This is certainly the case with the Morrison government, with a PM that is clearly more interested in the marketing of his government's activities and achievements than the policy substance.

Indeed, sometimes to his ultimate embarrassment, he consciously oversells, only to have it come back to bite him. Moreover, rather than admit the excess, he doubles down.

The mess of the vaccine rollout is a defining recent example. Towards the end of last year he was calling it a "world-leading strategy", claiming to have "tied up" some 160 million doses of a range of vaccines.

The reality is clearly that our rollout is woefully behind many other countries simply because he hadn't ensured supply.

More broadly, Morrison claims that we are a world leader in the management of the virus. This is mostly true, so far, but it can be argued that we are yet to be fully tested.

This will come when we attempt to open our international border, the difficulty and timing of which is being compounded and delayed by the slow vaccine roll out.

One area where our governments have consistently exaggerated their success has been in trade agreements with various countries.

The most recent of these has been the deal with the UK, announced by Morrison and Johnson after the G7.

There has been enormous fanfare, and the sycophantic media has lapped it up, well before any of the detail has been announced - some might say even fully settled.

As background, recall that for decades our priority was for a multilateral reduction of tariffs and other trade and non-trade barrier but, with the failure of the last global Doha round, the strategy switched to the second best, seeking a string of bilateral agreements with major trading countries.

This is second best for several reasons but, most importantly, while such agreements may create new trading opportunities between the two countries involved, they may also divert trade with third countries.

It has also been a feature of such agreements that the claimed benefits can be spread over decades, with the possibility of many "a slip between the cup and the lip" during the agreed implementation period.

China is a case in point. What real advantage has our free trade agreement with China been, as it has subsequently, unilaterally, attacked many of our exports?

When these agreements were announced, and we can count about 15 of them to date, the claimed benefits are always based on some modeling, that (tongue in cheek) surprisingly, supports the government's boast but tends not to stand up to closer scrutiny.

I recall an exercise I did when an FTA with the US was announced back in 2004.

To set the claimed benefits in context, I visited the website of the US trade negotiators, where they also claimed significant benefits - the net benefits seemed to be strongly in favour of the US.

As it has turned out, the US had many significant wins, a major one being in pharmaceuticals, which unleashed significant price increases for many drugs, with the consequence that some had to be dropped from our Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme which subsidises the costs of certain drugs.

With the claimed economic benefits of these FTAs to flow over decades, the assumptions of these models need to be carefully, and objectively, scrutinised.

It also needs to be recognised that the process of implementation will be dynamic not static, such that the relevance of many of these assumptions may change significantly over that time.

A major issue in our trading relationship with the UK has always been its desire to protect its agriculture. It has also set and enforced much tougher animal welfare standards.

As an example, it banned battery-caged eggs in 2017, while we are only committed to a phase down to the mid-2030s. In addition, sow stalls, hormone-fed beef, hot branding, mulesing are all banned or illegal in the UK, but not in Australia. Slaughterhouse CCTV is mandatory in the UK, but not in Australia.

Also, irrespective of what Morrison denies, our position as a global laggard in terms of our response to climate will inevitably see many countries move to impose carbon border tariffs/taxes on our exports.

It is essential to cut through the marketing blurb to get a real measure of the substance of the Morrison government.

John Hewson is a professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU, and a former Liberal opposition leader.