Kelly says Australia once led the world in economic and social reform under Hawke, Keating, Howard and Costello, but that era is gone. He points to stagnant living standards, weak economic reform, substantial budget deficits and community unhappiness as signs that governments and the country are not performing.

He calls Scott Morrison the most significant of the three, given the 2019 election win, which he says only Morrison could have won, and his handling of China's trade coercion and the COVID economic response, which ranked in the OECD's top two. Morrison still lost the politics of COVID.

Kelly argues that beneath his muscular image Abbott was a very humble man with self-doubt, the most humble prime minister since Gough Whitlam. Abbott believed his 2013 win was a joint effort with his chief of staff and that he could only succeed working with her.

Although One Nation polls between 20% and 29%, Pauline Hanson is still rejected across much of urban Australia. Kelly says any alliance gives Labor its campaign script, and a coalition in which One Nation is the major party would mean the end of the Liberal Party.

Kelly credits Albanese with returning stability to the prime ministership after the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd and Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison years, with conspicuous discipline and unity in Labor. But he says the crisis of the system remains, with flatline productivity, falling real wages and high debt and deficits.