Voters are sceptical about Dutton’s war on the public service. And America’s disembowelment is a cautionary tale | Peter Lewis

As the federal election looms, a flurry of new polls are offering their predictions of who will form the next government. But while all eyes are on the horse race, there is less focus about the actual form the next government will take.

The Guardian Essential Report joins the plethora of polls and models tapping the national mood (spoiler alert: it’s close). But as I’ve argued previously, focusing too intently on future voter intent risks missing the drivers that will actually determine the election.

Beyond the cliches that the election is a referendum on the cost of living and that the major parties are alike on many key issues, there are genuine differences emerging around the scale, ambition and role of government, how it should be funded and by whom.

The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, is drawing inspiration from Elon Musk’s crypto-meme inspired department of government efficiency (or “Doge”) as he scythes the US government with his calculated disruption to the workforce, including encouraging workers to resign and purging any program that sits outside the president’s ideological filter.

Dutton has taken a similar approach with the appointment of referendum-buster Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to a “government efficiency” shadow ministry that is desperately seeking programs to defund and workers to cut.

While the Coalition refuses to give a clear number of positions to go, it has consistently catcalled Labor for creating 36,000 new public-sector jobs in office. This week’s report shows that the Coalition has some work to do to land that proposition.

Australians appear sceptical about wholesale public-sector job cuts, although we found big variations across age and gender. Dutton will try to bluster his way through the campaign with vague promises to preserve “frontline” services but any meaningful intervention to reduce the public-sector headcount will require substantial pain.

Underpinning these policies are three articles of neoliberal faith: that the public sector is inherently inefficient; that cutting jobs won’t have a material impact on citizens’ lives; and that people will vote for a tax cut over anything else.

Add to this Trump’s populist strain that provides extra ballast: the government is not to be trusted because it acts in the interests of elites not you.

Dig beyond the ideology and the idea of painless job cuts begins to unravel: Labor’s alleged jobs spree included thousands of new workers in Centrelink, the NDIA and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, which had been run down to the point of incapacity by the previous government’s hiring freeze.

Of course, these public-sector jobs and government services do not exist in a vacuum: unless we want to move to an entirely user-pays system of essential services, like the US health system (notoriously one of the world’s most expensive and ineffective), they need to be funded by taxes paid by citizens.

At this point the cost of government becomes personal. While most people think the amount of tax being charged for services is about right, they think the distribution is all wrong, with those who have the resources to legally minimise their contributions through complex arrangements such as the use of trusts and other concessions.

This is where the rubber hits the road for progressive representatives: how to make the case to voters that paying tax leads to better collective outcomes in services and infrastructure?

After decades of highly effective neoliberal messaging that tax is some sort of theft from the individual, this is no easy task but one thing is certain: you don’t get there by adopting conservative framing like “relieving the tax burden”.

Rather it starts with articulating the purpose of government and being honest about the resources required to provide people with support and opportunity and be upfront about the choices we need to make to deliver these.

Per Capita’s Community Tax Summit, to be held this week in Melbourne, is an attempt to recast these contradictions, starting with the grown-up proposition that we get the society we are prepared to pay for.

The key question posed by the summit is what kind of country do we want and expect Australia to be? Is it one in which we collectively contribute to ensure that our fellow citizens today, and our children and grandchildren in the future, can live secure, peaceful, safe and productive lives, fulfilling their potential and raising healthy, happy families?

Or is it one in which we abandon the great social gains of the postwar liberal-democratic state and fall back to a basic “survival of the fittest”, individualist mentality that essentially declares that it’s every man for himself?

Per Capita’s Annual Tax Survey finds 60% of people would personally be willing to pay higher taxes for stronger health and aged care systems. This is reinforced by our poll, which finds a majority calling for increased funding on key social policies.

As the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr famously observed: taxes are the price we pay for a civilised society.

While there are legitimate debates about the distribution of who pays, particularly when the tax treatment of wages is so much higher than is that of income from assets, lowering the tax base is actually an argument to dilute the effectiveness and reduce the role of the state.

While the frontrunners in the horse race may appear the same, the good news is the election does provide a stark choice: an economic approach committed to investing in people and delivering long-overdue reforms in energy, housing, education and the care economy; or a winding back of government that leaves citizens subject to the whims of the market.

Taking the axe to government should be an informed choice. With Trump’s America currently disembowelling itself, at least we are getting a glimpse of the costs before we potentially embark on our own cycle of self-flagellation.