While Australia may not be holding a presidential election, the leaders of the major parties carry the disproportionate burden of personifying the contest: they are the human pub test.

The “pub test” may appear a somewhat redundant measure given how few of us actually convene over a cold one to ruminate about the world at the end of the day any more. We are either at the gym or scrolling through our streams or doing both at the same time.

But much as common law has its man on the Clapham omnibus, the pub test remains our default jury of political commonsense, invoked to determine whether a perk is reasonable, whether a policy makes sense and whether the bloke in charge is fair dinkum.

Elections have been won and lost on these crude assessments that work to shortcut the ideological and policy contests into a user-friendly binary: think Beazley’s ticker, Latham’s inexperience, Morrison’s artifice.

This election cycle Peter Dutton has been at pains to define the pub test through the prism of his strength and Albanese’s weakness. The election had barely been called and there he was, downing a XXXX and accusing Albo of being “weak as water” while his opponent supped on a non-alcoholic ginger beer just a few suburbs away.

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