So when the ''class-war cuts'' hit the Parliament you would think the Coalition would have been right on to it, but in fact, on Wednesday night, with all attention focused on this week's issue - which, in case you have been on holiday in Uzbekistan, was of course The Anniversary - they passed the lower house with barely a murmur. A former Howard government minister, Kevin Andrews, made a speech railing against the ''Labor-Green alliance's anti-family agenda'' but then he sought an amendment that didn't oppose or change the bill but simply tacked on some verbal condemnations, and when that, predictably, failed, the Coalition waved the bill through - not even insisting on a vote. Last year an expected Reserve Bank interest rate rise and a run of record bank profits helped whip up a particularly ferocious flurry of ''banks are bastards'' headlines, with first the Coalition treasury spokesman, Joe Hockey, and then the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, offering competing plans to rein in the power of the dastardly banks. For a few fleeting seconds everyone was an expert on competition in the financial sector and how to enhance it. This week a ban on bank exit fees (the fees borrowers are charged if they want to ''vote with their feet'' and switch the bank with which they take out their mortgage) finally passed the Parliament. The Coalition and the independent senator Nick Xenophon unsuccessfully tried to exempt smaller lenders on the grounds that the move would cement the power of the big four banks rather than increase competition, which was supposed to be the point. But neither the competing arguments, nor the eventual passage of the government's total ban raised more than a murmur, which is strange because the non-bank lenders are supposed to be the major source of competition for the big banks. A recent report showed they currently command a smaller share - and the big banks a bigger share - of the mortgage market than any time in the past 16 years. So it actually matters quite a lot for banking competition to know whether the exit ban helps or hinders the position of the little guys.

In recent years there have also been numerous outbreaks of outrage over ''fat cat'' executives' ''obscene'' rates of pay, particularly during the global financial crisis when their allegedly performance-linked remuneration didn't seem to decline that much even though the value of the shares that make up everyone's retirement savings was falling off a cliff. Initially politicians' responses were rhetorical (Kevin Rudd said some of the pay packages were ''obscene'', Tony Abbott once disapprovingly cited the Gordon Gekko ''greed is good'' motto). Eventually a Productivity Commission inquiry was commissioned, which recommended, among other things, a ''two strikes rule'' which allows shareholders to demand a vote on spilling the board if more than a quarter of votes cast oppose the company's remuneration report at two successive annual meetings. This week, finally, legislation doing just that passed the Parliament. Was it revolutionary? No. The Greens wanted to do something revolutionary, proposing a cap on executive pay at 30 times average wages in the company, but that got little support. But the new rules do give shareholders more power. The reaction was muted. Like exit fees, hating fat cats is also apparently, like, soooo last season. It's also a while ago now - 20 years to be exact - since the issue of Aboriginal deaths in custody was an issue of major national concern. The 1991 royal commission made many recommendations but high on the list was the need to reduce the over-representation of Aborigines in jails. But a House of Representatives report this week found that two decades on, the incarceration rate for indigenous Australians is higher than ever before and that Aborigines made up one quarter of Australian prisoners despite making up only 2.5 per cent of the population. So shocking and depressing were its findings that it got some attention, but not all that much given the overwhelming preoccupation with The Anniversary.

Anniversaries of all kinds are, of course, opportunities for taking stock. And for Labor the political stocktake of the past year is lean. For the Coalition it is richer, at least when judged by the overwhelming lead in the polls. But the significance of anniversaries is really on our minds. They are not usually days when something new and extraordinary happens, which is probably why this week in Parliament was so deeply anti-climactic. Some Liberal staffers took to photographing a cardboard cutout of Kevin Rudd around Canberra to liven things up when the real one would not oblige by saying anything obviously mutinous and Julia Gillard would not oblige by wilting under pressure and offering her resignation. So the one-year assessments are now written and the day is now passed (Rudd was busy in Brissie and Gillard did one quick interview and took off for the state Labor conference in Perth). Perhaps now we can all return to what each side of politics is doing, or is proposing to do, or, wonder of wonders, even return to the issues that were critical last month or last year and look at what they actually have done already.