The budget will reveal Labor’s level of confidence. Dutton’s already shown us his

There is a political logic to reverting to type: you don’t have to start from scratch, convincing voters of something new. But it has inherent danger, too: that you become cartoonish.

This is a political problem – but with ramifications for substantive, complex issues. “Israel will be able to count on our support again in the United Nations,” pledged Dutton last week. This in the same week as Israel ended the Gaza ceasefire and in one day killed 400 people, 130 of them children. Quite soon, probably, the number of dead in Gaza will reach 50,000. It is one thing to express broad support for a nation, quite another to offer its government a blank cheque. It should be remembered that thousands of Israelis last week protested against Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent actions.

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The nuanced question underlying this – how to treat a long-term relationship with a nation, as distinct from a relationship with the temporary leader of a nation – is raised too by Donald Trump. Last week, Chris Barrie, a former chief of our defence force, amplified concerns he had previously expressed, saying the “vandals in the White House” meant he no longer considered America a reliable ally. It was too early to give up on AUKUS, but our priorities should be “reconsidered”. Which should remind us of the simplistic politics – America good and stable, China not – that drove both Morrison’s AUKUS decision and Labor’s embarrassingly hasty embrace of it. No side is immune from cartoonish thinking.

The other theme in all this is the difficulty of separating what is temporary from what is longer-lasting. If Labor wins, the story of this term will be told through the prism of external events: a global inflation crisis that drove voters away from incumbents and a maniacal US president who drove them back again, perhaps especially if those incumbents were on the left. Shifting strategies might tell us a little about what political parties are thinking, but the reality is that strategy itself often doesn’t matter, outweighed by circumstance. That’s a good reason for governments and oppositions alike to focus less on cartoonish policies and more on complex ones. Let’s see how many of those we get this week.