It's not merely that the message needs a lot more work, or, better still a completely different focus. It is rather that it is the Turnbull government that is repelling voters, including people who have supported it before. There's not much evidence that Shorten is wooing them away, or that he is rising in popular affection. But he doesn't scare them much, least of all as some sort of potential Leninist, or as an incendiary likely to burn down the Australian economy.

A Turnbull government strategy that voters can be scared back into enthusiasm for Turnbull, for fear of finding something worse, seems destined for failure. Particularly at this juncture, when the government is in a stumble-bum cycle where it does not seem to be able to take a trick.

Cormann is quite capable of making a coherent argument that government economic policies are better calculated than Labor's to promote growth and jobs. He can put a case that policies being promoted by Bill Shorten and Chris Bowen are more likely to act as a brake on, than a spur to, growth. Some won't be convinced; the differences between the two parties are not that great, and mostly matters of emphasis and symbolism.

Government policy is not presently the significant factor driving the economy, let alone in any particular direction. What's happening is much more a matter of world economic conditions, uncertainties about events in the United States, Europe, China and in our region, and, probably, rainfall patterns over the next few years.

Political parties will always pretend that minor, sometimes mostly symbolic, differences between the parties are fundamental ones, presenting voters with fundamental choices between safety and disaster. They will also, naturally, use and abuse concepts of equity and fairness and play to their favourite galleries, always exaggerating the diabolical risks associated with alternative strategies. But one can take things a bit too far, making the message seem somewhat ridiculous.

Cormann told the Sydney Institute that "Shorten has made the deliberate and cynical policy judgment that enough Australians have forgotten the historical failure of socialism".

"The Berlin Wall came down 28 years ago, which means roughly 18 per cent of Australians enrolled to vote were born after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the failure of a system of government that destroyed the economies of eastern Europe.

"Bill Shorten now believes the politics of envy will work for him politically if not economically. That people will believe him when he pretends that the path to a better life for them is to tax their neighbours, their friends and their family members harder, to demonise aspiration and go after hard working Australians and successful businesses.

"Bill Shorten believes that by denigrating successful people as the undeserving rich he will generate enough support to win the next election. His rhetoric is the divisive language of haves and have-nots. It is socialist revisionism at its worst."

It is perfectly true that Shorten has perceived that some of the economic reform messages and policies of the Hawke and Keating governments have run their race, at least as far as voters are concerned. It is true that he is trying to send more traditional Labor messages to voters who are concerned about the present economic situation and worried about their jobs, their security and the future of their children.

The shift in Labor rhetoric reflects some of the excesses of economic neo-liberalism, the changes to local, regional and international economies since the global financial crisis began (and hasn't quite ended) a decade ago, and the current appearance of stagnation and drift in the Australian economy, particularly among the middle and working classes. It also reflects increasing voter antipathy to privatisation, reduced government services and a new culture of public meanness.

But one could hardly suggest that Labor, or Shorten has turned to arguing for bank nationalisaton, or taking control of industry, commerce or markets, or the establishment of any sort of dictatorship of the proletariat.

The glib conflation of Soviet or Eastern European style communism – the system which did collapse, morally as well as economically, in 1989 – with the modest socialism of Britain or western Europe suggests more than overreach by Cormann, but conscious hyperbole.

Almost all of the economies of Europe have bigger roles for the state sector than Australia presently has, or would have after the election of a Shorten government. In most of these economies, there is more intervention in markets than occurs or would occur in Australia under Shorten.

One could, if one must, fear that the restoration of a Labor government here would substitute Labor luvvies, urgers, tree people and a slightly different political class than the Liberal luvvies, urgers, tree people and insiders of an Abbott or a Turnbull government. But neither amount to Stalinism or the establishment of an authoritarian state.

But the line of attack is not weak only for overdramatisation and obvious embellishment. First is the fact that both the Abbott and the Turnbull governments have stepped markedly away from the open market liberalism they purported to represent, and have been shifting (and for much the same reason, which is to say voter discontent) in the same direction as Labor.

From early days of Abbott, which saw two-finger salutes delivered to the car industry, manufacturing and the South Australian and Victorian economies, as well as major cuts to health, education and social welfare spending, Australian voters have seen governments panic, slow, then reverse direction, not least so as to save seats in Adelaide.

Parties that made a virtue of having the market decide have been actively interfering in the energy market, and are still trying desperately to prevent external inquiry into the operations of banks, and to defeat the operations of the market with riverine water. A government that preached the superiority of free trade (and still pretends to) has shifted into protectionism, and in a manner almost certain to lead to retaliation from some of our key trading partners.

Cormann may well give the impression that, left to his own devices, he would not have panicked as much as the latter-day Abbott or Malcolm Turnbull. But he has been at all times a key player in economic policy, and, over most of the period, the most articulate defender of whatever policy has been flavour of the moment. Government as much as opposition has been crab-marching (slightly) to the left, and slight differences of emphasis can hardly disguise it.

Equally undermining, as some other commentators have pointed out, has been the fact that in the other chamber of parliament, the main line of attack on Shorten has not been that he is a cloth-cap firebrand with a dastardly plot to drive the economy to its knees. It has been, rather, that he is an ambitious and not particularly honest person intent only on his own aggrandisement, much given to excessive sycophancy of rich businessmen. (That is, when he can shove his way into the company of some of the people with whom Turnbull has been flirting this week.)

Shorten can't be both at once. He may be neither.

Cormann compared him with Jeremy Corbyn, Labour leader of the opposition in Britain, and Bernie Sanders, who made such an impression during the Democrat primaries in the United States. Both would regard Shorten as a complete reactionary.

There is little doubt that Shorten learnt something from the discontent they were mining (if, in both cases, ultimately unsuccessfully). But not even Shorten's best friend, if he has one, could pretend that Shorten is charismatic, in the manner of Sanders or Corbyn, or that he leads any sort of movement, or has demonstrated any sort of capacity to mobilise and enthuse the young.

Shorten may have made a slight change of tack, but is still a classic (and as Cormann says, dull and boring) mainstream politician, uttering platitudes from the mainstream.

If he has a few favourite Labor bogies – such as banks, or rich tax dodgers – almost every phrase he utters has been carefully crafted so as to offend as few people as possible.

The politicians who can be expected to change things can usually be judged by the enemies they make than by the interests they placate. Donald Trump did not cause his revolution by appeasement. Nor did Gough Whitlam.

Indeed, both took on their own parties first, something Shorten has never done and would never do.

Like Turnbull, too, as it turns out.

Indeed public disillusion with Turnbull, symbolised by the collapse in confidence in him from the high point, two years ago when he rescued Australia from the personality (if not, as it turned out, the policies) of Abbott, may come particularly from the fact that Turnbull, in power, has shown no willingness to be in charge. He has become the servant, not the leader, of his party, and, as such, seems incapable of inspiring it.

Turnbull versus Shorten is not, in short, a personality contest. Nor a beauty contest. Nor even, particularly, a great debate about alternative futures for, or visions about, Australia.

Chris Bowen has crafted a few differentiating economic policies designed to make Labor seem more on the ball with the economy, the polity and the public mood. But both parties are talking much the same percentages of gross domestic product, and both parties have similar ideas about where money should be spent. In areas where there could be real differences in approach – for example in immigration, on defence, foreign affairs and national security or Aboriginal affaires – Labor has made sure that there is no choice at all. These are the areas from which voters might be inspired towards Shorten, but he is unwilling to take the risks involved.

Voters are not embracing Labor. Nor are they, as Cormann fears, contemplating a Labor government because they have deceived themselves about Labor.

Rather they are abandoning Turnbull, and, having done so, decided that Shorten is not very threatening or dangerous. In much the same way, voters abandoned Kevin Rudd for Tony Abbott without ever having embraced the latter. They would have done the same, in somewhat greater numbers, with Julia Gillard.

If (it now seems likely when) Shorten becomes prime minister, voters will make him the primary object of scrutiny. At that stage his attributes and his deficits will be in sharp relief, and the fate of his government will turn more on his power to take charge, get credit and seem to be changing things than on the character and personalities of his opponents.

Generally, it is governments that lose power, not oppositions who win it. Voters are not flocking to Shorten. So far they are merely walking away from Turnbull and the coalition.

Yet since 1914, every time Labor has gone into government from opposition, it has been because they won, voters choosing them more for thinking they had the better policies than simply because they were tired of the alternative. James Scullin, John Curtin, Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Kevin Rudd became prime ministers, because they were different, and presented voters with clear choices.

Shorten deserves some credit for the skill with which he is playing the game, but if he wins next time it will be more because the coalition has collapsed rather than because voters have adopted (or forgiven) Labor. He should take out some insurance, with more clear policy choices, and in fields wider than economic policy. Otherwise he could fall prey to a scare campaign, a big bribe, or the luck of external events. The coalition starts with an edge on economic management, even if that is not from voter fear of a tinge of pink in Labor.

It's hardly red, and hardly eastern Europe. Cormann may have to face the fact that Australians, like Belgians, don't mind a bit of collectivism, a saving role for the state, and some concern, however much confined to rhetoric, for the poor, the lame and the oppressed.

Jack Waterford is a former Editor of the Canberra Times.