Maybe leaders should just stop doing outdoor television interviews on the eve of an election. Remember Julia Gillard's "no carbon tax" declaration, standing in front of the Brisbane skyline? Sorry, of course you do. It's astonishing how much it resembles Tony Abbott's albatross. Abbott is standing in a stadium, as befits his relative sportiness, but this aside it's just about a perfect match. Each has given the most perfectly destructive grab: a crisp, unequivocal statement that promises in less than 10 seconds exactly the opposite of what they would come to do once the election was over. This week's focus has been on cuts to public broadcasting, but it's the sheer breadth of Abbott's promises – almost all of which are now violated – that makes it so compelling. You'd think you could at least stumble or ramble a bit to draw out the clip and make it a little less usable. But no. By election eve you've learned your lines. It's only afterwards, apparently, that you forget them.

This stuff can really hurt, as Gillard so brutally discovered. Abbott's case is perhaps a little less dire. His broken promises don't directly raise the cost of living, and so don't quite lend themselves to a carbon-tax-sized scare campaign. He doesn't lead a party desperate to tear itself apart to the point of being unelectable. He faces an Opposition Leader not remotely as effective as Abbott was himself. But Abbott has other problems that mean his broken promises operate more as a garnish. They don't need to be the whole catastrophe because they sit atop something more substantial. You see, the Abbott government is now in trouble. Really quite serious trouble. Trouble from which it will take a special effort to emerge.

The hyperventilating about Abbott being a one-term Prime Minister has always struck me as the wishful thinking of those already implacably opposed to him, oblivious to the lessons of political history. Changes of government are rare and one-term governments almost mythical. But as I write this on the eve of an election that looks set to terminate a one-term government in Victoria, in which Victorian Liberals are describing Abbott's influence as poison, it is clear that political history is changing.

Governments run their course quickly these days. Even the previous Labor era felt like two one-term governments, each of which ran aground at the first available poll. Last year we had three Prime Ministers, the Northern Territory had two Chief Ministers and Victoria had two Premiers. This year, New South Wales has done the same. Not one of these discarded leaders had been in the job for a complete electoral term. It's now possible Abbott might be the same.