Received wisdom among election watchers holds that the Australian electorate does not throw out governments when the economy is doing well. When governments changed in 1972, 1983 and 1996, the economy was just coming out of or heading into troubled waters, and this explains the shift. We're a pragmatic, materialist lot on this reading, not much moved by larger questions or principles, so don't get too excited about the prospects for change at this year's election. Commentators, wary of being caught out by events, keep trotting out this generalisation to balance the books on all the things that seem to be going Kevin Rudd's way.

But what about 1949, when Robert Menzies defeated Ben Chifley and the Coalition began its 23-year run in office? There are, I think, intriguing parallels between that election and the one due at the end of the year. First, Labor did not lose because the economy was faltering and people were feeling the pinch. On the contrary, Australians were fully employed rebuilding after the war, and the economy was booming. Inflation was a bit of a problem, but this was not harming people's hip pockets. There were issues aplenty, as there always are: communism, bank nationalisation, petrol rationing, the coal strike. But the general state of the economy was not one of them. So that is a counter-example to the received wisdom of the moment.

Secondly, the election was thought to be very close, too close to call for most observers; and the swing against the government was 5.1% - just about what Labor currently needs to unseat the Coalition.

Thirdly, and perhaps most worrying for John Howard, the election may not have been won by Menzies on the basis of his vision of the future, but lost by Chifley because of the way he handled the immediate past: bank nationalisation, the national coal strike and a currency crisis. This argument is put by David Lee in a 1994 article in the Australian Journal of Political Science, on the basis of a close study of the contemporary polls. Lee argues that the 1949 result was a retrospective judgement on the performance of the government in a few key areas. Facing his fourth election, Howard is standing on his record. And, in the case of his decision to commit Australia to the war in Iraq and his government's industrial-relations reforms, he is standing by it. Neither the disastrous stupidity of our involvement in Iraq nor the unpopularity of WorkChoices will deter his defiant defence.

Howard's WorkChoices legislation has always seemed to me to risk destroying his government, the equivalent of Chifley's decision to nationalise the banks, when ideology overcame good sense and tempted him to extremism. Howard claims that WorkChoices is about the future, guaranteeing the flexibility of Australia's workplaces so that employment and prosperity can grow. But it is also about the past, about defeating a union movement which Howard rails against as if it were the powerful militant force of his youth in the 1950s, rather than the much-diminished movement of today.

Listening to the Liberals' attacks on Labor during the March mud-fest, I was struck by their reliance on two lines of argument which are now almost a century old: that Labor parliamentarians are not really their own men, and that they cannot be trusted with the Treasury. These themes are stand-bys of the anti-labour rhetoric the Liberals developed when they were first confronted by a Labor government, after the 1910 election.