I should have known better, because there were some signs I had ignored, just as I had ignored them on my two most recent miscalculations or false predictions. In 1993, I thought that John Hewson would defeat Paul Keating, even when I thought, correctly as it turned out, that Keating had had the better of the actual election campaign. Likewise in 2004, when I expected the ghastly Mark Latham to narrowly defeat John Howard. The reason, on both occasions (and last week's one) was that I thought that the relevant government had run out of steam and ideas, and had become all too comfortable with the ministerial cars and entitlements, and was often fumbling badly.

In the case of the Morrison government, that seeming lack of direction and guiding star seemed to be compounded by a long recent history of open disunity, changing leaders, embarrassing incompetence and, sometimes (it seemed to me), abuse of power. Even a generally disengaged electorate gets a sense of this after a while and comes to feel that it is time to change the current set of rascals for another one. This has been generally the Australian way.

There was an additional example, although not where I had been a false prophet. The demise of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government was similar. Whether its intentions were good or bad, it was often a shambles, the more so for the open disunity and an addiction to public relations announcements of no real substance or durability. It also faced the relentless oppositionism of (the late) Tony Abbott and the shock jocks. Before 2013, Julia Gillard, in particular had proven remarkably adept at getting legislation through the parliament, particularly with carbon taxes. But she struggled for authority and respect, in part because of ferocious and unfair assault by her enemies, within and without, and repeatedly stumbled with PR confections that, often, could not survive as policy for a week.

The 1993, 2004 and 2013 elections were all cases where governments seemed to be on the slide primarily because they were not performing as the electorate had a right to expect. Whether opposition had policies and records (and, of course, John Hewson had the mega manifesto of Fightback) would probably not be the issue so much as an adverse judgment on incumbent performance. In 1993 Keating had not really fired up and become the policy dynamo of 1993-96 and Australia was coming, all too slowly and bitterly, from the "recession we had to have".

Keating survived by making John Hewson the issue, and in portraying him as some sort of Dr Frankenstein, "a feral abacus" about to perform bizarre experiments on the Australian economy and people in pursuit of an ideological fixation on the virtues of the market. Some of Keating's closest colleagues (and many in the media) did not believe the government could win, a point that Keating was wont to stress when the electorate turned conservative and elected the devil they knew rather than the uncertainties in prospect. If it was not an assault on the character of Hewson, it was an assault on his experience, his ideology, and his common sense.

John Howard's reputation for reliability and trustworthiness had taken a big hit in 2004 (the opinion polls confirmed this), but the government had also become lazy and was abandoning almost all of the fiscal prudence that had accompanied its first two terms. The opposition had, on a number of occasions, tactically ambushed Howard: the administration was looking tired and dispirited, almost going through the motions.

By 2004, the general reputation of politicians was slipping, not least as a result of deceptions and misleading impressions, such as the 2001 Children Overboard affair and the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Yet when Howard called the election, he audaciously said that the election was about trust: Which party did voters trust in government? He was not talking about credibility, as such. Rather he was arguing that the electorate "knew" him, and knew his character, beliefs, and reflexes on issues of government. By contrast, he argued, the electorate knew very little about the character of Mark Latham, and had no feel for how he would behave in a crisis. They focused hard on issues such as his rudeness, belligerence and aggressiveness. Almost on cue, Latham seemed to give an overbearing handshake of poor Little Johnnie. The election was not about Labor's policies, even if these were routinely attacked as likely to drive up taxes and interest rates: it was about Latham. Labor lost, badly, indeed giving Howard a workable majority in the senate. (One consequence of this was that Howard over-reached with tough industrial relations legislation, which greatly assisted Labor's victory, under Kevin Rudd, in 2007.)

Usually, elections of this type merely postpone electoral execution by a term. In normal circumstances, voters would have pitched the incumbent out, but held back because they had been persuaded to fear the alternative more. Howard's victory in 1996 was the bigger because, as many voters saw it, Labor had avoided its just fate in 1993. Likewise with Howard's fate in 2007: he was never going to be able to win a trustworthiness contest with Rudd in the way he had with Latham.

This time, public opinion polls had indicated that the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government had been on the nose for a long time. Given that it now seems clear that there are ingrained problems with the way that all pollsters are sampling opinion, it is interesting to speculate how long these polls have contained a systemic bias - towards Labor as this case suggests. Was Turnbull wrong in suggesting that Abbott had failed 30 Newspolls in a row? Did Turnbull really fail his 50 or so, bearing in mind that the 2016 result, where Turnbull only barely scarped home, was roughly in line with what the polls were suggesting? Did Morrison at some stage start turning the real state of affairs around - first to equality and then slightly ahead? Were some of the Coalition test runs - say the border protection panic which began before Christmas, or scaremongering about African gang crime in Victoria - more successful in shifting opinion towards the Coalition than they had appeared to be?

There certainly was a systemic problem with the polls, but there were other indications of a government in trouble with the voters. The Wentworth and Longman byelections showed this, however hard Coalition apologists insisted that Wentworth, or Longman, or, later Victoria in its state election, were "not Australia". Polling for state government elections in Western Australia, Victoria and NSW had seemed reasonably close to the mark, and both NSW and Victoria showed some volatility - with in one case a measured late swing towards Labor, and, in the other, a late swing against Labor. The oddest thing about the national polls was the way in which the clock seemed to be stuck.

Morrison's decision to run a narrow campaign focused on taxes and doubts about the character of Shorten may have been the only strategy open to him - or at least the only strategy providing a possible path to victory. Observers had long been saying - albeit mostly on the evidence of the polls - that voters had stopped listening (probably in Turnbull's time) and that the Coalition was doomed. They may not have embraced Shorten or published Labor policies, but they had measured the government and found it wanting. Open fighting over climate change and energy policy, a succession of scandals over water management, banking and finance industry rorts, and Adani all tended to confirm the government was on the skids. Moreover, it was clear that many ministers, and backbenchers, were pessimistic about survival, and there were rats deserting sinking ships, or, in some cases, seeking comfy taxpayer-funded jobs on other islands.

It was commonly said that it was an election for Labor to lose. On the evidence, the government had done more than enough to deserve the boot. Only if the opposition could succeed in making the opposition the issue, or if Labor made a significant stumble during the campaign, or some external event changed everything was there a path to victory. Labor's response to the challenge was a continuing uncommon discipline, and, on the face of it, a cleverly planned and orchestrated program seeming to lead inexorably towards The Lodge.

The sense, in Labor, that it was succeeding was amplified by the complete negativity of the Morrison campaign, the fact that Morrison was running a very one-man campaign (in part because key players were concentrating on their own marginal seats) and one which scarcely concentrated on party or ideology. Morrison was not apologising for, or explaining his own bad record of government. He was simply arguing that Shorten would be worse, particularly with taxes.

Morrison was tightly disciplined and polite, rarely willing to engage on detailed policy argument, other than to insist that voting Labor meant higher taxes, a more uncertain fiscus, and all under the leadership of people who could not be trusted. Meanwhile the wider party ran hard on particular policies put up by the shadow treasurer, Chris Bowen, not least over dividend imputation taxes, labelled, without much Labor resistance, "retirement taxes". Labor was said to threaten "death taxes" on the basis that the ACTU had them on its agenda. Morrison suggested Labor's fiscal sums were fishy (even if they had been independently costed).

Howard added to this: "I detect in the community a lot of growing suspicion that Bill Shorten is after your savings". Labor was pretending that it was only interested in higher taxes for the big end of town. But the real targets were ordinary businessmen.

"They're not the big end of town," Howard said. "I mean, that is an insult to every successful small businessman who has worked hard, accumulated a bit, and wants to leave it to his kids. I mean that's what this country is all about!

"That's what people aspire to do! And this fella Shorten is after those people, and he sneers at them, says, 'You're the big end of town', and his putative treasurer Chris Bowen says if people don't like it, don't vote for us.

"Well I hope that people don't like it and don't vote for it."

Perhaps Labor was not noticing the success of the strategy because it was itself using the services of Newspoll for its private polling. But it was in any event in heavy seas explaining and re-explaining the dividend imputation system and the other taxation measures necessary to fund well thought out policies on child care, cancer care, health and education expenditure, and vocational education. Rounding it all together was a climate change strategy, bolstered by a program of doublespeak on Labor's attitude to the Adani mine. One of the central charges against Shorten - of saying one thing to one audience and the exact opposite to another - was particularly evident on Adani, and, as we now know, particularly fatal in Queensland.

Overall, Morrison persuaded a narrow majority of voters that a Shorten government was more risky, and more likely to result in higher taxes, than a continuation of his government. He himself put forward almost nothing in the way of a program or a vision for the future. His victory - effective reinforcement of the status quo - now gives him enormous authority within the party, and a fairly free hand on policy. His biggest risk is that the National Party reads the result differently, and believes it has a renewed mandate on its approach to coal mining, and, perhaps, water policy.

It was long remarked that the public was suspicious of Shorten, and couldn't much warm to him as a human being. His trade union career, dogged by continual allegations of putting his own political interests and the interest of his union's hierarchy ahead of the welfare of union members - was at the start of the undermining. But there were his treacheries with Rudd, and, later, Gillard, and his role as a factional chief, and suggestions of his sucking up to big businessmen even as he spoke, outside, the language of class warfare. An effective chairman of a shadow cabinet, able to achieve consensus and discipline with caucus, he had problems reaching over them to the public at large. He gave a reasonable stump speech, and his general speechmaking improved greatly in his last campaign. By then, however, impressions may have gelled.

Labor did not fail for having a program, let alone a program that was "too big and complicated". It failed, first, to have a program in which each feature was neatly a part of a grand plan. It failed, too, in selling the program to the public at large. It was not enough to satisfy economic writers, or to answer, respectfully and at great length questions at press conferences. It was a matter of explaining, reexplaining, selling, arguing and starting all over again. As Paul Keating once remarked, it is only when you are sick of hearing your own voice on the subject that you have got to first place in winning the argument.

Shorten is to be succeeded by Anthony Albanese, the people's (if not the caucus's or the party machine's) choice when the leader came up last time around. Albanese has the advantage of being passionate and focused. But he too has his vulnerabilities, including the lack of numbers his own faction has in caucus. With Albanese it's not character which will be in issue, but judgment. Judgment about people - for example his working to secure re-endorsement for Ian Macdonald. And judgment about things: he's wedded to infrastructure spending, which is fair enough, but open to the accusation of never having seen a project he didn't like. He has a strong feel for Labor tradition and history - as did Shorten - but Albanese is better at making his story appear authentic and his crusade urgent. He's good for an argument at the pub, and effective enough, if blunt, in the boardroom. This failed prophet is reserving judgment on him, for fear of jinxing everything.