For months, political commentators have occasionally wondered whether voters had stopped listening to Malcolm Turnbull, trapping his government in a polling Phantom Zone from which there could never be any escape. As each Newspoll ticks by showing the same gap between the parties and the same views about Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten, it’s hard to avoid the sense that voters have stopped listening to pretty much everything coming from the major parties.

Today’s Newspoll shows, in essence, no shift at all in the electorate — whatever changes there are are within the margin of error, so the increase in Labor’s two-party preferred lead to 8 points is more likely statistical noise than anything you can retrofit a narrative too. Voters remain decidedly underwhelmed with both Turnbull and Shorten. But the government was supposed to have begun its fightback since the last Newspoll, to have gotten Labor’s measure in Parliament with its “Blackout Bill” stuff on electricity, to have sent Labor MPs back home from Canberra despondent at how well Malcolm Turnbull was now performing. Well, all for nought, to the extent any of that was ever true. Tony Abbott’s spoiling tactics are blamed — carefully timed interventions to put the government’s divisions on display ahead of Newspoll. But voters already know that Abbott wants to destroy Turnbull. They’ve seen this film before. No intervention by Abbott would make the government appear any more divided than voters know it already is.

What if Abbott isn’t to blame, but Turnbull’s tactics? One part of the government’s efforts to turn its fortunes around have been straight from the John Howard playbook: appeal to the base (by talking up coal) while focusing attention on Labor, however little Bill Shorten may have to do with the energy crisis currently gripping the east coast. The other part has been something Howard never would have done — an FM radio assault in order to soften Turnbull’s image. The transcripts being issued by the PMO in recent weeks have been replete with interlocutors such as Dave, Sam, Ash, Fitzy, Wippa, Hamish, Andy, Jodi, Soda (sic), Hughsie, Stav, Matty, Abby, Jonesy and Amanda. As entertaining as these turns with the denizens of FM have been in contrast to the dull earnestness of traditional news and current affairs, they appear to have done nothing to improve the PM’s image in the eyes of the electorate.

Worse, the attempt to focus on Bill Shorten as the author of all our electricity misfortunes has been a cover for the fact that the government doesn’t have an energy policy because its backbench won’t let it have one that doesn’t involving materially lifting carbon emissions from our energy sector despite our commitment to lower emissions over the coming 12 years. John Howard rarely had the challenge of trying to distract from his own internal problems; he could blame Labor from a clear policy position. Turnbull’s tactic has been to constantly accuse Labor of being strong adherents of the “ideological” position of supporting renewables, while disguising his own failure to produce a policy under catchphrases like “economics and engineering”, “pragmatic and objective” and “technology agnostic”. Turnbull’s agnosticism looks a lot like someone too scared to say what they really believe.

This tactic on electricity was supposed to be a masterstroke by Turnbull. Perhaps it will become one, in the fullness of time. But at the moment it looks like he’s accusing Labor of ideologically supporting something voters like — renewables — while he’s unable to say what he believes in. Maybe a few more chats with the brekky crew will fix it.