During the half relieved, half worried sick days since the kerfuffle over whether Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard should lead the ALP to inevitable defeat or miraculous victory, many perplexed Australians began to query what had become an almost pathological obsession with so-called “political leadership” – as distinct from politics.

Is this, they asked, what Australian politics has sunk to? A popularity contest, rather than a political one? And that goes for whatever line-up taking your fancy: Julia v Tony, Julia v Kevin, or the one we’ve ended up with, Kevin v Tony.

The painfully protracted mess is almost out of control – and more worryingly, probably misses the entire democratic point. Where large chunks of the Australia media are concerned, it’s not a simple matter of bias, or even subjectivity. Plainly, who’s been leading who up the proverbial political leadership path is a lot sexier, easier and far more fun to comment on than policy differences – let alone ideological ones.

Ideological differences? What are they? Oh, nothing important – other than arguably the fundamental reason we have political parties, and therefore elections. Is it possible that, as a direct result of our learned fixation with personality politics, we’ve managed to de-politicise the nation’s political debate beyond repair?

Week by week, poll by poll, the country’s would-be prime minister and the woman who was his embattled incumbent belted each other with feathers. Geoff Kitney called it “low rent politics”. Regardless, after three years of this exasperating carry-on, Gillard and Abbott turned out to be pretty much as unpopular as each other.

Introduce the mind-bending “Rudd factor”, and the mess gets messier. If the polls can be trusted, an inescapable percentage of Australians have always preferred Rudd as a Labor PM, even though a bar-full of his ALP mates wouldn’t contemplate a beer with him.

You can’t help wondering whether our collective wit and wisdom have been on long-service leave. Somehow, we’ve almost reduced the difference between two ostensibly ideologically-driven political parties to a matter of mere degree, not difference. Boiled down, their policies amount to “we’d do the same things as the other mob – but, we’ll do them better and cheaper.”

If that’s what our democratic process has become, it’s reasonable to ask whether we need political parties at all. Why bother with the whole tedious business? Why not just put governing the country up for tender? Best bid wins! If that’s too much trouble – tongue only just in the cheek – toss an old penny. “Heads, Labor wins; tails, the Libs!” It would make almost as much sense as voting for leaders, not parties.

If tossing a coin to get ourselves a government seems too much like betting on two flies crawling up a wall, we could always hand the country over to the miners? Some of them already behave as though they should be running the place. One of them has actually formed his own party. Miners running the Treasury and the economy would certainly be the quickest, even if not necessarily the best way to get rid of the mining and carbon taxes.

Not just since, but before last week’s ALP leadership coup, there have been polls indicating that dumped for Gillard, Rudd back as Labor prime minister could threaten Abbott in what the pundits have for yonks been assuring anyone who’d listen was an unlosable election for the Coalition.

Meanwhile, that endangered political species, the small-l Liberal Malcolm Turnbull vanquished by one vote as alternate prime minister to make way for Abbott. In other words, for most of the past three years, the two most popular politicians in the land – Rudd and Turnbull – couldn’t even get the leadership of their own parties. Go figure, but rightly or wrongly, for better or worse, one of them now has! The other one? Out there on the street, a curiously persistent question remains: “do ya reckon the Libs are gonna knock off Abbott for Turnbull before the election?”

All that said, don’t know about you, but I don’t vote for a leader. I vote for the ideology of the party the leader leads. And here I was, thinking that’s what this entire Western democratic circus was supposed to be about.