A winning smile in need of a political agenda? Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk. Credit:Tracey Nearmy Her opponent Tim Nicholls has one real ambition: to take the premier's job, even if he needs One Nation to get there. He boasts of 100 policies, but few could be considered anything approaching meaningful reform. Newman's former treasurer, he is busy trying to convince the public he has learnt the lessons of 2015. Opposition Leader Tim Nicholls has run a small target campaign. Credit:Tracey Nearmy The resulting "contest" is an all too familiar scene, both parties playing by the same strategic rule book. Present a small target through few policy specifics and certainly nothing mildly controversial. Announce some popular infrastructure or hip-pocket initiatives you may or may not be actually able to pay for. Raise fears about your opponent.

Voilà. A foolproof strategy. Except … Queenslanders have been here before. The last three winning premiers (and then some, but let's focus on the recent past) have presented identical versions of themselves to voters. But then one of them wins, and they actually have to govern. And that's where things get tricky. Within 73 days of becoming the first elected female premier in Australia in 2009, Anna Bligh had had an epiphany. The state's finances were far worse than previously thought. The only option was to sell state assets. The plan didn't rate a mention before the election. Anna Bligh faced a backlash after announcing she would sell state assets in 2012. Credit:Cole Bennetts Bligh maintains this sequence of events happened in good faith - admittedly there was a financial crisis unfolding - but the public believed otherwise, turning on her with unprecedented savagery in 2012, reducing Labor to just seven of 89 seats.

Meanwhile Campbell Newman was smiling for the cameras and hinting at a bit of tinkering with the public service via natural attrition. Then, 87 days into his premiership, that had grown to "20,000 jobs" the state could not afford and a rapid-fire redundancy program. And we all know how that ended. Short reign: Campbell Newman on the night of his 2015 election defeat. Credit:Glenn Hunt Similarly, at about this time federally, we had "there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead" played on endless repeat for three years, then the disastrous Abbott-Hockey budget of 2014 that effectively brought about their downfall. (It's no coincidence both Newman and Abbott's budget revelations came following 'commissions of audit'.) And so we have Palaszczuk, who spruiks an 87 per cent conversion rate on the promises she made before the last election. A distinction, then, for being upfront with voters, but her roll call of meaningful reforms is noticeably short. Her primary achievement in three years is, like Abbott federally, reversing the unpopular decisions of her predecessor. But returning to the status quo isn't progress. Whatever their faults, Bligh and Newman were in the job to get things done. Both of them, I believe, were acting in what they considered to be Queensland's best interests, even if the electorate disagreed. Or did they? The thing is, we'll never know. Did people turn on Bligh and Newman because they didn't like their policies or was it just that they didn't care for being treated like mugs at an election three months earlier? Politicians deal in trust. Once it's gone, it's almost impossible to replenish.

The genesis for some of this can be tracked back to John Hewson's "Fightback" campaign of 1993, where Paul Keating mounted the mother of all scare campaigns against a GST and Hewson lost the "unloseable" election. That campaign became Political Strategy 101 for the whole generation that followed. Except six years later Australia got a GST anyway and now no one remembers what the fuss was about. The "strategy", which lives on to this day, is built on a false premise that obtaining and securing office is more important than actually achieving something. Queensland's politicians have been watching but learning the wrong lessons. They jettisoned policy ambition from campaigns, instead deciding the only way to win office was to tiptoe softly into power, then shout 'SURPRISE' once you're there. But it hasn't worked. At least not lately. But instead of offering more ambition up front, they're instead sacrificing ambition from their whole agenda. This flow chart captures how political leaders see election campaigns at present. A strategy document obtained from both ALP and LNP campaign headquarters? The question is, how much are politicians to blame and how much are they victims of circumstances beyond their control? Reform and change are difficult things. Especially when you're dealing with a cynical, disengaged public.

It's fashionable these days to talk about the effects of social media on democracy but I think we the mainstream media still have our own case to answer. Media thrives on drama. Revolving door prime ministers are great for ratings, not so much for, say, national energy policy. Which is why I have some sympathy for Malcolm Turnbull. This year his government has legislated the Gonski 2.0 education reforms, stumped up a plan to fully fund the NDIS which proved beyond his two predecessors, come up with some semblance of an energy policy (even if that largely seems to be 'let the retailers sort it out') and in same-sex marriage will likely pass a historic social reform that was vehemently opposed by a sizeable portion of his own party. Admittedly a lot of this is finalising initiatives set in place by predecessors, but it still feels like a reasonable annual output for a prime minister, especially when you consider the citizenship fiasco going on around him. The media, however, smells blood. We get a constant stream of stories about unhappy colleagues. Groundhog day returns. If the definition of insanity is making the same mistake twice, what do you call doing it four times? It comes back to a mismatch of objectives. I would suggest a good way to judge a political leader is their three biggest policy achievements in any given year - maybe any given term. But that won't keep the nightly news - or your Facebook feed - ticking over. Hence all this other noise. Every meaningful reform, by definition, changes the existing balance of society. This means someone, somewhere, has to be less well off than they were previously. And I don't think I'm giving away any industry secrets when I say the media love to find these people.

One example for which I had a front-row seat working at The Sydney Morning Herald was the issue of pub lockout laws. The media, us included, heaped pressure on the NSW government to do something after a string of high-profile assaults. Then after the legislation, as the backlash gained momentum, came the string of profiles of small bars and restaurants devastated by the changes. Our coverage wasn't motivated by malice or any Machiavellian agenda. They were simply the obvious stories to do at the time. The media gets to report the problems, with no responsibility for finding a solution. Hence they win every time. The government can't. The sudden prevalence of digital metrics in newsrooms has probably played its part too. Everyone clicks on a sad-faced case study, especially if they're good looking. And every year the highest rating story on federal budget night is a bullet-point list titled "Budget winners and losers'. Every media outlet has cottoned on to this, which is why you'll see it leading every news website at 8pm on the second Tuesday in May. Its success means it's repeated year after year. And so politics is reduced from the quest to build a better society for future generations to a crass game of 'what's in it for me?' Into this mix you throw a populist group like One Nation who have successfully recognised people's alienation from the self-interest of the major parties but are yet to produce anything like a cohesive policy platform. They're like a single issue party that's only issue is disillusionment. But they heighten the anxieties of a political mainstream rocked by insecurity, furthering their retreat into policy paranoia. Ironically, this amplifies the major parties' lack of conviction and makes One Nation stronger still. But it doesn't make Australia stronger. It makes us cynical. Weary. Resolved to further disappointment. And going backwards on the global stage. All three relevant players - politicians, media and the public - are part of the problem, but each is seemingly frozen in its own repetitive cycle, blinded to their own role by the disappointment and contempt they feel for each other. Which makes it hard to see how this will ever change. I know it's naive but wouldn't it be nice to see a flow chart that looked like this?

This would make a nice change. Credit:Jamie Brown Conal Hanna was Editor of Brisbane Times from 2009-2012 and is currently Fairfax Media's Audience and Innovation Editor.