The famous picture of Labor prime minister Ben Chifley admiring the first Holden that featured in recent nostalgic reports about the car’s storied place in post-war Australia is something of a cheat. Poor Ben, the pipe-smoking former railway engineman, didn’t hold on to office for long after his 1948 trip to the GMH factory at Fisherman’s Bend.

Former Prime Minister Ben Chifley introduces Australia's first car, the Holden 48-215, later known as the Holden FX, at Fisherman's Bend in 1948.

Chifley was too much of an activist for Australian voters. He wanted to nationalise the banks and promptly lost the 1949 election to the Liberals led by Robert Menzies. It was really the extraordinarily long Menzies era – he led his government to another six election wins and didn’t surrender the prime ministership until 1966 – that enabled and accompanied Holden’s penetration into the Australian culture.

Menzies’ installation ushered in a new political settlement in which the non-Labor parties confirmed themselves as the default national government. It was not a time of ambitious policy-making or of great social programs. The Menzies government held on to the confidence of the public by not promising to do too much. It existed to keep the country ticking over and at each election successfully dismissed every Labor policy idea as being too costly and too radical.

Is any of this starting to sound familiar? We’re now into the third term of a Coalition government that somehow seems to be establishing its own political settlement, just as Menzies did. It does not aim to be transformative. It does not speak of policy challenges or adventures, as John Howard did when he proposed a GST. More than anything, the Morrison government exists to hold office and maintain the status quo – and that’s all it’s ever sought to do.