By ABC's Annabel Crabb Posted March 27, 2012 08:22:47

Photo: How many prime ministers can you fit in a decade? (ABC/AAP)

In Australia, we don't change governments very often. And like teenagers with sheets, we often leave it a shade too long - till things get distinctly whiffy - between changes.

This is a not a column about Queensland, because even though the result there is barely 72 hours old, there is pretty much nothing new I can think of to say about it that hasn't already been said, repeatedly and at length, by the platoons of trained professionals that have been dissecting it in that time. (Also, I can't think of any other words that mean "Armageddon" or "Wipe-out" or "Massacre")

The Bligh government died, messily and mainly by its own hand, after 14 years of Labor government in Queensland. The New South Wales government led by Kristina Keneally died last year ending 16 years of Labor rule. The Howard government, routed in 2007, were pretty ripe by that time. If Labor had been led by someone less unnerving than Mark Latham in 2004, perhaps the end would have been earlier and kinder, just as it might have been for NSW Labor in 2007 if the Liberal leader had been less Speedo-wearing and subtly unpronounceable than Peter Debnam, and for Queensland Labor, had the 2009 state election been contested for the conservatives by a leader who knew exactly which party he was leading, and didn't insist on styling himself "The Borg".

Who knows? It's a crapshoot, just like grandiloquently predicting the death of political parties, of which much has been done in recent days. As the remorselessly sensible Andrew Catsaras reminded in an email yesterday, the death of the ALP was predicted in 1975, in 1996 and after the 2004 election. Last rites for the Liberals, meanwhile, were murmured on a series of occasions, in fact as recently as 2009, when division, forged emails and infighting about climate change did for a couple of Liberal leaders on the trot.

If the Federal Labor Government does bite the dust at next year's election, though - and that still looks to be the most likely result, whether it be because of broken promises or bungling or Bill Ludwig's rather dispiriting contention that men in Queensland just aren't that into sheilas - the ramifications are entirely different.

This is not a snaggle-toothed, elderly government booted into the grave just a bit later than it should have been. This is still, in effect, a new government. Even worse, it is the second new government we've had since 2007. And if Tony Abbott is elected next year, that'll be the third new government. In fact, by the end of the Abbott government's first term, if that's indeed what's going to happen, Australia will have been governed by new governments for the best part of a decade.

Not just any decade, either, in which it might be forgivable to fanny about changing letterhead, but one in which a nation realised that mining booms are not necessarily a source of infinite good fortune, and that serious legwork was required.

New governments are like puppies. Much as one loves them and does not in any way regret one's decision to acquire them, there are always puddles for a bit. These tend to be crimes of overexcitement rather than actual calumny, but puddles they are, nonetheless. New governments rip apart what they've found, and drag their own stuff in off the street. They cancel the vanities of their predecessors, and build their own expensive replacements. All of this is extremely wearing on the soft furnishings.

Having two new prime ministers on the trot is already atypical, in the Australian. Having a third in quick succession would be most unusual.

This is not an argument against Tony Abbott, by the way - a government that loses power has no-one to blame but itself, and if federal Labor cannot prevail next year, then it will be uniquely culpable for a stop-start decade, when what we really needed was a start-start one.

Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer. View her full profile here.

Stop-start decade of political changes - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)