What the Queensland and Tony Abbott polling woes show us is not that reform is dead - as conservatives suggest - but that voters have varying ideas of what constitutes good "reform", writes Greg Jericho.

There's nothing quite like seeing conservatives throw their toys out of the crib when their side loses an election. According to such folk, the Queensland election was not just an election loss but the end of a glorious period in Australian history.

For conservative and right wing commentators, the Queensland election result was poor not merely because Campbell Newman lost one term after winning one of the biggest majorities in Australian political history, but that he lost after pursuing "reform".

Conservative commentators love "reform". It gives them a chance to reminisce about the old days when they were able to convince themselves they had some relevance.

The editorial in Monday's Australian Financial Review, for example, noted that Bob Hawke often argues "voters can be relied upon to make the right decisions". These right decisions of course were the "economic reform agenda pursued" by the Hawke government and "John Howard's centre-right government that followed".

But now, voters can no longer be relied upon to do the right thing.

At such points the lovers of the 1980s and '90s reform period start to sound like old white blokes (like me) who can't understand why U2 don't get voted anymore in the Triple J Hottest100.

Apparently our political choices mean our chances for "economic growth that will generate well-paying jobs and widespread opportunity" are dimmed.

Yes, dear voter, you are to blame. You could have had prosperity, instead you are voting to "head down a Greece-lite path that will provoke, or exacerbate, the next genuine crisis".

One would think after four years of Greek austerity and weak economic growth the austerity hawks could find another nation with which to compare Australia should it fail to go along the path of "reform" they wish it to.

But what is this reform that we so desperately need, but apparently won't vote for?

Usually it means that someone other than the person arguing for it is either to lose their job or be paid less for doing it.

"Reform", as I have previously argued, also means "policy that I agree with". Thus you won't see the AFR or The Australian op-ed pages bemoaning the failure of reforms to tackle climate change, or reforms that will lead to greater equality.

Nope, sorry. That's not real reform.

Reform must be about productivity and efficiency. Tax reform can only be a reform if it means less tax is being paid - even if our revenues are falling. The exception of course is the GST, in which reform means more tax being paid (but of course relatively less by those who earn more).

The economics correspondent and editorial writer for The Australian, Adam Creighton, echoed the AFR's view of the voters being at fault, when on Twitter he wrote the Queensland election result showed "economic literacy dwindling at the time we need it most #ignorance."

But what is economic literacy? Creighton once wrote a front page story for The Australian that thought it newsworthy that "a chief executive earning $1 million a year is required to pay more than $423,000 in annual tax, almost 40 times as much tax as a high school teacher earning $60,000 a year."

I'd argue any article that implied that such a situation was unfair is pretty damn economically illiterate.

Similarly, the AFR cited the example of the Victorian Government's refusal to go forward with the East-West Link motorway project as a sign of its economic illiteracy. And yet nowhere in the editorial does it mention that the East-West Link project was calculated to return just 45 cents for every dollar invested. Surely if one wished to educate readers to ensure they made better economic choices, such information would be included.

In fact, I would argue the voters are actually ahead of politicians on economic literacy.

The Queensland election - and the current Abbott polling woes - demonstrates that voters no longer will fall for the old game of parties trying to win office with a near-invisible strategy, only to then announce how much worse things are than they thought, and thus requiring massive cuts and other "reforms".

It worked well with Howard and Costello in 1996, who were able to manufacture a black hole that they used to justify massive cuts to government expenditure.

They then also made use of their large majority to bring in a GST at the 1998 election, despite Howard having ruled out doing such a thing before the 1996 election (and even that strategy nearly came unstuck).

Campbell Newman tried the same trick - ruling out before the election measures that were then unsurprisingly recommended after the election in the Costello commission of audit that also found "black holes" that demanded cuts to government expenditure.

And yet the belief that their fat margin would get them over the line a-la Howard in 1998 came greatly unstuck.

In the federal sphere, in 2013 we saw Abbott and Hockey try to argue that Labor had left the economy in a much worse state than they had said.

Even in his Monday address at the National Press Club, Abbott kept up with the furphy that the ALP hid the true picture.

He told the press club that "we went into the 2013 campaign with the then government telling us that the deficit for that financial year would be $18 billion. It turned out that the deficit was $48 billion, a dramatic explosion a $30 billion budget black hole that the Labor Party should have known about".

It's rare to see a prime minister so brazenly lie before the entire press corp.

Yes the 2013 budget projected a deficit of $18 billion for 2013-14, but in its "Economic Statement" delivered prior to the election, the ALP admitted the figure had blown out to $30.1 billion.

That was the figure all parties "went into the 2013 campaign" working from. The Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook released during the campaign confirmed this figure.

In the December 2013 Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook the figure increased to $47 billion. But it is worth remembering that of the $17 billion increase, $6.2 billion was due to lower revenue due to the economy growing slower than expected, and $11.9 billion was due to extra spending initiated by the Abbott Government:

If, as Abbott would have you believe, that figure was something "the Labour Party should have known about", then that includes knowing that after the election Joe Hockey would give $9 billion to the Reserve Bank despite them never asking for such an amount.

Similarly by the same logic, the Liberal Party and Abbott should have known that its own projection for the 2014-15 financial year made in the May budget would blow out by $10.6 billion in six months.

What the Queensland and Abbott polling woes show us is not that reform is dead, but that just saying "reform" is not enough - and that trying to play voters for fools won't work either.

The big "reforms" for this year look set to be on IR, and yet over the past 30 years labour costs have fallen steadily:

The pro-reform crowd would have you believe they can keep falling forever, and to do so without workers noticing.

Back in the 1980s, wages and salaries accounted for nearly 53 per cent of total national income. After 30 years of "reform" that figure is now around 47 per cent:

Perhaps when the reform lovers wish to persuade voters to be economically literate they need to consider that firstly not everyone agrees on what constitutes a "reform".

Moreover, given voters have experienced 30 years of the types of reform conservatives believe are worthy, perhaps rather than suggesting they are economically illiterate it might be time instead to consider that voters actually have a fair amount of experience with which to judge the worth of "reform".

Greg Jericho writes weekly for The Drum. You can read his blog and he tweets at @grogsgamut.