Parties blown in the wind Illureation: Rocco Fazzari The overarching theme of the election is change. Australians want a change in the country's politics. Both the Labor and Liberal parties set their sails to catch this wind. It's hard for the party that's held government for six years to claim that it stands for change, but Labor's giving it a try. This is an implicit admission that Labor doesn't think it can plausibly campaign on its record. Its campaign slogan promises "A New Way." The subtext here is that Labor is no longer the party of Julia Gillard. But even then, the "new way" is still a prime minister that you used to know. So, the Labor proposition depends heavily on Kevin Rudd as a new leader, a new way, offering a different politics. Capitalising on Labor's dilemma, the Liberals urge you to "Choose Real Change." If you're disenchanted, if you're angry, why would you vote for the incumbent government, no matter who's leading it? Tony Abbott offers a change of government as a panacea: "There's almost nothing wrong with our country that wouldn't be improved by a change of government," he says in an audacious piece of over-claiming. The Liberal Party is telling us that Labor may have made a change of leader, but it's a fake change, done purely for the purpose of electoral manipulation. If you want a new government, get a real one. So, the Coalition relies heavily on voter rejection of Labor, not on a euphoric embrace of Abbott or the Coalition. Indeed, this has always been the centrepiece of the Abbott proposition. Knowing he is not a popular figure, from the very beginning Abbott has built his political purpose as the wholesale extinguishing of Labor. His mantra at the 2010 election: "We'll end the waste, repay the debt, stop the new taxes and stop the boats." The mantra hasn't changed from one election to the next. Each element is simply a promise to cancel Labor. The main difference between the Abbott pitch of three years ago and his pitch today is that last time he wasn't winning the election campaign, and this time he is. Abbott is standing in the same place. The electorate is moving to him, not the other way around. But many voters are sick of the entire political mainstream, as unhappy with Tony Abbott and the Coalition as they are with Kevin Rudd and Labor. One measure of this? The rise of protest parties, especially in the main battleground of the election, Queensland. Altogether, the three largest of the minor parties on the ticket are attracting a remarkable 20 per cent of all votes. The party created by bombastic billionaire Clive Palmer is polling 8 per cent of the primary vote, the party of 19th-century economic nostalgist Bob Katter is polling 4, and the Greens are on 8, according to Tuesday's Fairfax/Nielsen poll. Each of these claims not to be a protest party but a party seeking to win seats and exercise power in its own right. But while Palmer campaigns under the slogan "Reunite the Nation," his biggest policy is bizarrely for northern Queensland to secede. His party is a protest against Australia. And while Katter seems to have no slogan other than his surname and his ten-gallon hat, his party is essentially a protest at modernity. The Greens have actually served as the junior partner in a coalition government, but they are now campaigning as a mechanism to foil Tony Abbot. As the headline on the press release for their campaign launch said: "Australian Greens will stop the excesses of Tony Abbott." These parties are unlikely to win any more seats than they already have - which is one House of Representatives seat for the Greens and Katter's own seat in the house. However, Palmer's party may win a seat in the Senate. But the size of their combined vote is a measure of the deep underlying dissatisfaction with the main political parties. The main parties claim to represent change, and the minor parties claim to offer radical change. It runs like this. Rudd says, I represent change because I'm not Julia Gillard. But Tony Abbott says, I represent change because I'm neither Gillard nor Rudd. Palmer says, I represent change because I'm neither Gillard, Rudd nor Abbott. Katter says, I represent change because I'm from another century. The Greens come closer than any other party to claiming to represent the status quo, because they are trying to preserve their balance-of-power position in the Senate. The pervasive sense of national dissatisfaction strikes overseas visitors as a bit baffling. "Most countries would envy Australia's economy," the US Nobel laureate in economics, Joseph Stiglitz, wrote this week. And Australian households have enjoyed just as strong an improvement in their standard of living during Labor's six years in power as they did in John Howard's 11. Disposable incomes, net of increases in the cost of living, have increased by an average 2.6 per cent a year under Labor, a rate of gain identical to that under Howard, according to Canberra University's National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling. It's remarkable that Labor has presided over this yet can't run on its record. The economic record is far from perfect - growth is slowing, unemployment rising and the federal deficit growing. Yet Deputy Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wasn't making it up when he set out the record at Labor's campaign launch: We created almost 1 million jobs. We have low inflation. We have low interest rates. We have higher workforce participation. We have lower industrial disputes. And we've achieved all this with a AAA credit rating. Better yet, the stockmarket is rising and house prices are booming. Yet the sense of dissatisfaction is real and the desire for change is widespread. There are two key explanations. First is the troubling syndrome that also afflicted the Howard government. After the longest uninterrupted boom in Australia's history, the people seem to take economic growth and prosperity for granted. You need to be at least 40 years old to have any adult memory of recession. Governments that preside over growth and prosperity seem to get little or no credit for it. Second, the dissatisfaction is directed less at the economic outcomes of Labor's six years and more at its political conduct and administrative management. The internal Labor coups against Rudd and Gillard won Australia the unenviable boast that "Canberra is the coup capital of the Western world," in the words of the former BBC correspondent in Sydney, Nick Bryant. Or, as a Melbourne voter in an Ipsos Research focus group, Ruth, put it: "We must look like a dickhead country when all that happens." The political smarties in Labor's apparatchik class can take full credit. This produced turmoil and damaged trust. Incompetence in policy execution was the other great source of dissatisfaction. The change to asylum seeker policy was a central failure. The economic success story was lost beneath gripes about implementation of economic stimulus - pink batts and school hall rorts trumped the fact that Australia, almost alone among developed countries, grew through the global crisis. Abbott will be the main beneficiary of this dissatisfaction and the craving for change when he wins, on every available indicator, the House of Representatives on Saturday.