Can the Coalition reclaim government after one term? Stranger things happen – but only rarely.

It is impossible to anticipate the trajectory of Rudd’s mob. The world and its challenges will evolve and shape the government in coming years – as it did the Hawke-Keating and Howard administrations.

But for this government to fall after one term would require two things: an economic meltdown, and political incompetence. Just one of these conditions won’t be enough.

The economic part would be a world recession, or an inflation-induced domestic one. In this situation, it would gross political negligence for the new government not to successfully blame it all on their predecessors.

Treasurer Wayne Swan reckons he doesn’t intend spending much time berating his predecessor, but he surely doesn’t mean it. In the Howard government’s early years, Peter Costello’s $10bn “Beazley black hole” achieved great resonance in voterland, giving many folks a reason to vote for the Coalition in 1998 when their inclination was to toss the miserable rabble out.

Something like that is needed, and Paul Keating’s caricature of a lazy and vain Peter Costello, swinging on a hammock and periodically reading the latest national accounts, is not a bad one. The Howard government was brilliant at short-term politics (the story can go) but incapable of contemplating the country’s future.

The other type of incompetence is run-of-the-mill: ministerial resignations, misleadings of parliament, mis-statements and corrections – that sort of thing. The Howard government’s first term was rather like that, but without a tanking economy.

If, in two years people’s hip-pockets are squeezing, and the Labor government appears incompetent, then the two things will be easily linked.

And what about the opposition? What can they do? As the above scenario is not likely, the Liberals are going to spend the next six or so years being nagged about moving to the centre, standing for something, developing policies (yawn) and preselecting better candidates. Along the way leaders will come and go. It will be a miserable experience.

They’re out of power everywhere around the country, but the Liberals’ time will come, possibly in NSW first, and then other states, and eventually at the federal level. Voters will tire of the Rudd government’s personnel, their ways of speaking and doing things.

Gillard, Shorten and Swan, each believing their time has come, will background friendly journalists and so on. We’ve seen all this before.

In two terms, or three or four, it will be “time” again, and if the Coalition is professional (and appears it), disciplined, united and unthreatening – and not being led by Tony Abbott – those Treasury benches will again be theirs.

But right now that’s a lifetime away.