It's routine to cast the Menzies years as a sleepy, wasted age where nothing much happened. But Robert Menzies knew something of political courage.
Emerging from the shadow of the war, he decided to press hard to re-establish trade with Japan, and use the authority of his office to talk the Australian people out of their visceral hatred of a recent, brutal foe.
Former Labor trade minister John Button recognised this was no small feat in his first book Flying the Kite.
"In the early 1950s prime minister Menzies invited a small delegation of Japanese industrialists to Australia. It was, in the post-war political climate, a courageous and prescient invitation. The delegation included Eishiro Saito of Nippon Steel, who subsequently became one of the icons of Japanese industry.
"In 1991 Saito told me about this visit. He regarded it as a seminal point in the relationship between Australia and Japan. And indeed it was. It was the starting point from which Australian exports to Japan of coal, iron ore and other mineral resources began a steady climb to the point where Japan became our largest trading partner."
Think about the context. In the wake of the Pacific War, Australians loathed the Japanese, a feeling that lingered even when I was at primary school in the 1960s. And some members of the Menzies government, like Sir Alexander Downer, had been prisoners of war.
Menzies supported the 1952 peace treaty with Japan and re-established the embassies in Canberra and Tokyo. He used a 1953 radio address to the nation to argue that Australia needed to move on from the war. In July 1957 his trade minister signed an agreement on commerce with Japan, ending discrimination against Japanese imports. In the same year Menzies visited Tokyo and hosted his counterpart Nobusuke Kishi here. And Australians knew something of Kishi - he co-signed the declaration of war against the United States in 1941 and had been held as a war criminal until 1948.
Faced with a daunting task, Menzies decided to shape public opinion, not be driven by it. Re-establishing the relationship with Japan was the work of years, carried out in the face of strident opposition. Public opinion was wrong, Menzies was right and the world is a better place because he persisted.
Could it be done today by either side of politics? How would those who divine the polls and huddle with focus groups advise a modern leader? And who today is trying to lead rather than follow?
Testing the waters inside Labor on two recent policy reversals reveals two camps: cheerleaders and the vaguely appalled.
Some say they have sustained little electoral damage from toughening the stance on asylum seekers and shelving emissions trading. They say any hurt has been done on the left and most votes lost to the Greens will return through preferences.
One said the about-face on emissions trading had done no damage at all. The public would recognise Labor had tried for two years to get its policy up and had been thwarted by the Coalition and the Greens. The argument that Labor could have an emissions trading scheme this year, if it called a double dissolution election, was one for the chatterati. Real people didn't know what that was, and didn't care.
Another thought the emissions trading climb-down was only tricky because the language used to sell the need for action on climate change had been "over-hyped". It was a short-term problem.
Then there are those who rate their response to the policy U-turns from "disillusioned" to "outraged". They were more focused on long-term damage to the Labor brand. One MP wondered how his party differed from the Coalition.
"Why are we involved?" he said.
A lot of anger was focused at the party's NSW right wing, which is seen as the workshop where this "cynical brand of politics" is fashioned. One derided the over-used tool of "inoculating" against criticism because it didn't comprehend that masking short-term illnesses could lead to a breakdown.
"Look at Bob Carr," one said. "He was master of the daily news cycle and his government was a disaster."
There was an old-world notion in the ranks of the disillusioned that words should count. They believed that you can't stump the country claiming climate change is the "greatest moral challenge" of our age and then fold your tent when the weather turns. If you really believed what you said - that the future was at stake - then the only honourable path was to risk an election on it. And they believe Labor would win that election.
The conversations focused on values, leadership and character and it reminded me of a moment from the last campaign.
When Kevin Rudd took on John Howard in the only leaders debate of the 2007 election, Mr Rudd was still a largely unknown quantity.
So it wasn't surprising he was asked this question:
"Mr Rudd, your troop withdrawals are heavily qualified. And, on other issues, your party labelled the Medicare safety net a sham, and then supported it.
"You said the Commonwealth land release was a marginal issue in making housing more affordable and then you adopted it. You oppose capital punishment always and everywhere, except when it's inconvenient.
"You often accuse the prime minister of doing anything and saying anything to get elected.
"What do you actually believe in, Kevin Rudd? What won't you qualify or jettison to get elected?"
In the minds of some of his own, that question has now been answered.
