In 2008, at the Australian zenith of the American custom of rating the first hundred days in power, Kevin Rudd issued a fifty-five-page booklet to mark his new government’s quotidian ton. Inevitably, it proved nothing much at all. Critics said it was both premature and simply validated the critique that Labor under Rudd had ‘hit the ground reviewing’. The Sydney Morning Herald worked out that Rudd had initiated an inquiry every four days, which sounded bad. But after eleven years of John Howard’s government, many things required attention. As Rudd countered, Howard had initiated ‘495 inquiries and reviews in 2005–06 alone’.

Of course, so far out from the next election, these arguments were boutique affairs. A meatier juncture for interim evaluation comes with the first trimester of the three-year parliamentary term, which, for the current forty-seventh parliament, ticked over in May.

Self-evidently, a year encompasses a full cycle of annual events, including international meetings and a federal budget (or even two) in which election promises were either honoured via appropriations, or deep sixed.

The first-year snapshot brings something else of interest. In the Westminster parliamentary tradition, it is a two-for-one birthday, twinned by what we might call the annus frustratus of the freshly spurned. Such is the lot of the ‘shadow’ government that the victor’s year in clover marks a year in Coventry for the vanquished – twelve months in which to reflect, regroup, and, ideally, reposition. Is that what Peter Dutton’s Liberal National Party coalition has been doing – repositioning?

According to the truism, oppositions do not win elections, governments lose them. Generally speaking, this takes more than a year and, historically, more than a term. There has been no single-term federal government since 1932. This underscores the impotence of opposition parties, forced to lie in wait until their time comes. Even when it does, calibrating effort to suit the circumstances requires skill and discipline. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, sometimes an opposition’s best approach is to stand back while a tiring government makes errors of its own accord.