By contrast, what the Opposition has been heard to be saying about the nature of the global financial crisis, and its criticism of the Government's response to it, does not seem to have much impressed the electorate. Few, for example, would seem to think Rudd has brought the crisis on Australia, or that a re-elected Howard Government, with Treasurer Peter Costello, would have somehow been able to avoid it. While Turnbull's doubts about the value of pouring money into the economy, increasing government debt and handouts, have a respectable economic lineage, and may even be right, they can hardly be said to be representative of the consensus of the politicians or experts in the industrialised economies. Moreover, Turnbull's analysis has the disadvantage of seeming to represent the classical economic theory that politicians, including Rudd, claim to have been discredited by the way the crisis occurred. That Turnbull's successful business career was in merchant banking hardly helps either, as any amount of Government innuendo and interjection demonstrates.

But there's a wider problem. One way or another, the Government seems to have Turnbull trapped on a treadmill where he is ever having to respond to, or comment upon, matters on the Government's agenda. It is done in such a way, of course, that the comparisons are made to sound odious as with the alcopops tax, workplace laws, or resistance to large cash handouts. It may not be wedging him on moral or philosophical issues, in the way Keating or Howard routinely wedged opposition leaders. But they are confining him as though he is under some immediate obligation to say exactly what he would do with the instant problem at hand, as described by them. Then it orchestrates the abuse of what he says.

Turnbull has to escape these confines. So does his party, whether with him or with someone else. He should be setting an agenda of his own, by no means necessarily about the same thing that the Government rates as important. And that agenda should be primarily about ideas and ideals, and about broad approaches to problems, rather than detailed prescriptions about how he would handle the immediate problems of today, accompanied by his own alternative budgets, analyses and expectations about what might happen on the other side of the world.

Rudd is by no means the favoured prime minister because voters think him the expert on our most pressing problems, or because they believe he has the answer to the crisis. Rather, they think him a competent and by now experienced type who is seeming to manage fairly efficiently, and in predictable ways. Many voters feel that they know him and most trust that he will not do anything too erratic or simply ideological.

If John Howard and his ministry, including Turnbull, lost office, it was not because voters had lost confidence in their essential competence. Most voters, probably, would expect that a Turnbull, or a Costello, dealing with the global financial crisis would be broadly following much the same path, and generally listening to the same economic advisers.

Labor won, first, because voters had come to believe that Rudd and the Labor team were a safe bet, and because voters had come to see that their ideas (particularly about the environment, workplace relations and reinvesting in the economy) were more on their wavelength than Howard's. Specific policy promises were secondary to such a perception.

Turnbull's mission at the next election, if he gets that far, is to persuade voters that his set of ideas and instincts, and approaches to problems, is more on the ball than Labor's. He could win by mere oppositionism if Labor completely falls apart, or if there is some massive scandal or incompetence, or the financial crisis takes a turn that has voters blaming governments rather than bankers. For any of this, Turnbull more or less has to hope that things will get worse, and has to run the risk of being accused of helping to make them worse, particularly by attacking that magic thing confidence that is said to be critical to a recovery.

He should be focusing instead on instilling popular confidence in himself and his team, and on some artful distinctions about policy which illustrate just how his instincts and approach would be different. The value of his Senate numbers should not lie in the capacity, with some independents, to wreck the Government's policies and programs, but to provide a forum for debates that the Government cannot control.

David Kemp (then political scientist, later Malcolm Fraser strategist and, under Howard, minister) wrote 35 years ago that the most vital relationship for a leader is not with the public but with the followers. ''The man who cannot unify and lead his colleagues in parliament and the organisation cannot make a successful appeal to the electorate''.

Kemp argued that the ultimate source of authority of a leader was his role as the expounder of the philosophy, ideas and ideals, of his party. A pragmatist regarded as clever could survive for a while; over time, however, a leader has to state and restate his basic guiding principles. This is what Howard did in 1995; he won office virtually without making specific promises. But we always knew where he stood and what he thought.

It is here that Turnbull is failing with his followers. For all of the money invested in his image, and all of the respect accorded his brains and ambition, no one really knows what he stands for or what he thinks.

Jack Waterford is editor-at-large.