If you don’t care about the details, why would they?

What do the Shorten / Turnbull leaders’ debate, Julie Bishop’s stumbles on transition to retirement and Sarah Hanson-Young’s train wreck on superannuation have to do with each other?

Answer: they are all boring.

Partial credit only for giving that response. The full answer is they are all largely about policy details, while the fact that the public sees policy as boring is problematic, not funny.

And the Sarah Hanson-Young interview wasn’t boring, especially the part where the host offered to get her policy advisor in, instead of her, because at least they knew what they were talking about. If only minor parties like the Greens were held to account more often.

The major parties are, at least on occasion, held to account. One such occasion was the leaders’ debate, where journalists asked probing questions like whether Labor actually had an upper limit on how high the tax to GDP ratio would rise (which Shorten couldn’t answer) and whether either party had a plan to actually get people off Manus and Nauru (which they didn’t).

The fact that both leaders largely stuck to scripted answers that avoided the substantive issues is symptomatic of a broader political malaise.

The politicians know they don’t need to be across the detail because most of the electorate isn’t listening anyway — and the bulk of those who do listen only care about what’s in it for themselves. And let’s not overlook the twitter partisan armies, ready to repeat whatever inconsistent, inane nonsense their side serves up as gospel.

That’s why Q&A with the leaders attracts a million people and the debate only attracted half as many viewers as the third most-popular reality show of the night.

The policy detail should matter. It should matter more than the colour of Malcolm’s tie or Shorten’s zingers. It should matter much more than Richard Di Natalie turtleneck or whether David Leyonhjelm really is the Bond villain, Blofeld.

Yet it will only matter to politicians if it matters to voters, and right now it is clear that it doesn’t. It’s just too boring.

Simon Cowan is Research Manager at the Centre for Independent Studies and just wishes those kids would get off his lawn