Prime ministers rarely lose elections by bungling a single issue. An obvious benefit of the four-year term is that if you screw up in one area you can atone in another, so the trick is to get your big gaffes out of the way as early as possible. When Scott Morrison became the second-most famous person, after James Cook, who should never have gone to Hawaii, he looked, for a while, no less dead in the water than his peerless Pommy predecessor.