If one thing is true for all mainstream political parties, it’s that they will always learn the wrong lessons.

Labor jumped ahead in 2016 with a tax reform policy that included phasing out negative gearing, capital gains tax discount and scrapping franking credits. Those same policies were blamed for the 2019 result, when Bill Shorten lost the “unloseable” election.

Not the failure to respond to a predictable misinformation campaign. Not the failure to communicate what it was that Labor was actually doing, nor an unpopular leader that voters couldn’t connect with.

No, policies were blamed and hastily shelved, never to be attempted again. This is despite the top 10 earning electorates, the ones most likely to have felt the changes, swinging to Labor.

It was the lowest-earning electorates that went to the Coalition. The scare campaign worked so well that some pensioners spent weeks after the 2019 election asking when their franking credits would start being paid.

But the “lesson” from 2019, repeated as nauseam, is that Labor should never try.

We saw a more recent version of it when the government folded on its super reforms. Instead of holding the line on a modest reform affecting only the top earners in Australia, it folded at the first sign of the ole scare machine whirring up.

They’ll tell you that it’s them “listening”. But to who? The same loudest voices they always listen to, which is how we have ended up where we have.

You can see the corporatist Democrats doing exactly the same thing in response to Zohran Mamdani’s historic win and the victories in New Jersey and Virginia. The “it was a vote against Trump, not individual policies” chorus has started to sing already.

Mamdani’s campaign, which was opposed by the Democrat machine, won because it gave those who have lost hope in US hegemony something to hope for.

But you can already see the wrong lessons being taken from these first fledgling signs of a pushback in the US. It’s easy to recognise in Australia, where we have seen these wrong lessons play out for the past 50 years.

This week, the nation’s eye will turn to the 50th anniversary of the Whitlam dismissal and lessons learned since. We know it will never happen again, that we would never allow a foreign power to dismiss our elected head of government.

We know that a lot of Whitlam’s reforms remain; that he crashed or crashed through. And there will be talk of his arrogance, the downfall he could have avoided if he just bent, and the legacy he could have left if he only compromised.

Lost in that analysis, and the lessons not learnt, is that we have his legacy because he didn’t bend. Because he knew that to compromise, to give in, would mean nothing ever changed.

But the lesson learned – and repeated over and over again – is that to be brave, to reform, to push for what is right for those not used to seeing policy work for them is to be punished.

Not that Whitlam couldn’t count on his Labor comrades to defend his reforms. Not that the world was about to be hit with a wave of stagflation that no one had seen before or knew how to handle. Not that the forces mobilising against Whitlam did so motivated by fear of what else he could do, and how that would derail their own neo-liberal theories and projects. Not that, with some bravery, you can push through change and make it stick.

No, the lesson became – don’t try. (Unless you were John Howard – love him or loathe him, the man knew how to use power and be unapologetic about it.)

Our leaders have progressively become more custard; bland, runny, complimentary. Not a stand out.

These lessons get repeated to each and every leader and potential leader – stand up, but not out. Work for the centre, not for all. Slowly, slowly even as people tire of waiting. And when it inevitably ends with people losing faith in politics-as-usual and turning somewhere else, those same people scratch their heads and wonder what went wrong. Don’t people understand that there are rules to this? That there is a book of lessons that they just need to understand a little better?!

The mess that is the Liberal Party is sucking up all the political air at the moment, with the main discussion point whether Sussan Ley loses her leadership before the end of the year, if she refuses to get rid of all mention of net zero, or in February-March, when parliament returns and she’s blamed for the inevitable poll backlash for the mess that led to the party ditching net zero.

But we should be looking at what Labor is turning to custard on. We’ll be hearing a lot of Gough Whitlam’s legacy, of Medicare and the fights he had to change Australia. Of the reforms Labor still proudly presents as its legacy. All of that is easy to write in hindsight, but it doesn’t make it true for now.

The lesson from the last election still hasn’t been learned – the Liberal vote fell so far that Labor won seats it hadn’t even considered possible. But Labor is still looking to the Liberals for approval on policies where it wants the status quo to continue.

Labor almost lost Fremantle, Bean and Franklin to independents, even as the swing was to it. Yet it still won’t address the weakness on its left flank.

Custard goes with a lot, but even the most ardent vanilla lovers start to crave something more substantial. Usually though, that’s a lesson learned only in hindsight – when it’s too late to serve up something different.