Bad policies and embarrassing behaviour have become so routine that they are able to hide in plain sight. The default rightwing settings of the political class see to it that dissent is massaged to the margins, writes Tim Dunlop.

The general dissatisfaction with Prime Minister Tony Abbott is palpable and this is reflected in the various opinion polls. It is even felt within his own party and, as we know, he only just survived a number of recent attempts to remove him from the job.

Dissatisfaction with the PM extends to the Government he leads, and again, this is reflected in opinion polling.

To even mention various ministers - Hockey, Pyne, Andrews, Dutton - has become a shorthand way of talking about incompetence, from issues to do with the budget, through to Pyne's bizarre designation of himself as "the fixer", to Dutton's mishandling of the Medicare co-payment.

Things got so bad at one stage that an establishment journalist such as Laura Tingle felt compelled to write a piece in which she said that "we actually are being governed by idiots and fools" and she marshalled evidence to support the case.

The disturbing thing about her piece, though, was how little impact it had.

Indeed, the idea that the current Government is perhaps the worst in living memory and that the PM in particular is a national embarrassment has become so taken for granted that it has all become a bit passé.

In part, this reflects the way the media react. For every Laura Tingle willing to call a spade a spade, there are 10 others who aren't. And indeed, if the News Ltd stable responded to the failings of the Abbott Government in anything like the way they did to those of the Gillard government, the public mood would be quite different.

It also reflects the way in which public debate in Australia is essentially conservative, if not actually rightwing. That is to say, the political class in our country tends to lean right, especially on economic matters, and to be considered "serious" you have to adhere to rightwing precepts, or at least, not promote leftwing views.

Television in particular, where most people still get their news, is less about wide-ranging debate than it is about a sort of anodyne neutrality that ultimately reflects the interests of this political class. I've explained this in more detail elsewhere:

It is not just that there is a right wing media that dominates and is biased. It is that the opposite of right wing media isn't left-wing media, it is sensible journalism. Sensible journalism is what you get when media organisations or individual journalists try self-consciously to be neither of the right nor the left. They try instead to be "balanced" or "objective". They see this as being professional. But what they end up doing is simply discounting left wing positions and arguments and thus by default give credence to right wing ones. To put it more clearly, the middle ground to which they are trying cleave is actually occupied by right wing assumptions.

This sort of bias is common throughout the Western world and the point was made by Owen Jones in The Guardian recently, speaking about Britain:

The media polices the boundaries of acceptable debate in Britain, helping to ensure that the national conversation is on the terms most favourable to those with wealth and power. According to the opinion polls, most Britons want public ownership of rail and energy, higher taxes on the rich and a statutory living wage. Yet despite the fact such policies are political common sense among the public, they are ignored or actively opposed by almost all media outlets. If you are one of the very few commentators with a media platform that advocates them, you are treated as chronically naive, or as a dinosaur who isn't aware of their own extinction. Support for privatisation, untrammelled free markets, lower taxes on the rich – all of this is treated almost as objective truth. Columnists who support the political status quo are treated as thoughtful and nuanced; the tiny few that deviate are treated as predictable.

Twitter and other social media, of course, are full of complaints about the awfulness of the Abbott Government, but those platforms don't yet have the ability to supersede the influence of the mainstream. In fact, they often reinforce it because they feed off it.

The net effect is that Mr Abbott has been able to achieve a sort of post-challenge equilibrium that simply wasn't available to Julia Gillard (Malcolm Turnbull deciding not to be the spoiler Kevin Rudd was obviously helped too).

For example, Mr Abbott's leadership came under threat because of his decision to offer an Australian knighthood to Prince Philip. His own party was so disgusted by this that they started organising against him. Even his supporters in the media criticised him. He barely withstood the challenge.

But a few months on and he is handing out $4 million grants to climate-change sceptic Bjorn Lomborg to set up a the so-called "consensus centre" and there is barely a murmur, let alone any threats to his leadership. (More recent revelations that the centre came at the Government's suggestion rather than the university's, as the Government originally said, are unlikely to change that.)

Oh well, we all shrug. What do you expect?

We find out that the Government is "quietly" handing out permits for mining exploration in marine sanctuaries, and it goes almost unremarked. The data retention laws that have us on the way to becoming a police state are digested with hardly a murmur. Yes, there is the odd dissenting piece, but nothing like the outrage that, say, surrounded the Gillard Government's media inquiry.

The bottom line is that there is a sort of normalisation of awfulness. Bad policies and embarrassing behaviour have become so routine that they are able to hide in plain sight. The default rightwing settings of the political class see to it that dissent is massaged to the margins.

Yes, it may all well change if and when another horror budget is produced in a few weeks' time, but for now, Mr Abbott is cruising.

He remains personally unpopular, and his government is behind in the polls, but his undeclared agenda of structural transformation of the Australia of the fair go - everything from renewed attempts to change Medicare, to softening us up for an increase in the GST while abandoning a pledge to tax foreign corporations who shift profits overseas, to laying the groundwork for pension cuts - is coming along nicely.

Mr Abbott is winning by losing.

Tim Dunlop is the author of The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience. He writes regularly for The Drum and a number of other publications. He tweets at @TimDunlop.