When you enter Disneyland, pretty much everything you do is controlled by Disney.

Everything around you, from the smell of fresh popcorn to the cheerful piped music, is designed to lift your mood and change your thinking.

And it works.

The world outside Disneyland does seem to fade away as you realise the only decisions you have to make are whether to enjoy that popcorn or check out the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

It seems to me that there is a similar bubble operating in our corridors of power.

Apparently once you enter a parliamentary building – be it federal or state – your grip on the real world fades away as you are enveloped in a whirl of polling, news grabs and Twitter feeds.

Perhaps it’s the increasingly frenetic pace of the news cycle, or maybe it’s attributable to social media, but never in my professional life can I remember a time when politics has been so dumbed down and so completely and utterly out of touch with the things that matter.

Take this week, while the government and the opposition have been squabbling over the use of the word “jihad” by minister Peter Dutton and pouting about whether Dyson Heydon should or shouldn’t head a royal commission, the stock market has been on a ride that would out-Disney Disneyland.

While the political classes tweet over who said what to whom on Q&A, real people in the real world are hearing that even Australia Post is struggling to find its feet in a world that has been revolutionised – several times over – by the internet.

Globalisation has enabled many companies to move traditional blue-collar manufacturing jobs off-shore and the internet is allowing many service industries to do the same.

Our country is facing massive changes to virtually every aspect of its citizens’ daily lives.

Many, many people are wondering – and worried about – how all these changes are going to affect their lives and job security.

So where’s the leadership of our country?

Where are the people with confidence and vision who can look at the changes and help shape the future?

They’re staring at their smartphones as they get into wars of words on Twitter: Stupid petty little games that will garner them likes, retweets and maybe a grab on the news, but does two-tenths of very little to actually help the country.

Every now and then, we will hear something about our clean green energy future or how Australia is going to lead the world in IT jobs.

It sounds great until you realise that beyond the cute plush toy motherhood statements is exactly diddly-squat.

But how do we burst the cosy political bubble and give this lot the reality check they need?

At some point – and sooner rather than later – politicians in this country are going to have to admit we are on the cusp of massive social change and that a few tweets and smart-alec press releases aren’t enough.

Singing Zippity Doo Dah goes down a treat at Disneyland, but we need to expect more from politicians than empty slogans designed to “win” the daily news cycle, garner tweets and put them ahead in the opinion polls.