Can Angus Taylor rekindle the romance?

The Coalition cannot make up a 13-point gap by nibbling at the centre. There simply are not enough movable votes there. Its missing vote is sitting in plain sight: with One Nation.

But if you can convince just 20 per cent of Hanson's voters to come back, then you are tied around 24 per cent each and back in the game.

As an aside the current state of first preferences is that according to Newspoll the Coalition plus One Nation vote adds up to 49 per cent, but after preferences Newspoll still has Labor on the 55 per cent of the vote it won last election.

So, Hanson is redistributing votes within the anti-Labor bloc but at this stage doesn't actually seem to be adding to them. That is a problem she and Taylor have to overcome. If they both try to run to the exact same place on the ideological spectrum they'll trip over each other and lose the election. They need to expand their support.

At the breakfast Taylor impressively covered a lot of the policies that make voters angry, but that is not going to be enough – Pauline can recite the same grievance list.

It's not policies that have lost the Coalition voters, it's their failure to deliver, and the fracturing of trust that lack of delivery has caused.

They're in the middle of a marriage breakdown. Half of Coalition voters have left.

They've heard all the promises before, they like the sound of them, but they know they will never be delivered. They're still invested in the kids and the house, but they've no trust in the ex.

They've got nothing to lose and maybe everything to gain by having a fling with a new partner.

At this stage the worst thing the ex could do is to slag-off the new partner. Taylor didn't make that mistake, although there were members of his team in the room who have been doing just that.

Which is his central problem. When the Coalition has broken promises it's not that the leaders making them weren't necessarily sincere, but that they didn't have control over delivery, or bargained them away.

The Coalition talks a good game on climate change, but John Howard signed Kyoto. It promised to reform Section 18C and then baulked, then doubled-down in January this year supporting the government's antisemitism bill which extended the criminal law into free speech.