By Mark Kenny

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

The ominous question hanging over the May 2025 election is, will Anthony Albanese make history of the wrong kind by becoming a oncer?

The polls have pointed to this dark possibility for more than a year, with experts citing the high cost of living, the housing crisis, the PM's loss of confidence after the Voice rejection and poor approval ratings.

This "oncer" question feels all the more dramatic for its statistical rarity - there having been no one-term federal governments since James Scullin's Labor operation 1929-31.

But what if another way to look at this historical factoid is on its flipside?

Since the inter-war years, no freshly defeated government has managed to return to office at the following election. Hence, there have been no one-term oppositions in nearly 100 years either.

While obvious when you think about it, this perspective highlights something instructive.

That despite the multiple disappointments which routinely characterise a new government, voters have been reluctant - to the point of stubbornness - to go back to the crowd they had sent packing just three short years before.

Perhaps this simply proves the adage that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. In other words, we electors don't so much actively install a new government as we do actively dismiss an old one - ie one deemed to have passed its use-by date.

One thinks of the philosopher Karl Popper's almost pedestrian characterisation of democracy's defining virtue as allowing citizens to "get rid of their rulers without bloodshed".

Or Churchill's famous observation that "democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

The Australian experience - at least federally - suggests that this imperative to get "rid of" comes freighted with an expectation to stay rid of, at least for a reasonable time.

Thus, a first-term government's underperformance or even disarray, plays second fiddle to lingering voter umbrage directed at the last mob.

Even when Julia Gillard seized the prime ministership from Kevin Rudd in 2010 in a caucus coup nobody saw coming, the electorate stopped short of re-embracing the former governing party.

Gillard said a good government had lost its way but as far as voters were concerned, a divided government had, bizarrely, just voted no- confidence in itself.

The election held shortly after reflected this political ennui by delivering up the first minority parliament since 1940. At 72-all, neither side had a majority.

Electors seemed to be withdrawing their permission for Labor to govern while specifically not transferring that approval back to the side they'd so recently, and emphatically, rejected.

Yet Gillard was able to helm a minority government that was surprisingly stable despite her numerical precarity.

Against all predictions, it passed more bills than any parliament before or since. It also ran full term, surviving ferocious pressure from the opposition and media.

Only then, at Labor's bid for a third term, was it comprehensively dispatched.

Peter Dutton's hopes of breaking this one-term glass barrier rely on somehow getting voters to forget the cloying conservatism, broken promises and internal bastardry of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison succession. This was a journey into the heart of snarkness in which he was a central player.

If rehabilitation of a first-term opposition is the real barrier, Dutton will be hoping that memories of the Coalition's greatest hits have faded leaving bushfires and climate wars, ministerial scandals, robodebt, and China-baiting behind.

Perhaps, now that we get our news and opinion not from a tap but from a fire hydrant, this is more possible.

It does, after all, feel like a very different world.

The tsunami of information and disinformation flooding our screens means there is a fighting chance that voters will have forgotten the outrage that brought Scott Morrison's ouster.

But the Coalition's failure to capitalise on the Rudd-Gillard leadership showdown points to another prerequisite for an early recall to the treasury benches: an opposition's basic readiness for office.

In just one term, the Liberal Party had already cycled through two leaders - Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull - and by 2010 was onto its third, Tony Abbott. So, however divided Gillard's team appeared, the opposition looked hardly more disciplined.

Dutton's signature achievement, given this history, has been the unity of his opposition team. But that oneness has come at the expense of staring down the Nationals, and at the expense of keeping poor performers in the weakest shadow cabinet in recent memory.

On the eve of an election, there's a scarcity of settled policy.

Vagueness surrounds spending cuts worth $24 billion, lowered migration intakes, tax reform, divestiture powers on supermarkets and insurers, nuclear power, and a crazy-brave referendum on citizenship-stripping powers for criminals.

And what about foreign policy? Recall Dutton's words in 2021 regarding Taiwan. "It would be inconceivable that we wouldn't support the US in an action if the US chose to take that action," he told The Australian.

In light of the Trump wildcard, where does he stand on such fundamental matters of sovereignty and security?

Accepting that policy is not Dutton's long suit, his primary task is leading a team of shadow ministers ready and raring to govern.

Yet beyond his harsh invective, there is little evidence of either policy purpose or detailed spadework.

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