The debate over the debate – now to be held at the National Press Club at the unlikely hour of 6.30 this Sunday – is a neat summation of the gulf between the political classes – who may or may not chatter as well — and ordinary punters.

What the level of political engagement of voters was 50 years ago is hard to know precisely. The perception is people were much more engaged in their politics. For one thing, people joined things like political parties in much bigger numbers. Mass media consumption of newspapers was far higher. And it was a far more ideological era of politics, with significantly different worldviews and policy platforms on offer from both sides, in the context of the Cold War.

Perhaps that disguised a general apathy, but the consensus is that for years now modern voters have been uninterested in politics. They stopped joining political parties, except smaller third-party outfits like the Democrats and the Greens. Trade union membership declined, along with the memberships of many voluntary organisations. Newspapers began their long, slow decline. TV abandoned serious current affairs in favour of tabloid gimcrackery.

But of course, you can’t track the level of political engagement because we use the threat of criminal sanction to make people vote.

Political debates are relatively new in Australia. The first wasn’t until 1984, when Bob Hawke was upstaged by Andrew Peacock at the National Press Club. Beforehand, Richard Carleton, who had a remarkable capacity to identify some wholly pointless aspect of political debate and hammer it, talked about make-up. “When these debates began 24 years ago,” he mugged to the camera, “Richard Nixon refused make-up…” Needless to say, the Hawke-Peacock stoush that followed wasn’t exactly up there with the great moments of US presidential debates. Hawke even refused to have one in 1987, suggesting John Howard debate Paul Keating instead.

When Paul Keating was Prime Minister, there was no problem about getting him to debates – as an underdog, he happily took on John Hewson anywhere, anytime, including a slap-up debate (in fact, almost literally a slap-up debate) on A Current Affair.

Ever since, the debates have been the subject of bickering between the major parties, and all attempts to establish an agreed process for determining the frequency, timing and format of debates have foundered, inevitably because whichever party is in government has declined to play along. This time around, it’s been Labor’s refusal to honour Kevin Rudd’s 2007 commitment to three debates and a proper process to working them out. It was Rudd himself who ditched this promise, not Julia Gillard – earlier this year, the Press Gallery president Phillip Hudson announced that negotiations over the establishment of a bipartisan process for determining election debates had yet again been thwarted, this time by Labor’s refusal to agree to key details.

Complicating matters is the split between the Press Gallery and the National Press Club, which is run by a board of a number mostly composed of Gallery journalists. The Press Club is running the show on Sunday night. At least this time, there’ll be no issues around networks worming the debate, after Brian Loughnane’s puerile and self-defeating insistence that there be no worming in 2007.

The Howard-Rudd debate in 2007 drew 2.5m viewers. But that was a different, much more engaging election campaign, with Rudd expected to end the 11-year long Howard Prime Ministership. The Howard-Latham debate in 2004 drew 1m less, and was blown away by 2004’s Masterchef, Australian Idol. The Beazley-Howard debate in 2001 drew 2.2m. But bear in mind these are multi-network figures, with debates broadcast on at least two and often three FTA networks. Judging by that, viewers simply don’t find them that interesting.

And more to the point, they have no bearing on election results. The only time John Howard was considered to have won a debate was when he went up against a tiring Paul Keating in 1996. Nevertheless, he racked up a none-too-shabby electoral record, especially in 2004 when Mark Latham was generally agreed to have flogged him.

That’s partly because debates are primarily about running the same talking points that the leaders run day-in and day-out. They’re no different to press conferences. There’s no opportunity for a questioner to build pressure on a leader and pull prepared talking points apart as there is in a one-on-one interview, which is still the format that produces the occasional surprise, especially when a bloke as volatile as Tony Abbott is in the hot seat. What you’ll see in debates is the same on-message politician you see the rest of the time.

Debates are a festival for the political class. Journalists, political tragics and politicians obsess over them. The other 99% of the population are essentially indifferent to them, and they’re probably right to be.