With an election due no later than May 2019, and possibly much sooner, 2018 promises to be just as fiercely fought. With that in mind, here are some of the issues we will be talking about this year, and all the way through to the next poll. Strap yourself in Australia, it's going to be another long year.

Company and personal tax cuts: Malcolm Turnbull promised this week that he will try to pass the remainder of his company tax cut plan - which will cut the rate to 25 per cent for all businesses, not just small and medium-sized ones - when Parliament returns on Monday. But as Deloitte Access economist Chris Richardson suggests, the plan has very little chance of being passed by a hostile Labor/Greens/crossbench in the Senate.

"The economics are great and the politics is terrible. If you listen to the modellers, the view is pretty consistently that this is a good economic reform and the smartest thing to do - but it ain’t going to happen, as the politics are dire," he says.

That means personal income tax cuts - "the economics are so-so, but the politics are good," Richardson says - will be the main game for the government. Turnbull and co. have dropped hints, but not much more, about personal tax cuts; expect flesh on the bone by the May budget.

National security and foreign interference: The creation of the super-sized Home Affairs portfolio, appointment of Peter Dutton to the ministry, introduction of new foreign interference laws and the ongoing threat presented by radical Islam are just some of the reasons why national security will be front and centre in the 2018 political debate.

Those new foreign interference laws, unveiled at around the same time as former senator Sam Dastyari unceremoniously quit over his activities with a Chinese Communist Party-linked businessman, are designed to strengthen the legal framework that protects our democracy. But a broad coalition of media companies is (reasonably) demanding legal protections for journalists, and the opposition has not yet given its support to the bill.

Citizenship fiasco: Yes, it still isn't over and won't be for a while. Labor's David Feeney fell on his sword on Thursday, becoming the ninth MP to lose his job over dual nationality. A byelection in his seat of Batman is due in about a month.

But after a horror final few months in 2017 that saw it lose a swag of MPs, the Turnbull government has no intention of letting the Labor blood-letting stop there. Queensland Labor MP Susan Lamb, who failed to renounce her British citizenship because of paperwork issues, is the next target; Tasmanian Justine Keay and West Australian Josh Wilson are also in the gun (though the trio argue they have taken all reasonable steps to renounce and are in the clear).

Which means, as ANU political scientist Jill Shepherd predicts, that Labor "who were untouchable on citizenship, are now facing a handful byelections".

Cost of living: Governments and oppositions love to promise they can fix cost of living issues (who remembers Fuel Watch and Grocery Watch?) but the reality is rather different.

The Turnbull government will continue to focus on tackling high energy prices - which the National Energy Guarantee is, in part, supposed to fix - while Bill Shorten made clear this week that high private healthcare costs are in the ALP's sights.

But the details of the Guarantee are yet to be worked out, Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg is yet to strike a deal with the states. As the Grattan Institute's John Daley puts it: "the things that will actually help [reduce power prices] take quite a while. Energy price rises were 10 years in the making, and will be 10 years in the undoing. It won't be fixed by the 2019 election".

30 Newspolls in a row: Malcolm Turnbull's decision to highlight Tony Abbott's 30 lost Newspolls in a row, in the hours before the 2015 challenge, has become a huge problem for the PM. Turnbull has lost 25 in a row and if the trend continues, will clock up 30 in late March or early April.

But does it matter? Turnbull himself admitted regret for saying it. His internal enemies and Labor, too, have used it as a weapon to beat him with. But as the ANU's Sheppard says, there is no obvious successor to Turnbull, "no Keating or Costello in the wings" - a least not yet.

"The only plausible successors aren’t likely to stab him in the back." But as the return of Kevin Rudd in 2013 provided, anything is possible if things continue to go south for the PM. In that scenario, Julie Bishop or Peter Dutton are considered the most likely to take over - but that's a big if.

The issues we should be talking about in 2018:

Fixing flat wage growth: Australians have experienced flat wage growth for years now, and while Treasurer Scott Morrison does mention it from time to time, there is no easy fix to the problem. The personal income tax cuts flagged by the government are one way to ameliorate the problem by putting a little more money in people's pockets, but are hardly a panacea.

However, Deloitte's Richardson predicts that a fix - not of the government's making - may be around the corner.

"To some extent flat wage growth will start to fix itself. The ingredients needed for better wages growth is good jobs growth, which is happening, and good profits. Both of those things suggest there will be growth from here, though it will be slow".

Defence spending and strategy: Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne loves to spruik how much the Turnbull government is spending on new submarines, jets and frigates. But in 2018 and the decade ahead, the twin questions that will confront the Australian defence community are what the rise of China means for our region, and whether we are getting value for money for our defence spend.

As the Australian Defence Association's Neil James says, "Australia does defence spending backwards. We should be working out how bad the world will be, and then work out what we need to spend."

"We should be thinking more about what could happen if things go wrong. Some people are so entranced by China’s economic importance, they forget how and by who it is governed. They don’t respect the rules-based order."

Federal ICAC: After umming and ahhing for years, Bill Shorten finally got off the fence this week and backed the creation of a National Integrity Commission. It was a welcome announcement, and means the Opposition Leader has joined the Greens and the Nick Xenophon Team's position.

The ball is now squarely in Malcolm Turnbull's court, and the PM told Fairfax Media late last year he had not ruled one out.

As the ANU's Sheppard says, the public appetite for tackling these issues is growing. "What we have seen previously in politics is that these issues don’t shift votes – people say they care but then they don’t shift votes. But I think that’s starting to break down and voters are, I think, starting to use their feet on issues like accountability and transparency".

Is Labor moving Left? When Bill Shorten was elevated to the role of Opposition Leader, he was seen as a pragmatic Right faction operative who would be able to work with business. But since then, with the rise of populist politics around the world, and the surprise (almost) success of figures such as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, Shorten has taken a more populist line on a series of issues.

The government rushed to compare Shorten to Corbyn after his press club speech this week; the comparison doesn't quite stack up - the Labor leader is hardly talking about re-nationalising industries. But his opposition to company tax cuts, which he supported in government, is an example of this populist approach. Labor hasn't said yet whether, in government, it would reverse the company tax cuts already put in place; expect to hear more about this in 2018.

Balancing the budget: Remember the budget emergency? So do we. But after the 2014 budget sank like a stone, swingeing cuts to benefits and payments have been replaced in more recent years by more incremental changes.

As Grattan's Daley puts it, "promising tax cuts because you expect the budget to be in balance in a couple of years time is not a responsible thing to do. Projections have proven very rubbery over the last eight years, it's one thing to do it when you are in surplus, it’s another when you are in deficit."

Politicians to watch in 2018:

Peter Dutton: He's the politician the Left loves to hate, but his stocks continued to rise in 2017 and it's a fair bet his upward trajectory will continue in 2018. In the powerful new Home Affairs portfolio, Dutton will have oversight over everything from tackling the problem of returning foreign fighters, to fighting organised crime to immigration and citizenship.

National security will form a big part of the Coalition's re-election pitch and Dutton, a media-friendly minister with a huge platform to speak out on a whole host of issues, will doubtless make regular use of it to burnish the government's - and his own - credentials. The test will be whether Dutton, more of a culture warrior than former Attorney-General George Brandis, for example, can tread a path that appeals to more people than just the Coalition's "base".

Scott Morrison: The Treasurer will deliver his third budget this May - one more than Joe Hockey managed - and the 2018 edition is shaping as a make-or-break test for the Sydney MP. Thus far, Morrison has marked himself out as less of an ideologue than his predecessor - some Coalition supporters are still howling about his changes to tax on superannuation - and more practically-minded. He's hung on to the Triple-A credit rating and, after years of being pushed back, the 2021 return to surplus timetable remains in place.

But figuring out how to cut personal income taxes, while not endangering that return to surplus, will not be easy. And selling the plan to an Australian public grown cynical about governments' ability to influence the economy will be harder still. The Turnbull government's fate at the next election will hinge, in large part, on Morrison's ability to make the case. No pressure, Treasurer.

Richard di Natale: The Greens have, at best, been treading water electorally since the 2010 election; picking up a seat here, losing a seat there, with a primary vote stubbornly stuck in the 10-13 per cent range.

Di Natale is a pragmatist who presents a more moderate face than his predecessor, Christine Milne, and has shown a willingness to (occasionally) strike a deal with the Turnbull government. In 2018, he will be looking to cut through more, outflank Labor on the left but also appeal to a broader cross section of voters. It will be a delicate balancing act. A win in the Batman byelection, which would give the party a second MP in the lower house, would be a big early boost.

Bridget McKenzie: It's a fair bet that few Australians had heard of McKenzie before she was elected deputy Nationals leader in December last year. The Victorian senator's challenge in 2018 is, first of all, to introduce herself to voters and show that she is a safe pair of hands, in the same vein as predecessor Fiona Nash.

That could be easier said than done; McKenzie has shown a sometimes alarming - and charming - ability to go off-script and wing it in broadcast interviews so far. With a little bit more discipline and preparation, she could be a powerful asset for the Nationals heading into the next election.

Anthony Albanese: a veteran politician who still shows all the enthusiasm of a first term MP, Albanese's talent for delivering a cut through line is considerable. His mastery of the infrastructure portfolio - after six years in government and five years in opposition - is under-used by Labor.

In 2018 he will square up to Barnaby Joyce in the portfolio, and you can bet that "Albo" will be looking to land some big hits for Labor on the Deputy PM. And then there is the leadership question: if Bill Shorten stumbles - Labor has a commanding lead in the polls, but Shorten's personal standing is flagging - Albanese will be waiting in the wings.