Perhaps the Prime Minister is having a well-earned break from politics with his wife and children, if only so he can regather himself for the fight of his life over the next four months. Apart from Photoshop-gate – when loyal acolytes in his department tried to substitute cleaner shoes on to his hooves – the public heard little of Morrison this week. A few of his ministers made desultory efforts to win headlines with announcements, bury bad news during the silly season, or engage in strictly routine denunciations of Labor, generally involving no fresh matter or argument. But there's been nothing from the leaders of the two parties engaged in a struggle to win the electorate's hearts and minds.

It is only the second week of January; most Australians are still on holiday and, generally, rather more interested in sport, loafing around, sagging under uncommon heat or, in some cases, dealing with the consequences of hail, storms, flooding or fires. Most people actively hate politicians anyway, and few are deeply engaged in any of the great policy debates that might form the agenda for a May election. So wouldn't it be sensible to save one's energy, and words, for a time when more might be listening? Will voters pay a bonus if they are not disturbed, distracted or disgusted during the holidays?

It could be common sense. There is supposedly a tradition in Australia that the Christmas holidays see an armistice in active political warfare, ending on or after Australia Day. From then, according to the tradition, it is back on, because the holidays are over, parents are back at work, children are at school and everything cracks up again. It is, of course, only an aspiration that would like to be a tradition, given that the silly season often ends abruptly with a natural disaster – such as bushfire, flood or cyclone – or with events, often international, that shake holidaymakers from their torpor.

And, sometimes, of course, there is a forthcoming election, which tends to get politicians up early in the morning, even if they find it difficult to rouse the people they are supposed to be leading.

One might think that Morrison, persistently behind in the polls, cannot afford the luxury of a holiday. Every moment not spent campaigning might be a wasted opportunity.

But a dearth of public appearances doesn't mean Morrison is not engaged. There's an early budget to prepare and jam through the Parliament in only a few charged days before the nation is in full election mode. It must not only appear to be a servant of promises that the budget will go into surplus next financial year but, presumably, offer voters tax cuts and incentives to return a Coalition government, against their present instincts.

As Malcolm Turnbull's treasurer, Morrison had many communications problems but was able, in the last budget, to secrete more than $10 billion, over the forward estimates, for election promises and announcements. (Most of this war chest comes from changed estimates of government revenue, which will suffer if the government is forced to reduce projections of growth.)

The targeting of tax cuts and determining incentives in marginal seats is an intensively political process, given the election's proximity. Willy-nilly, the budget will double as the government's policy speech, even if that suggests a longish election campaign. The crafting of the budget and its messages (as well as the placement of any booby traps for an incoming Labor government) is not something Morrison would delegate to his Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, or his Finance Minister, Mathias Cormann.

Nor is this simply a matter of the arithmetic, or the apparent triumph of a surplus. If the government has a central organising message, of which the budget is to be the centrepiece, it does not yet seem to have been communicated to the cabinet as a whole, the Coalition parties or the electorate.

No set of random handouts, however generous to selected classes of marginal voters, can substitute for a narrative conveyed to the electorate at large. The government must show that the budget announcements fit into the logic of a consistent strategy and show the government's triumph in producing growth and jobs during adverse circumstances, or at least a hostile Senate. If the strategy is harnessed to the handouts, rather than the other way around, election defeat is virtually guaranteed, not least because voters have proven themselves increasingly cynical about political promises, projected surpluses and the handing-out of tax cuts from money the government has not yet received.

Indeed, Morrison and his team might be better invested in working out a script and roster of arguments, as well as polishing the budget goodies, rather than getting bogged down in the detail of reviewing spending. That's because Morrison has proven himself dreadful with presentation and persuasion, whether as treasurer or Prime Minister. Perhaps some of his folksy grab bag of cliches, slogans and pabulum were tested in focus groups – though I doubt it – but they won't convince markets, and it's doubtful they can win debates among economically literate but very cynical voters, particularly given the relative sophistication of the economic messages honed by the opposition.

Normally, a government expecting to lose (and most of this government expects that) will be tempted to make a host of promises, unlikely to be able to be carried out, but calculated towards the bases of Liberal and National Party support and designed to "save the furniture". As things stand, the government is looking to lose about 20 seats. But if Morrison and his ministers continue shedding votes almost every time they open their mouths, the casualty list could be twice as high, probably putting the Coalition out of reach of power until the late 2020s.

But these are not normal times, even assuming that the government, like the opposition, will play funny buggers with the electorate and not submit some detailed policy proposals for independent costing and analysis until the campaign's last days.

Labor can be expected to be alert for highly irresponsible promises, particularly in a campaign that will focus on budget management and strategy, including the role of higher taxes and the equity of tax burdens. Moreover, it can be expected that the opposition will accuse both the Treasurer's office and the Treasury itself of feeding dodgy assumptions into the columns balance, underestimating costs and overestimating revenue. It will do this as it points out that Treasury secretary Phil Gaetjens, appointed last year, was a close adviser to Morrison and Liberal ministers and, so the innuendo will go, a partisan hack. Indeed, the innuendo will go further to suggest that, with this man in charge, the Treasury itself has become a politicised, loyal servant of the government.

Senior Labor figures have suggested that Gaetjens is one of the few departmental secretaries marked for replacement if it is elected. It has been stressed there are no plans for any sort of night of the long knives, as when John Howard was elected in 1996, or the Tony Abbott purges of 2013. Abbott announced, inter alia, that he would get rid of Martin Parkinson as his Treasury secretary, presumably because Parkinson had earlier had the audacity to accept appointment as head of a government department dealing with climate change, and thus could be assumed to believe in it. After Turnbull knifed Abbott, he restored Parkinson to the public service, indeed in a more senior role, as head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

This had a significant calming effect on a public service rendered increasingly mutinous by the way Abbott had co-opted it into erratic and intensely political stunts. That some of those so used were later collected into a Department of Home Affairs, under a minister of authoritarian tendency and a secretary addicted to apocalyptic visions of national security stranger danger, has meant that some reputations have not yet recovered.

Most departmental secretaries are reasonably relaxed about their futures in a Shorten government. Few, in any event, are well known publicly, or (other than Mike Pezzullo) of such dominating personality (like John Stone or Jane Halton) that incoming ministers might doubt their loyalties or willingness to implement new policies. Some secretaries and agency heads have worked in Coalition ministers' offices, just as, earlier, a few of the present secretarial establishment had worked in the offices of Rudd and Gillard ministers. It is not mere service in an office that brands one as a partisan.

Still, almost all secretaries, like most public servants, expect a change of government. Under the quasi-constitutional niceties, they have a role in preserving the the public administration's independence, a role now usually easier because minders perform many of the overtly political functions of executive government. There are formal conventions about harnessing the public service for political ends during the caretaker period of government, which will, or ought to, start almost as soon as Parliament rises from a truncated budget session. With senior officials anticipating a changeover, one can expect they will be extra punctilious about being used and abused for frank political purpose, or to lend some air of independence and authenticity to bogus propositions.

Those expecting the "sexing-up" of budget projections, particularly with growth forecasts, should know that ministerial offices have manipulated such figures for at least 25 years. Before that, the budget assumptions – then fed into econometric models of the economy to estimate costs and revenue – were made within the Treasury. While political interference in the projections from interested parties is always done to "improve" bottom lines, it is hard to assert positively that such projections have been any more unreliable than the Treasury's.

By May, the population will be thoroughly sick of both Morrison and Shorten, neither of whom they have ever much liked. The most relief that some punters can hope for is that campaigning will be constantly interrupted by a state election in NSW, Easter, Anzac Day and school holidays, and perhaps a bit of cricket against Sri Lanka.

My guess is that none of Morrison's "positioning" since becoming Prime Minister in August has done him any favours and that he is yet to find a phrase, or achieve anything, that has imprinted itself favourably in the minds of either the so-called Liberal base or voters generally. The budget is his best chance to make a pitch that will last until polling day, even if, as I remarked last week, the public might be now past wooing with baubles and trinkets. He can win, if at all, only by conveying the idea that he and his Treasurer have a superior feel for managing the economy. I doubt he is up to it, because he does not project experience, flexibility and authority.

But Morrison should certainly avoid one temptation as he emerges from the cloisters on Australia Day. The Liberals, and particularly the Liberal conservatives, have pretty much passed their zenith on implied claims that they are more Australian, or love the country more, or better represent true-blue Aussie virtues than Labor, the Greens or anyone else. Morrison, like Turnbull, has enabled a good deal of division in the community, and, in Victoria in particular, frank racism in the lead-up to its state election. That rebounded badly and seriously damaged the Liberal brand – perhaps as severely as the antics of Barnaby Joyce and Andrew Broad damaged the National brand.

That will not stop a Peter Dutton inventing announcements designed to show he is against crime, terrorism, African youths, slack judges and people who trespass into our waters. Mostly, as with Dutton's proposals for a national lynch party on child sexual abusers, the purpose is to get people talking about him rather than any serious intention to put policy or programs on to the statute books.

My suggestion is that his child offender register be expanded to include all folk, from ministers down to cops, service folk, officials and contractors, implicated now or later in evidence given to a truth and reconciliation commission, in the physical and mental abuse of children, or in official callousness about it.

Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times. jwaterfordcanberra@gmail.com