It became a fairly regular ritual at about 3.30pm most days. “Well, mate, that was another triumph.” It was Laurie Oakes, his voice dripping with sarcasm, delivering another brutal, but indisputable assessment of Labor’s question time tactics.

I was director of communications for Simon Crean at the time, and one excuse might be that for most of that year we were forced to spend as much time planning tactics to battle our own side as we did the government. But the truth is, even when things were going well, we rarely did much better.

Under Crean, question-time tactics were pretty much finalised at an 8am conference of about a dozen senior shadows and staffers. The strategy was locked down at 12:30, with the pack of 10 questions and a few spares emailed around the shadow ministry.

Usually some sort of theme was developed, but frequent attempts by staff to target a minister were undermined by internal party politics. Junior shadow ministers would constantly complain about not being allowed questions, one even threatened to resign if not given a question on some totally pointless issue that day.

Senior shadows would insist that Labor would have no credibility unless we asked questions that very day in their portfolio. Others, judged crucial to shoring up the leadership, would get a whole series of questions that had absolutely no hope of making that day’s news cycle.

To fit them all in, the plan usually was run three or four questions attacking the minister, then tag on the ones required to soothe the internal issues. This would inevitably invite accusations that “Labor had given up” or “the attack failed”. It was then decided that the minor questions would go first, and the attack launched at question three or four so it could be pursued until the end.

This only infuriated journalists, especially those in the electronic media who were counting on the first questions to deliver the grabs they needed for radio bulletins or early TV news. It also raised the question of if the issue was so serious, why had it been kept until the end of question time?

I can only think of a few occasions when question time delivered for us in a big way and we got the tactics dead right.

In 2001 the Liberal whip accidentally faxed to the ALP a series of talking points from Peter Costello’s office to Liberal MPs suggesting they argue that if the government was forced to cut the beer tax, they might have to raise petrol tax.

Although the whip quickly realised what he’d done and retrieved the fax (after it had been copied), somehow, the Prime Minister wasn’t warned before question time. The plan was to ask the PM a couple of questions and get him to rule out a link between petrol tax and beer tax, and then hit him with the memo and it worked a treat, delivering Labor a massive media hit. BEER TAX TRICK screamed the entire front page of the Daily Telegraph.

It’s doubtful a coalition Opposition would ever take advice from a former Labor press secretary but if they did, they might just want to give this a go. Scrap your tactics committee and just hand question time over to the press gallery.

Question time is a stacked deck, where ministers write their own rules and pick the referee. Its sole purpose, as far as Oppositions are concerned, is getting a favourable run in the media.

So, instead of question-time packs, just get your press secretaries to ring senior journos every morning, especially the TV correspondents, and ask them “what question do you want us to ask in question time today? … What questions should we ask that will get us a run in your bulletin?”

What have you got to lose? At the very least, if they chose the questions, it would stop journalists writing those interminable opinion pieces complaining about your question-time tactics.