By Mark Kenny

A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.

Ask any ex-prime minister about mistakes or cowardice in their time and you'll get spirited denial.

The very suggestion of fallibility invites long-rehearsed accounts of how media depictions were unfair, colleagues lost their nerve, and officials failed to account for changing circumstances.

Malcolm Turnbull's government began in August 2015 with enormous public relief after the quirky right-wing fantasies of Tony Abbott (slashing health and education, knighting royals, sabotaging marriage equality, climate denialism, 'Bishop-gate' and more).

Yet Turnbull squandered that goodwill by showing little of the reformist purpose for which he was recognised (emissions trading, marriage equality, republicanism) and by drifting for 10 months before holding an election in July 2016.

Years later, when I pressed Turnbull on his abundant caution, election timing was the only area he came close to conceding, but even here, he explained that he had no choice because the Liberal party in 2015 was broke and couldn't mount a campaign.

Caution, not boldness, did Kevin Rudd in, too. He lost the prime ministership in 2010 primarily through his unwillingness to legislate an emissions trading scheme or go to an election if denied by the Senate.

I had these, and many instances like them ringing in my ears last Tuesday as I attended a symposium in the Museum of Australian Democracy on the 50th anniversary of the only joint sitting of Australia's Federal Parliament.

As foregrounded last week, the joint sitting followed a May 1974, double dissolution election called by Gough Whitlam, who at that stage had been in The Lodge for just 18 months - Labor's first breakthrough since 1946.

Against the tremulous incrementalism of today's poll-driven practice, Whitlam's all-or-nothing gamble of putting the government's existence in the hands of voters seems reckless.

Imagine what first-term marginal seat MPs were thinking.

Labor had been in the wilderness for so long that even some within its ranks struggled to conceptualise their party as equipped to govern.

This imagination gap was understandable. Senior public servants had spent their entire careers advising Coalition ministers and had little familiarity with Labor's internal policymaking structures, culture and processes.

And the conservatives themselves? They saw Whitlam as an imposter, his mandate as illegitimate, and their own 1972 defeat as an aberration. This ruling class arrogance would prove their undoing in '74.

As I listened on the green leather benches to brilliant papers and the discussions they provoked, a deeper appreciation formed of Whitlam's intellectual predominance, his constitutional and parliamentary mastery, burning social democratic values, and sheer derring-do.

John Howard's magnanimous observation to Laura Tingle was still fresh from its 7.30 airing the night before: "I don't mind saying that of all the people I've seen in Parliament, he was the best overall parliamentarian I have ever seen in the flesh."

I wondered, would a government be as bold and purposeful now? Could a civilised figure from the institutional centre-ground emerge in the fragmented vitriol of the shouty-belligerent age - an age which views moderate language as weak and promotes division over inclusion?

Would a governing party armed with all the real-time metrics of voter surveys and focus groups, trust the strategic and theatrical judgement of a progressive reformer like Whitlam?

It is often said in defence of subsequent Labor governments more pedestrian ambitions that the big reform achievements and legislative agendas of the Whitlam and Hawke-Keating periods have left less to do. You can only float the dollar, deregulate finance, and scrap trade tariffs once, the argument goes.

But this is a managerialist apologia. The two biggest challenges of the age are democratic decline relative to growing authoritarianism and environmental destruction. Both have complex global drivers but solutions which must begin at the national level. Last week the Irish Taoiseach (PM) Simon Harris flagged intentions to apply financial sanctions and personal liabilities on tech-titans for anti-social and extreme content on their platforms. The EU has embarked on ambitious laws for regulation of digital platforms also.

Addressing this is about imagination, political will. Opportunity and purpose. Where Bob Hawke and Paul Keating built their 13-year brand around economic transformations including universal health insurance and superannuation, the majesty of ambition required to decarbonise Australia's economy could (and should) sit at the very core of everything the Albanese-Chalmers government does.

These call for urgent nation-saving reforms.

And there are countless retail issues on which to muscle up also.

When Parliament returns this week, political financing and gambling reform will be on the agenda. As the Nine papers reported on Saturday, even Howard now wants to see a ban on the scourge of ubiquitous gambling advertising. He joins a raft of both conservative and progressive figures who back the far-sighted work of the late Labor MP Peta Murphy.

With such cross-party agreement, banning all advertising of this gormless and socially destructive industry is a no brainer.

If a Labor government cannot even take the gamble with unpopular gambling ads, what hope tougher structural reform?

Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.