Three days after calling the 2013 election, Kevin Rudd unveiled what was supposed to be one of the killer blows of the campaign that had begun just a few weeks after he was returned to the prime ministership in late June.

On August 7, it was announced that former Queensland Premier Peter Beattie would be parachuted in to contest the Brisbane seat of Forde for Labor.

It was a truly cunning plan, in the best Blackadder tradition, to capitalise on Beattie's high recognition factor in the Sunshine State.

Like all such cunning plans, it went spectacularly badly.

Labor suffered a primary swing against it of 3.39 per cent and, with the help of a big vote for the Palmer United Party, the LNP's Bert Van Manen saw the margin with which he held the seat jump from a nail-biting 51.63 per cent to a more comfortable 54.38 per cent.

Reviewing the debacle in his book, Where To From Here, Australia? in 2016, Beattie said he was stunned by the internal warfare in the party.

"Friends who were Gillard supporters or, more accurately, Rudd haters refused to campaign for me in Forde", he wrote.

"It wasn't personal, they just hated Kevin."

Peter Beattie's chances were damaged by internal warfare in the Labor Party. ( AAP: Brendan Esposito )

Morrison tries the parachute trick

It remains a mystery to the rest of us why politicians don't seem to learn lessons from others who have trod their path, particularly those on the other side of politics.

Yet this week, Scott Morrison launched his own cunning plan to win the NSW south coast seat of Gilmore: parachute in the former national president of the Australian Labor Party!

Hoorah! What could possibly go wrong?

Sure, the local members had engaged in a not-so-clandestine campaign to force out their own MP, Ann Sudmalis, last year to replace her with the son of a former Liberal MP.

The Prime Minister's actions were portrayed in part as a righting of this wrong: the removal of a candidate who had been associated with the bullying of Ms Sudmalis.

Gilmore MP Ann Sudmalis was forced out. ( ABC Illawarra: Justin Huntsdale )

And that seemed as good as any explanation proffered about why putting Warren Mundine, who had repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to get Labor to put him up as a candidate over the years, and who doesn't even live in the electorate, was a good idea.

"Well he's been endorsed as a candidate because he brings such incredible life experience of working in regional Australia here and long family connections into the area," Scott Morrison said.

Locals fight back

Unfortunately, local members of the Liberal Party didn't share the Prime Minister's enthusiasm for Mr Mundine's credentials, and were even less impressed by the heavy-handed intervention to put him in the job.

They rang in to local radio stations to say so, and to announce that they would be resigning from the party.

You have to at least say this for the cunning plan: it stopped people talking about Mr Morrison losing one of his most senior female cabinet ministers when Kelly O'Dwyer announced she would not be recontesting.

That move provoked the inevitable return to the Liberals' problem with women. But it also exposed the vulnerability of the Coalition in Victoria, where it is now fighting to hold on to blue-ribbon seats in its heartland and where the party organisation is in a state of meltdown.

Shorten sells 'stability'

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, meanwhile, was back in Bert Van Manen country, starting his nine-day odyssey through Queensland in Forde.

There is some nice symmetry in the fact that Mr Van Manen is once again fighting for his political life, after having held the seat by just 1,062 votes in 2016 with a two-party preferred vote of 50.63 per cent.

He will be up against Labor's Des Hardman, the long-suffering local hospital radiographer who was rudely shunted out of the way for Mr Beattie in 2013, and got so close to winning the seat from Mr Van Manen at the last election.

Bill Shorten (left) with Labor's candidate for Forde Des Hardman in Logan, south of Brisbane. ( AAP: Dan Peled )

The reversals of fortune that these events reflect between 2013 — when we last saw a change of government — and 2019 are quite stunning.

The spectre of high-profile members of the Morrison Government heading for the door reflects what was close to the loss of an entire Labor generation in 2013 who put up the white flag long before polling day.

More significantly, Mr Shorten's message to voters in Queensland this week has been about stability. He told ABC's 7:30:

"One of the things that I've been hearing this summer is people coming up to me and saying 'I'm a lifelong Liberal, I don't agree with everything you're saying, but I'm prepared this time to give you a go because we are sick of instability. It's interesting. Managing the economy in the interests of working people: that's important; tackling climate change: that's important. The cost of living: crucial, and wages; making sure you've got good hospitals and schools. But I also feel an issue that's emerging in this election is just stability."

Keep in mind this is from a man whose public persona was long blighted with the perception he was the face of the faceless men who brought down two Labor prime ministers.

Mr Shorten is now able to make a virtue of the fact he has been party leader for six years; that he leads a publicly solid team with a detailed policy platform, challenging a divided, directionless Coalition for the right to govern the country.

And while Tony Abbott campaigned in 2013 as a "safe pair of hands" amid the Labor instability of the time, he mainly campaigned on the basis that he would undo Labor policy.

Mr Shorten, by contrast, is suggesting that six years in the wilderness has not just proved Labor has learnt its lessons about stability but given it the time to develop a very different, sometimes controversial policy platform.

It's beginning to feel like 2013

The Mundine parachute has come a bit earlier than Mr Beattie's last-minute arrival in a federal election campaign.

But in so many other respects, just two weeks into the political year, and with potentially more than two months until the election campaign proper begins, it's beginning to feel a lot like 2013.

Mr Morrison hasn't emulated Mr Rudd's desperate last-minute pledge to move the navy to Brisbane. But one could speculate that something as harebrained could still turn up.

The best the Prime Minister seemed to be able to do this week was engage in some culture wars about Australia Day and Captain Cook.

And he managed to make a hash even of that when it appeared he was suggesting the illustrious voyager had circumnavigated the continent.

It could be a long few months.

Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.