and wages growth.

Well, sort of.

The Government's own modelling to support the company tax cut revealed that were the rate to be cut to 25 per cent, then employment in the long-run would be improved by (drum roll) 0.1 per cent.

What a shock voters didn't take to the streets in celebration.

Malcolm Turnbull didn't really help himself either. He told the media in May that:

One thing we know for sure is that when you cut business taxes, company taxes, the value of that, the benefit flows back into the economy and overwhelmingly goes back to workers, to labour.

Now that is how things are expected to work, but it sounds very much like a trickledown economics view. Being told that giving a tax cut to someone else will eventually flow through to more income for you requires voters to have a lot of faith.

He also liked to cite the Treasury modelling that he argued showed that "for every dollar cut in company tax $4 of value created in the overall economy."

Well yeah, but you don't eat GDP. And as the Grattan Institute's John Daley noted, that $4 was greatly reduced once you put it in National Income terms.

And if we're going to talk macroeconomic concepts like GDP and GNI, another good measure to note is the ABS's calculation of general economic wellbeing - net national disposable income.

During normal times it grows at much the same pace as GDP, but during the mining boom, it zoomed ahead of the actual economy.

Wonderful! Feel the joy, enjoy the tax cuts we can afford, hear us boast of the glories of growth and our economic wizardry.

And yet since September 2008, while GDP per capita has grown by almost 10 per cent, real net national disposable income per capita has fallen by about 2 per cent.

So much for the wizardry, so much for the joy.

GDP growth is an important aspect of our lives, but it remains a pretty abstract one. The main reason why GDP is important is because economic activity (which is essentially what GDP measures) is strongly linked to employment growth.

As a general rule you need to keep the Australian economy growing by about 3 per cent each year to keep the unemployment rate steady.

But GDP is made up of many things and talking about growth should acknowledge that there are large sections of the economy which are not experiencing employment growth as others may be.

Amidst all the chin scratching about how One Nation came back from the dead (gee, wonder if giving Pauline Hanson free advertising on morning talk shows and Dancing with the Stars helped during the lean times?) a look at Queensland employment since 2013 gives a good insight into the disjoint:

In Greater Brisbane things are doing well, the rest of Queensland not so much.

Much as in South Australia, it is not a great shock that some voters turned away from the two major parties.

The best thing about the ALP's campaign from the get go was that it was light on the abstract economic focus. The focus on negative gearing prior to the campaign, education in the early stages, and Medicare at the end was a smart decision to avoid trying to beat the Government on GDP and budget deficits.

The ALP's "Mediscare" didn't work because it was a good lie and people are stupid, but because throughout the existence of Medicare the LNP has struggled to convince voters they value it.

And while governments around the world, nation and states have been selling off assets and seeking to outsource as much as possible to the private sector in the interests of efficiency, people actually like public ownership. And Australians love our health system, and care deeply about it.

The ALP hardly pushed any great socialist agenda - there was no Bernie Sanders type cries for revolution - but they at least seemed to realise voters see more to life than just the budget deficit or surplus.

That voters in greater numbers than ever before chose to vote for minor parties is part of a long-term trend, but which may now have reached a point where the ALP and LNP are forced to admit they have a problem.

And it's a problem that is unlikely to be solved with more talk of how GDP growth, free-trade agreement and international competitiveness will make everything better again.

Greg Jericho writes a weekly column for The Drum. He tweets at @grogsgamut. His personal blog is Grog's Gamut.