Most political analysis in Australia is of a personal and short-term nature.
That is why so much discussion about the 2004 federal election result has concentrated on factors such as the qualities of party leaders, the details of their policies and the content of their advertising.
But John Howard's win was the product of more than manoeuvres during the course of a six-week campaign. More than luck was required to gain four successive victories over eight years, each accomplished under quite different circumstances.
Similarly, mere good fortune cannot explain the electoral dominance of the Liberal Party federally, where it has won 16 of the 24 general elections since 1945.
It is more than a coincidence that three of this country's four longest-serving prime ministers have been Liberal. Nor is the ascendancy of the non-Labor parties only a postwar phenomenon. Two of the long-serving prime ministers who held office before 1945, Joseph Lyons and Stanley Bruce, were from the Liberal Party's direct predecessors, while a third, Billy Hughes, spent most of his time in power leading a non-labor coalition.
The political skills of individual prime ministers can only partly explain the Liberal achievement. While some might be reluctant to admit it, the political philosophy of the Liberal Party, a combination of conservatism and liberalism, is central to the party's triumphs.
This truth is ignored because it reveals Australians to be more sympathetic to the ideals of the Liberal Party than to those of the Labor Party something that is obviously deeply unpalatable to Labor.
The most successful and the most popular Labor government in history was led by Bob Hawke, and his government put in place a Liberal-inspired agenda.
The two men who best understood and communicated the Liberal Party's philosophy, Robert Menzies and Howard, have been their party's most successful leaders.
Conservatism is a doctrine that emphasises the practical over the theoretical and rejects change that is unnecessary or dramatic. Liberalism stresses property rights, favours the individual and the family over the collective, encourages private choice, and in some circumstances tolerates government intervention in the economy.
Menzies' legacy is more than the economic prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s. He made it legitimate for Australians to want to aspire to home ownership and to advance themselves and their families.
These attitudes are now such a commonplace that they are taken for granted, even by Labor leader Mark Latham, but this was not always true. During the 1940s a prominent Labor member of parliament famously argued against home ownership when he said that government should not attempt to make "workers into little capitalists" because then "they would have a vested interest in the continuance of capitalism".
There is widespread agreement that the economic credentials of the parties played a significant role in determining this election, as indeed they have done in practically every Australian election since Federation. Voter concerns over unemployment in the 1950s, inflation in the 1970s and interest rates in the 1990s were all manifestations of a preoccupation with the economic wellbeing of individuals.
Issues about economic wellbeing are grounded in liberalism, for at their core they are questions about the condition of the individual's material property.
Our trait of so-called "egalitarianism" is an extension of this liberalism because it embraces the idea of equal opportunities for individuals, regardless of their status or wealth. A society of equal opportunities is not a society of equal outcomes a point often forgotten by the political left.
Despite the best efforts of some members of the Labor Party to portray it as such, our political history is not about entrenched social division and class warfare. Instead, it is the story of ongoing tension between liberalism and conservatism.
The Liberal Party, which self-consciously regards itself as the custodian of these traditions, has reaped the electoral benefits of its position.
Howard's 1996 campaign slogan, "For all of us", summed up both his rejection of special-interest politics and offered a vision of a united nation, following in the rhetoric of Menzies and then Hawke.
The Labor Party, by defining itself against things to which it is opposed, has developed a strong identity but it has come at the price of losing touch with the electorate. The party's romantic tilts at massive social transformation such as Ben Chifley's bank nationalisation scheme, Gough Whitlam's frolics and Paul Keating's republic, all failed.
Attempts at radical change from the right likewise succumbed to the conservatism of the community, for example John Hewson's Fightback.
Australians will tolerate change but it must be either gradual or required by necessity.
In the course of three decades of public life, Howard has shown himself to be sensitive to this realisation.
The question to be faced those urging Howard to undertake a radical reform agenda now that the Senate's obstruction has been removed, is whether either of these two conditions for change are satisfied.
As yet, it is impossible to know.
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