This is how it will probably go.
27 Feb 2012: Gillard defeats Rudd for ALP leadership but Rudd stays around.
Late 2012: Rudd runs again and loses but stubbornly refuses to quit.
Mid-2013: Gillard calls election. Abbott and the Coalition sweep with a massive majority into power. Gillard resigns as leader and from Parliament. The ALP, despite their misgivings, turn to Rudd as leader because they have absolutely nobody else. No other candidate wants the job this early on. Shorten, Combet and others want to bide their time. Rudd becomes the first former PM to lead the opposition since Whitlam.
Mid-to-early 2015: His agenda disrupted by a Senate still dominated by the Greens, Abbott calls a double-dissolution. He defeats Rudd, who finally vanishes from the scene. The Labor leadership goes not to Shorten but someone else (maybe Combet, more likely Bowen or Burke).
2016-2017: Polls are getting very bad for Abbott, whose government has proved incapable of governing well. A hostile Senate, a series of scandals and a PM who prefers campaigning to policy bode very badly and Labor start to be ahead for the first time. There are leadership tensions and Abbott is overthrown a year or so out from the election by Hockey. The government gets a poll bounce from the new leadership. A few months later, panicking Labor powerbrokers install Shorten as the new Labor leader.
2018: Hockey calls an election and loses to Shorten. Liberal leadership goes to one of the “new generation” of post-Howard Liberals.
2020-21: Shorten calls an election and either loses or wins narrowly. By this stage, the prospect of single-term governments has become very standard because the government is always unpopular and the press constantly tell everyone how harsh life is. Massive electoral swings are commonplace, in state and federal elections. Governments are plagued by indecision, so terrified of making the wrong move, and nothing they do increases their standing in the community.
2022: I finally get fed up with the state of Australian politics and emigrate to Zimbabwe.
