Kevin Rudd had been installed in the Lodge less than three months before and today, February 13, he will step to the despatch box and make an historic apology to the stolen generations, the good will of a nation urging him on.

Thus began a decade reporting from the hot house on Canberra's Capital Hill (after a panicked phone call to my then-colleague at the Canberra Times, Peter Martin, who helped me slip the lines and enter the building).

But ten years later, as I leave the offices of the

Sydney Morning Herald

and

The Age

in Canberra and move to Jakarta to report on South-East Asia for Fairfax, it's hard not to escape a gloomy conclusion that poses a couple of even gloomier questions: Australia's politicians have (mostly) just squandered a decade. Can the ship of state even be turned around, and is the age of reform over?

Some context.

Since 2010, Australia has had five prime ministers. If the polls are right - and because of compulsory voting in Australia, they are still usually bang on, Bill Shorten will become the sixth PM in this decade and replace Malcolm Turnbull some time during the next 15 months.

Not since the war time years of the 1940s (six PMs) have so many people occupied the nation's top political post in one decade. But that statistic is less reassuring than it looks: Frank Forde (seven days as interim PM after Curtin died)  and Arthur Fadden (41 days after Robert Menzies's unstable coalition fell apart) blow out the averages.

The first decade after federation is a better comparison. It recorded the highest number of PMs (seven) in ten years but again, its not a good comparison: Alfred Deakin served three times in those first ten years, so only five people occupied the post (and then, too, political parties were still forming and re-forming rapidly).

Which means that, if the leadership merry-go-round continues and Shorten takes the keys to the Lodge from Turnbull and becomes the fifth person to occupy the post this decade, Australians by one measure will have endured the most unstable period in Canberra politics since we became a nation.

What began in a moment of national optimism has collapsed into an era of mediocrity.

For ten years an increasingly combative politics - framed by partisan sections of the media, and an increasingly frenzied social media that digests (and I use the word loosely) new policy initiatives and spits out withering, one-sided analysis in four seconds flat - has shaped debate, much for the worse.

The days when, for example, John Howard backed in the big, early economic reforms of the Hawke-Keating age, or when the Business Council of Australia and the Australian Council of Trade Unions could get around a table, look each other in the eye and agree on anything much seem a very long time ago.

But the fish rots from the head.

What we have witnessed has ultimately been the failure of Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, and Malcolm Turnbull to both clearly articulate their vision for the national project and then - crucially - take people with them.

The break point came in the last month of 2009 and first month of 2010 when Abbott, newly installed as opposition leader resolved to oppose Rudd's carbon pollution reduction scheme.

The Greens, more pure than the driven snow, joined the Coalition in voting down the CPRS, for diametrically opposite reasons. To this day, they cannot concede that opposing the CPRS was a mistake.

The result was a first term prime minister cut down, Australia's first female PM handed a minority parliament and no mandate for big reforms, and a green light for Abbott to wreck the joint - which he promptly did, riding a wave of populist opportunism all the way to the Lodge.

But consider the alternative: if the Greens had voted for the CPRS, Rudd would have had a stay of execution - though so poorly did he treat his caucus, his early exit was inevitable - Gillard could have been installed in the Lodge without the millstone of having to resolve and legislate climate policy around her neck, and Australia would have had a price on carbon since 2009.

Gillard - to her credit - launched big reforms in climate policy and the National Disability Insurance Scheme; but she also gave in too much to an ever-shrinking union movement, compromised the elegant simplicity of needs-based school funding in the Gonski plan with side deals, and booby-trapped the budget with unfunded big spending promises.

To this day, climate policy bedevils Australian politics (as Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg have discovered); Abbott successfully repealed the carbon tax - a policy he had taken to the people - but was himself cut down for breaking a slew of pre-election promises, which further eroded voters' trust in Canberra.

Japes such as the knighting of Prince Phillip aside, Abbott failed to prepare the ground for the swinging cuts enumerated in the 2014 budget and paid the ultimate price.

Which brings us to Malcolm Turnbull, who came to power - like Rudd - with sky high popularity and voters hoping the circus would end.

Turnbull, like Rudd, squibbed it; fearful of doing anything that could dent those early approval ratings, he blinked and dumped a proposal to raise the GST, backing up the decision with selectively released Treasury modelling to back up the decision.

His reward was a one-seat majority, a diminished mandate and an increasingly assertive right wing of his party that has damaged his authority. That the Coalition would have lost seats at the 2016 poll by promising to raise the GST is without question, but the result could not have been much worse than a one-seat majority (though Gillard might disagree) and may actually have been better - if you believe voters reward courage.

Indeed, after a decade of deficits and being told the budget is broken, voters may have rewarded Turnbull for bravery.

Which brings us to Shorten.

The current Labor leader gets a pass mark, at best, after five years in the job. Shorten has largely borrowed from the Abbott play book of oppositional politics; his hypocrisy on the company tax cuts he once supported is breath taking; his refusal to support an across-the-board rise in the Medicare levy to pay for the NDIS is base politics at its worst.

He gets a tick, though, for backing his treasury spokesman, Chris Bowen, and backing changes to curb tax breaks for negative gearing and capital gains tax which most major, non-partisan economists have advocated as a salve to increasingly unaffordable house prices.

Indeed Bowen - a man who knows company tax cuts can deliver economic growth and wages dividends - could prove to be the hope of the side for a Shorten Labor government.

No less a person than Martin Parkinson, then the head of the Treasury and now head of Turnbull's Prime Minister and Cabinet - once told your correspondent Bowen had the potential to be a truly great Treasurer, in the style of Keating and Costello.

And if Shorten stumbles, make no mistake: Anthony Albanese, a man who oozes authenticity - that key characteristic the Opposition Leader lacks, and who already enjoys deep support in the caucus  - will be ready to pick up the baton.

On the Coalition side, Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison are the men most likely to lead the Liberal Party, though the accomplished Julie Bishop cannot and should not be discounted if Turnbull stumbles fatally.

The whip-smart Frydenberg - who Liberal MPs jokingly describe as the best press secretary in the government - should also not be discounted as a clean skin future leader.

But here's the rub.

Switching leaders - Barnaby Joyce was the latest victim on Friday afternoon - or changing governments will not, necessarily, "fix" the stalled reform project in federal politics. After more than two decades of uninterrupted growth, Australians have it good.

But to ensure that continues, the era of disposable leaders and "I'm for it, until I'm against it" politics must end.

In one of his final columns for The Age, the late, much-loved Michael Gordon lamented the rise of "blah-blah politics" and predicted "Things, I suspect, will get worse before they get better".

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Micky was right.

After a decade of watching politics up close, the optimism and idealism of that day on February 13, 2008 - framed against the backdrop of a veil of tears in the people's House, as a decades-old symbolic wrong was finally righted - seems farther away than ever.

We have the right to expect more from our political leaders. The nation is crying out for the bold vision of a leader like Hawke or Keating, and for the mettle of a Howard or Costello.

I'll be watching from Jakarta, hoping for things to take a turn for the better.

Over to you, Malcolm, Bill and everyone else.

Thank you for reading.