When it comes to mea culpas, they don’t come much stronger than Jim Chalmers’ recent admission

But there is another answer. The government seems to be falling into a malaise in which at least some of its MPs, too, begin to believe polling offers an authoritative answer to the question of whether it is doing a good job. The newspapers are suddenly full of Labor ministers and MPs offering views about each other.

There is nothing wrong with disagreement – in fact, this government hasn’t had enough of it. But disagreement is most useful when it is serious argument over policy and ideology. So far, much of this backgrounding seems to be at the level of political whingeing. Still, senior figures are obviously taking it seriously. On the subject of olive branches, you will not get many stronger mea culpas from senior ministers than Chalmers’ recent admission to this masthead: “I should make more time for my colleagues.”

A type of urgency is building in the media: the sense that Labor must define itself clearly and perhaps even stake out some new direction. That pressure will ramp up after the next rate rise, predicted this week. Is that urgency justified? Again, there are two answers.

The first is that Labor must be wary of jumping at shadows. A sudden swerve would look like panic. And a pivot in the dying weeks of the year is unlikely to succeed, as voters begin to switch off.

The second answer is that Labor must not assume the ship (or bicycle) will right itself, in part because of one significant difference between this term and its first term. It is easy to see this term’s housing tax changes as equivalent to last term’s tax cuts changes: both are about equity, both involved breaking promises, both brought concerns about Labor’s future to the fore.