Reform, while never an easy task, is probably more difficult now than it used to be. Not only is declining trust a problem, belief in governments’ ability and willingness to affect real change is also in decline.

There’s also the tyranny of the election cycle. Often real reform takes much longer than the three-year terms, not to mention assessing whether any given policy decision was effective.

The attitudes of voters are also unpredictable: just ask the prime ministers who proposed the last eight referendums, all of which failed to win popular support.

So what does it take? Australian history shows lasting reform is about building coalitions, managing the stakeholders who can make or break your reforms, and having the somewhat magical ability to read the moment correctly.

Method 1: building it from scratch

First, there’s the hard way: start from first principles. This means reckoning with existential political questions: who do we represent? What vision of Australia do we want to manifest?

From there, you develop policy to fit the vision and communicate it with the public (ideally in a highly compelling way). The party wins in an election and implements the policy in government.

While the policy may be in place, you then have to win the public debate for keeping the policy long term, so your reforms are not immediately repealed when you lose power.

Politics and policy share a love-hate relationship, but we can’t have one without the other. In this six part series, we’re chronicling how policies have shaped Australia’s prime ministers, for better or worse, and what it means for how politicians tackle today’s big challenges.

If you can do all of that, and that’s a big “if”, you can sit back and watch your legacy take shape.

But of course, this method is contingent on a lot of things going very right. This doesn’t happen often and there are only a few arguable........

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