Less than a year ago, Tony Abbott was an opposition leader cruising comfortably towards seemingly inevitable victory. The Coalition had only a fraction of the resources available to the Gillard government. But it mostly seemed as if the more that Gillard tried to focus the resources available to her on that first task of politicians – to be re-elected – the more her own position, and her party’s, deteriorated.

The more advisers and the more marketeers, the more strangled the message. Labor was spectacularly inept at deploying to advantage the spending programs and presence of the vast logistics of power. It seemed unable to mobilise the vast intellectual resources of the administration to develop and promote good policy, even less at securing public assent for it.

Several battalions of party loyalists, political specialists, pollsters, spin doctors, minders and fellow travellers were available at public expense to inject the words, emotions, empathy and political touches calculated to attract and retain support. Thanks to incumbency, Labor’s shock troops outnumbered the opposition’s by three to one. As ever, vast public resources were available for frank politicking. But it wasn’t working. The public wasn’t buying.

Abbott, the opposition and its advisers did an excellent job of keeping Labor at a disadvantage. People may differ about the strategy, the tactics and perhaps the consequences of the new (and now bipartisan) oppositionism. But there must be a professional admiration for the incredible self-discipline of Abbott and his team, and their capacity to keep to bigger points.

That Labor’s ineptness and suicidal impulses helped enormously is not to the point. Much of the poor footwork of Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd was a result of a seeming incapacity to demolish Abbott in the public gaze. Defeat became inevitable, even if it was never clear just what it meant about what the public wanted or expected.

Nine months on, the Abbott government appears to have lost the confidence of the electorate. Its possession and disposition of new armies and resources is not helping. The shift, if the polls are right, seems so emphatic that it might be said that voters have now made up their minds about Tony Abbott. All things being equal, he has two years to redeem himself in the public gaze. He has the enormous advantage of facing a second-rater with few sharp reflexes in Bill Shorten. But no one knows better than Abbott how much harder it is to retrieve ground that has been lost.

Already the conventional wisdom is becoming that the budget was a political disaster because Abbott and Hockey did not spend enough time preparing the ground with the public and the sectional interests, or in deftly putting good politics on to good policy. Redoubled because of the inevitable political difficulty of being seen to break promises, the more damaging given the fetish Abbott, in opposition, had made of the literal keeping of one’s word.

That wisdom is probably seriously wrong. It was not the lack of the savvy political touch on good but "courageous" policy that is causing the problems. To the contrary. All too many new policies show signs of compulsive meddling by the political processes of the prime ministerial and ministerial officers, of over- rather than under-packaging to make sure that every Liberal fetish and shibboleth was included, if needs be at extra cost, and that as many as possible Coalition enemies were punished, or Labor luvvies infuriated. In the process, not only did politicians fail to explain the underlying strategy, but they also seemed to ignore the need to be seen to be having a plan.

Political cynics often claim that the public will always be distracted by the hip-pocket nerve, and will never accept short-term pain, even in the hope of long-term gain. As the political history of the 1980s shows, that is not so when voters believe they understand and approve what government is doing. On economic questions, in particular, the public is perhaps the most sophisticated in the world. They are not the mugs Labor and Liberals take them to be.

But while the public expects general fiscal prudence and good management from either party of government, there has never been any evidence, from polls or otherwise, that it has a deficit fetish, or a debt fetish, or that it regards the achievement of a "balanced budget" as an end in itself. Nor has "sustainability" – whatever that means on any particular occasion – ever been a political goal as critical as a growing economy, full employment, and business and consumer optimism.

It is perfectly possible to frame and test propositions so as to suggest that Australians want less government, not more, or more efficient or less intrusive public servants, or to let the market affect the provision of service. But there is very little evidence to suggest that there is any political consensus – let alone a shifting one – about the desirable size of the public sector or the need to diminish it. Nor about an imperative to ration government services only to the very needy, or even about a critical need to reduce the general or sectional burden of taxes or government costs.

On matters such as this, there are people and interests with views and opinions, but the mere vehemence with which they are held or proclaimed neither makes them right, or proves that everyone, or everyone sensible, agrees.

Indeed one of the great conundrums about politics over the past 70 years is that there is a growing divide between, on the one hand, the consensus of politicians and the business and managerial classes about the size and functions of government, and on the other the hopes and expectations of the general electorate.

Public expectations of what government can and should deliver to voters – in health, education, community services, law, order and general security or for the aged, the young, the sick and the disadvantaged – have increased, not reduced, over the years.

That has been in spite of any amount of political discourse or propaganda about the need for less, rather than more government. It is in spite of any number of media or political campaigns designed to excite anger and resentment against particular classes or recipients of government goods and services. That has been in spite of any number of Treasury, or Productivity Commission reports, or any number of commissions for audit, which have taken as self-evident the need to reduce the level of services or benefits, to diminish the "sense of entitlement" or to divide the community into givers and takers, lifters and leaners or producers and consumers.

Voters, probably sensibly, take as read the general level of services with which they grow up. They have expectations about the quantity, quality and cost of healthcare, schools, public transport and civil infrastructure.

Over time these expectations tend to increase not decrease. Over the past two generations, for example, voters have come to expect and demand much more public provision of services in childcare, parental leave, aged care, and disabled care. They have not, accordingly, reduced their expectations of what government should do for defence, or foreign aid, or Aboriginal welfare, so that the net cost of service provision remains the same and that taxes and charges do not increase.

Voters do expect that services will be efficiently delivered, and they do not care much about how or by whom (or at what level of government) the services come. But they expect them, and they will blame politicians who do not provide them, or who make it more difficult or expensive to receive them.

A politician who thinks that expectations should change, or that the nature of the general social contract or the requirements of good public finances should be altered in fundamental ways must have a frank conversation with the Australian people about it.

It is arguable that Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in the 1980s – and John Howard and Peter Costello in the late 1990s – did, and, as a result, significantly restructured the economy. The public put confidence in them at a particular time; but the argument was not won for all time. All too often modern politicians think that talking among themselves, or reading the rants in their favourite house newspapers, or addressing gatherings of the political classes can act as a substitute for engagement with the electorate at large.

That conversation involves much more than continual assertion that government spending has ballooned as government revenue has plateaued and that as a result there will be long-term structural deficits unless something is done to bridge the divide. The public probably gets that, and (probably) has come to believe (because Labor will not defend itself) that this is because of Labor mismanagement, profligacy or incompetence.

That does not of itself mean that the public now agrees that the level of services must be reduced, that previous spending promises must be broken, or that, so far as possible, nothing should be done on the revenue side, because it is a sin to raise taxes.

Even less is it likely that the public has been persuaded that our economy, or government fiscus, is now in danger of becoming some sort of international basket case, unable any longer to provide services we have always assumed and expected.

The public will buy cuts (or new taxes) if they believe they are necessary. To be necessary, they must be part of a plan. They must have a definite place in a vision of the future, and be sold as such. The plan cannot simply be some claimed fiscal virtue, or tidying up of a balance sheet said to be out of control, but a distinct part of a strategy about how government, the economy, and the nation should be in the years ahead. That’s the message Abbott and Hockey are not selling. And even if they were, that’s the message that got strangled in all of the budget cheerio calls, and acts of spite and sweet revenge.