A FEW days ago I was discussing the condition of the Turnbull government with someone who has many years of political campaigning experience.
I offered the view that rising numbers of voters would be unhappy with the feeling that the government seemed to be faffing about well into its third year.
He accused me of understatement. 
"It's not just these past couple of years. It goes back much further than that, past Abbott and Turnbull, on to Rudd and Gillard - the lot of them," this veteran of many election campaigns said. "It's like they all haven't been able to get it right and that wears people down." If that analysis is right, that's nine years of squandered opportunity leading to a long, steady erosion of public faith in our political system. Here in Australia we quite rightly feel very good about our achievements and the way we've managed to get through most of our big challenges.
When we look across at America and compare its refusal to do anything meaningful about its problem with gun violence with the way we took action immediately after Port Arthur in 1996, it's hard not to feel smug.
Ditto our national health scheme. On healthcare American society seems incapable of organising the basics for an advanced, prosperous society.
And as we gaze across the Pacific and observe its presidential race, that feeling of mild superiority takes hold once more.
Donald Trump's campaign for the Republican nomination grows stronger with every day. Trump has blown away the other candidates because he is completely unmediated. He attacks the Pope. He says Mexicans are drug dealers and rapists and he'll build a wall on the US border to keep them out - and then send the bill to the Mexican government.
Trump is rich enough to be able to fund his own campaign. He doesn't have to rely on corporations for donations. There's been no need to do deals with special interests in order to keep campaigning. So he can - and does - say whatever comes into his head without having to worry about who he's offending.
That's why his support among Republicans has been growing. He says what a lot of them think - keep the world out, make America great again. They resent America's direction and Trump gives voice to that resentment.
Trump's campaign has been aided by his rivals. Marco Rubio is inexperienced and programmed. Ted Cruz comes across as weird and unreachable. A writer with Rolling Stone had this to say about Cruz's face: "It looks like someone sewed pieces of a waterlogged Reagan mask together at gunpoint." Trump is now starting to run against his own party. He thinks nothing of attacking the Bushes, for example. Trump started the name-calling and the others are joining in. Rubio has decided to try to out-Trump Trump, deriding him as a first-rate con artist who would turn America into a casino, and "the guy with the worst spray tan in America" who "should sue whoever did that to his face".
ON the Democrats' side, Hillary Clinton's on her way but there's little apparent enthusiasm. A lifetime political insider promises to run the country as a political insider would.
This is the best the political system of this fascinating, powerful nation can produce - uninspiring or scary presidential candidates, legislative gridlock, an incapacity to confront and solve some obvious, fundamental policy challenges.
Australian politics isn't as bad as that - yet. But is it just a matter of time? We should be worried about how long we've been in a holding pattern. Australian politics has been as much about reversing as going forward. After John Howard came up with WorkChoices, voters elected an ALP government on the basis that it would kill that policy. Then the ALP ditched Kevin Rudd, after which voters denied both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott a majority.
Labor subsequently chucked Gillard and reinstated Rudd. Then the voters elected Abbott, on a promise of killing Labor's mining and carbon taxes. Last year the Liberals dumped Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull is still working out how to operate the gearbox.
People want their politicians to be genuine. Australians don't necessarily want a Trump but they do crave truth and authenticity. Going back over the past 50 years, Australia has seen outbreak parties formed in reaction to events or grievances. They haven't lasted long. In the 1960s, some Liberals broke away in protest at the Vietnam War and created the Australia Party.
In the 1970s that party merged with the Australian Democrats, which was itself a bunch of former Liberals who broke away over the blocking of supply that led to the 1975 constitutional crisis and the Whitlam dismissal.
Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party flickered briefly in the late 1990s. The Palmer United Party, a Trump-style outfit headed by a billionaire populist, had one good election, in 2013, and is already, for all intents and purposes, in palliative care.
Australia, unlike the US, has compulsory voting so our politicians haven't traditionally needed to dial up the crazy to get attention and support.
But if our established parties can't demonstrate that they can organise themselves and tackle the big policy challenges honestly, get ready because the crazies are going to look a whole lot more appealing to greater numbers of voters.Shaun Carney is a Herald Sun columnist and adjunct associate Professor of Politics at Monash University