A Labor government was, in recent months, elected “in a fit of absent mindedness” by voters in Victoria. Inexplicably, in a moment of madness, they forgot how excellent and great the Liberal Party is in government. Well, at least according to the prime minister that’s what happened.

Abbott’s comment, made during today’s National Press Club address, was very well received by the gaggle of Liberal MPs who had, ostensibly, come to support their captain. Heartfelt guffawing was captured by every microphone in the room.

On one hand, the moment – so fleeting yet bound to endure – again demonstrated the distance between the Liberal establishment and the rest of us.

On the other hand, the outburst belied a political crisis all too inescapable for the government. The Liberal backbench reportedly is on the verge, if not already in the midst, of open revolt against the PM. MPs are desperate for a new leader. Despite their contempt for workers, they still have some grasp of the popular mood – if only because their own jobs are on the line at the next election.

And the mood is clear: Tony Abbott is reviled. In today’s Fairfax Ipsos poll, two-thirds of respondents said that they disapprove of the prime minister’s performance. The Liberals’ primary vote has dropped eight points compared with the 2013 election result. The Ipsos survey comes on the back of a Galaxy poll, released on the weekend, which estimated a 10-point drop in the party’s primary vote. That’s a lot of lost seats were an election held today.

Worse than being reviled, the PM appears weak. His broader agenda lies in tatters and very few figures in the establishment have come out in open support of Abbott. If business leaders last year failed to campaign hard for his budget, they now may well have abandoned him, dismayed that he is incapable of delivering the tax and industrial relations changes many were hoping for.

Perhaps worse than appearing weak, the PM is widely viewed as a dickhead. This is not a flippant point. People can respect someone they revile. They can accommodate weakness for a time. But dickheads are afforded little grace. No one listens to the dickhead in the room.

More than a leadership crisis

The diagnosis of the federal MPs, which also was repeated ad nauseam on election night in Queensland as the LNP was savaged, is that the Liberal government lacks a good salesman.

We heard the same from ministers in the Rudd and Gillard governments: the problem was not, according to them, the ALP program in office, but an inability to sell the achievements.

The analysis of some media commentators today, in the wake of the Queensland landslide, is that the electorate has grown “fickle”.

Let’s be clear: most of this is garbage.

The Liberals might find another leader and the party’s fortunes might rebound for a time. But the broader agenda of ruling for the rich and kicking pensioners, students and low paid workers in the teeth, which is the clear reason for the party’s ills, will remain. Who can doubt that when the mooted alternative leaders are Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull – the former a shark who defended CSR against its asbestos-poisoned victims, the latter a millionaire former investment banker and venture capitalist?

The seemingly endless crises of leadership – which, while taking different forms in each, nevertheless plagued the former NSW state Labor government, the former federal ALP government, the LNP in Queensland, the Victorian Liberals in their single term and the federal government today – are symptoms rather than causes of the malaise afflicting Australian politics.

The neoliberal project seems unable today to find a mass constituency. Its broader success, at least in its own terms, delivered more than 20 years of economic expansion. The first phase of the project was carried out in partnership with a union movement with still strong structures and implantation in the working class. A second phase came with rising living standards in the 1990s as the economy recovered from the “recession we had to have”, which cleared some of the remaining barnacles of the old order. A third phase came with dramatically rising housing prices and a mining boom of a scale not seen since the Gold Rush.

Yet neoliberalism was always more than just the narrow economic policies of privatisation, deregulation and delivering “market efficiency”. It was a political project and social experiment that sought to tear the fabric of social solidarity created by the workers’ movement. It was founded on the undermining of democracy, a dramatic increase in inequality as wealth was transferred from workers to bosses in increasing proportions, and the enforcement of precariousness.

Its success in ripping the fabric apart has been adequate enough. The trade union movement and the ALP were partners to their own demise in this regard. But it is far from complete. That’s the problem the Liberals – and the ALP – today face. They continue to push through a program that people have become somewhat fed up with. Yet, neither party has an alternate path – it is what the rich want, and that’s who they serve.

The hollowing of democracy, due to the lack of difference between the mainstream parties, the withering of trade union structures and the greater institutional power or at least influence wielded by unelected arms of the state – the Reserve Bank, the Productivity Commission, the Treasury, the intelligence services, the Parliamentary Budget Office etc. – has left an increasing number of people politically homeless.

Tony Walker, former Financial Review political editor, today wrote: “Brand loyalty in politics is disintegrating. Swinging voters may well represent 30 per cent, or more of a volatile electorate, compared with a much narrower band of uncommitted voters in the past.”

The signs have been there for some time. But this is not simply about voter caprice. It is a legitimate response to a political project that fails the working class. That people are increasingly “disloyal” to political forces that by and large reward only the already wealthy is hardly surprising. Nor is it surprising that political crises often take the narrow form of leadership crises – when policies converge, leadership is one of the last vestiges of party differentiation.

The gaping hole in Australian parliamentary politics is the absence of any plan on the part of either party to redistribute wealth back from capital to labour, and the continuing marginalisation of the broader population from not only the political process, but from control over the world they create.

Every now and again it is obscured by the handfuls of glitter thrown about during election campaigns and leadership challenges. But after the last glimmer, once the sparkling lights have descended, all that is left is that gaping hole – and the shit eating grin of the latest party leader who promises to be different from the last.