Pauline Hanson's One Nation (PHON) has surged in the opinion polls, and rather surprisingly, those poll numbers have held up in the party's actual votes, at least in South Australia, where over 200,000 people put the party first on the ballot at the state election last month.

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PHON is generally typecast as a party of protest, rather than actual policies, and I'd be very surprised if even a quarter of those voters went to the trouble of looking up the party's policies online. Those who did would have found an Issues page with 29 sub-headings - general ones like Education, Immigration, Health and Fisheries, along with specific gripes about Stop the Rorts and Firearm Ownership (and at least six dismissing climate change) - for a total of about 10,000 words.

I could say a lot about these policies, almost universally derogatory, but that's not actually what I'm on about today, which is the difference between issue-by-issue parties and parties of government. Pauline Hanson doesn't really expect to find herself on the Treasury benches any time soon, whatever she says, and so doesn't feel obliged to cobble together an entire range of consistent, detailed, coherent and credible proposals. The Liberals and Labor - the parties that have alternated in power nationally for the past 80-odd years - have a higher bar to meet.

You'd think so, at least. But that doesn't really seem to be true.

If you look up the Liberal Party's policies online you get a page called Our Plan that runs to a mere 380 words of general principles before dropping back to a list of particular issues such as "Securing the Port of Darwin" and "Restoring Funding for Crucial Suicide Research" - important issues, certainly, but directed at specific voter interests rather than setting out broad approaches to national priorities.

If you turn to the Labor Party looking for more clarity on the major challenges of our time you'll be just as disappointed, if not more........

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