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A Labor senator was telling me why both his party and the Coalition were tracking so lowly with punters.
Both sides have been hovering around 36 per cent primary support all year, two full points below the assumed absolute rock bottom for securing government.
With 38 per cent, Julia Gillard managed to scrape a negotiated victory for the ALP against Tony Abbott's Coalition in 2010.
But now with a combined 72 to 73 per cent combined primary support, the ALP and the Coalition, the two parties of government, are (to use Mr Abbott's terminology this week) at a low ebb.
At last year's election, they achieved a combined 76.7 per cent primary support (a record low), and 79 per cent in 2013.
Before then, with the exception of the 1998 election (79.6 per cent), the two sides have always snaffled more than 80 per cent of the national vote in the post-war period and often into the 90s.
The Labor senator said the modern-day slide in support for the major parties boiled down to something relatively simple: both sides of politics were suffering from stagnant wage growth.
People either feel they are going backwards financially or not getting ahead, and increased indebtedness caused by record-low interest rates was only making things worse.
Australians are disillusioned with the traditional parties of government because they do not seem to have the answers. Neither side can say where the next generation of jobs will come from or how their kids will be better off than them.
It is a less extreme version of the key driver behind Donald Trump's rise in the United States, which former Australian ambassador to the US Kim Beazley predicted last year would be on the back of the "deeply disenchanted white working class" fed up with their lot.
And it is exactly the kind of anxiety that reacted badly to Malcolm Turnbull's "most exciting time to be alive" mantra last year and why the Nationals quietly spurned the Prime Minister's over-the-top rhetoric during the federal campaign out bush.
And it's why MPs of both political stripes privately agree with former Queensland premier Campbell Newman that the outcome of the state election and the 2019 federal election will greatly depend on what happens north of Noosa.
North of Noosa in the most decentralised of states is where Pauline Hanson's One Nation is strongest and it is where concerns about the economy, jobs and wages growth are acute and why the politics of Adani's $22 billion Carmichael coal mine in the Galilee Basin cuts across both parties.
So how bad is current wage growth?
At just 1.7 per cent in the 12 months to the March quarter, it is a record low.
This worries both sides of politics, especially the Coalition given it will cop the blame first.
The last time growth was over 2 per cent was when Mr Abbott was PM in 2015.
Five years ago, it was 4 per cent and the slide in wage growth since has accompanied falling support for the two major parties.
What is causing low wage growth has been befuddling the experts for some time.
Look for example at the Reserve Bank's forecasts over the past half-decade.
The black line is the actual wage-price index and the coloured lines are the forecasts, going back to 2011.
You can see how, time and time again, the Reserve Bank forecast a rebound in wage growth and how woefully wrong its forecasts proved to be.
Treasury has taken a similarly rosy view on wage growth and Treasurer Scott Morrison's return to surplus in 2021 was predicated on wage growth more than doubling what it is now to 3.75 per cent within four years.
Realistic? Doesn't look like it.
Dig deeper into wage growth and you see where the political problem lies.
In this graph you can see that whereas 70 per cent of the working population got pay rises of more than 3 per cent in 2009, it is now about 17 per cent.
In 2017, about 48 per cent are getting pay rises of 2-3 per cent, or barely in line with inflation, and just over 30 per cent of workers will receive wage growth of zero to 2 per cent. That is, they are going backwards.
It is on reversing this trend that political fortunes lie but neither side has any solution it seems.
But in this environment you better understand the potential potency in Bill Shorten's pledge to reinstate Sunday penalty rates for the retail, fast food, hospitality and pharmacy awards.
Whoever can solve the wage-growth puzzle will be best-placed to secure government.
Topics: federal-elections, government-and-politics, business-economics-and-finance, elections, australia
First posted