FOR five long weeks, it seemed the big loser of the election campaign was policy reform.
Neither side took a convincing policy agenda to the electorate, instead choosing to play to the findings of their focus group research.
Paradoxically, the election result means policy reform may now be the big winner: the independents have stated clearly that, alongside parliamentary reform, policy delivery will be the price of their support.
The paradox has two parts. First, why were the two main parties unwilling to take big ideas to the electorate?
Apologists will point to the national broadband network on the Labor side and Tony Abbott's paid parental leave scheme, but neither of these was part of a comprehensive reform package.
The former was the lone untarnished survivor of the stimulus program, while the latter was Abbott's attempt to woo the female vote and shed ideological baggage.
The truth is that this campaign lacked policy substance. Progressive voices called for commitments on a carbon price and integrated tax reform including a mining tax. Conservatives hoped for detailed proposals on smaller government and industrial relations reform. The sad fact is we got none of these proposals and no ensuing debate on their merits.
Given the result, there will be deserved criticism of the Labor machine, but the Coalition is equally culpable. Its four-line slogan was a study in negativity.
The main parties deliberately shied away from positive ideas because they believe elections are won by mirroring the views of swinging voters in marginal seats with catchy slogans about boats and waste.
They all know boat arrivals are a non-issue in policy terms, but they think voters will reward them for listening.
This belief is mistaken. Rebecca Huntley of Ipsos Mackay explained on Four Corners last week how political parties miss the key message from focus groups. The message Huntley hears consistently is: "This is what we think, but what do we know? We're not running the country. We're not experts. We're not seeing all the information. We want people to convince us otherwise."
What exacerbates this problem for the main parties is that voters now see through the spin. Even positive announcements are treated with disdain. Liberal candidate John Alexander claims Labor's re-announcement of the Epping-Parramatta rail link is one of the reasons for his win in the Sydney seat of Bennelong. This cynicism also helps explain the rise of the Greens.
They have positioned themselves as the party that refuses to betray core convictions for political expediency and voters have believed them.
Imagine, for example, that any of the party leaders had chosen to rise above the false link between migration and infrastructure bottlenecks. Infrastructure is poor due to chronic underinvestment and an inability to access our superannuation pool creatively to fund it.
Migration remains critical to our future economic success and parts of regional Australia are crying out for population inflows.
Policy leadership involves explaining the trade-offs between the long-term benefits and short-term costs, yet the political orthodoxy says voters can't grasp complexity of this kind. So instead of defending migration and tackling infrastructure, the party leaders are content to blame the one on the other.
Here we reach the second part of our paradox. The one group that has been crying out for policy delivery has been the independents, whose need to serve their constituents is not hampered by the constraints of party messaging.
The independents rightly observe that in the fight for swinging voters in marginal seats, their constituents are taken for granted. The two main parties don't bother to compete against incumbents whose two-party preferred votes are all above 60 per cent. The weakness of the Nationals within the Coalition means they cannot convincingly promise rural and regional policy.
So the independents represent voters who feel ignored and will reward local outcomes. They are not policy mugs, either.
Tony Windsor introduced the first substantial climate change bill into the last parliament. Rob Oakeshott has highlighted the importance of broadband and the need to act on the Henry and Garnaut reviews. Bob Katter has advanced well-developed proposals for a clean energy corridor in northern Australia.
Armed with these policy agendas, it's just possible the independents can provide Julia Gillard or Abbott with the freedom to move in areas off-limits to the party machines. We could end up with a real population debate, covering the needs of the economy, the balance between the cities and the regions, the delivery of infrastructure and the carrying capacity of our environment.
If such debates can happen, this year's election might yet deliver substantial policy reform.
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