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Enough of the ugliness of Australian politics. Enough of its madcap silliness, too. But what about the narrowness of Australian politics: the myopia of concentrating so much attention on so small a number of voters in so small a clutch of marginal constituencies?

Twenty seats will determine the outcome of this election - the Liberal-led coalition needs 17 more MPs to command a parliamentary majority. Half of them are in Queensland. Plausibly, if just 12,000 or so voters in these battleground constituencies were to switch allegiance from 2007, opting for the Liberals over Labor, Tony Abbott would win. So in a country where over 14 million are compelled to attend a polling station, just 0.1% of the electorate could ultimately decide the race.

Confessedly, it is the kind of crude, back-of-the-envelope calculation which, though not inaccurate, comes with various caveats - the stuff of a political parlour game. But this kind of electoral arithmetic, along with the reductionism it breeds, drives the political game-plans of both parties. Efforts are trained, almost microscopically, on a tiny cohort of the electorate. And everyday, it feels that this election is all about them. Just monitor which communities the leaders target each day. The pins will all end up in marginals.

From the dominance of focus groups to the elevated importance attached to polls, narrowness prevails. Even the outcome of the great set-piece event of the campaign, the televised debate, is left in the hands of the undecided voters invited by the television networks to determine the trajectory of the fabled worm. In the case of the Nine Network, the whims of about 150 people making split-second decisions impact the campaign for days afterwards. Again, the overall effect is to falsely empower a small sample of wavering voters.

The narrowness breeds minimalist forms of campaigning. A solitary televised debate. One town meeting in Rooty Hill in western Sydney. A short press availability each day. Only a couple of brief, usually choreographed campaign events designed to fabricate an opening montage of shots for the evening news reports. Earlier in the campaign, I followed Tony Abbott on the trail foolishly thinking it would consume a full day. Yet after the Liberal leader visited a maternity ward and held a brief press conference an hour or so afterwards that was pretty much it.

This narrowness has also produced what could be its definitive photo-opportunity: when Julia Gillard boarded a border protection vessel in Darwin harbour to watch a training exercise involving a mock-up of a suspected illegal entry vessel. She was accompanied by David Bradbury, the Labor MP for Lindsay in western Sydney, that marginal of marginals - the Basildon, if you like, of Australian politics.

That same brevity is heard in the rhetoric of the campaign. The mantras repeated ad nauseam. The speeches which appear devoid of any expansive vision, overarching ideas or even a baby-grand narrative. It is a politics in which complicated policy debates, such as border protection, are reduced to short sound-bites which are couched in terms that the key electors not only understand but feel are in their own self- interest.

In state and federal government, the policy-making process is also being compressed by this narrowing of politics. Writing in The Monthly, the former New South Wales Labor government staffer Mark Aarons wrote about how focus groups were "being substituted for political judgment". State premiers were simply told to ditch policies which were unpopular with the public.

Now, at the federal level, we have the apotheosis of this approach. Julia Gillard's plans for a Citizens Assembly on emissions trading, a people's forum 150-strong. The policy is a focus group.

This is a global trend, and hardly new. But arguably its effects are more pronounced in this corner of the political Anglo-sphere.

And the paradox is that this approach disregards one of the central reasons why the Australian governmental model is so widely admired: whether in the de-regulation of the banking sector, a Labor policy, or the introduction of the GST (goods and services tax), a Liberal initiative, it was based on a bold politics which emphasised the national interest.

The wackiness of this campaign has almost defied analogy. It has produced wide-screen entertainment, for sure. But a politics focused on small snapshots of Australia. Perhaps you could call it a battle for Rooty Hill.

POLL WATCH: are still contradictory, and suggest a photo-finish - even, dare I say it, a hung parliament.

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