I'm posting this image in December, 6 months on from the shot being taken. And my how things have changed. And yet not.

At the time of this shot Tony Abbott (left) was the 28th Prime Minister of Australia. Abbott was an appallingly effective opposition leader. Appallingly effective? Yes. He reduced every issue to a mindless three word slogan. ("Great Big Tax", "Stop The Boats" (on which some asylum seekers were arriving), "Axe The Tax", "Nope, nope, nope" (to a question about whether his office was involved in a rather stupid incident that most people believe that it was in fact involved in.) He probably did this because he regarded the electorate as too stupid to think beyond that. And it's depressing that for large chunks of it he's probably right. His favourite word was "No" and he used the fact that the government didn't control the Senate to obstruct and block the government at every opportunity, and to point score on every bit of bad news.

If you believe that the job of an opposition is to oppose and to get itself into government by bringing down the incumbents then he did a bang-up job. If you believe that all parliamentarians should try to pull together for the good of the country then he was a narcissistic piece of excrement whose sole goal in life was to have the title "Prime Minister" and to impose his own view of what Australia should be on the rest of us whether we like it or not. Having once studied theology he was often dubbed The Mad Monk and was so divisive and extreme that he would have been unelectable had the then government not been so much on the nose.

He ran the government as an autocracy and made so many clangers of decisions that he alienated his own party to the point where a couple of back benchers moved a leadership spill motion a few months before this. There was no challenger, but Abbot got 61 votes for retaining his position, 39 against. Only 22 votes stopped him from losing the leadership to an empty chair. From that point on, he was on notice to improve. And of course his leadership style led to someone playing a riff on the famous Obama "Hope" posters, as we see here.

To the right is his then loyal lieutenant, Joe Hockey, Treasurer extraordinaire. In his first (2014) budget he concocted a document so blatantly unfair, littered with broken promises, full of cuts to payments and support for the most vulnerable in society and devoid of attempts to rein in tax evasion at the top end, that there was no chance at all of it passing the Senate. During the drafting of the budget (that would have seen, for example, people under 30 forced to wait 6 months before being entitled to unemployment benefits - what they were supposed to eat or use for shelter in that period was not specified) Hockey and his sidekick Finance minister were photographed chomping on cigars in a Parliament House courtyard. It was a moment that went so far beyond the "Let them eat cake" incident that if you weren't there, you could not possibly believe it happened. From then on Hockey was almost always portrayed with a cigar.

Hockey famously declared that "the age of entitlement is over", that people were divided into "lifters and leaners" (presumably he learned the three word thing from his boss), that poor people wouldn't be affected by an increase to the fuel excise because "they don't drive very much" (they can always walk to job interviews during the 6 months that they have no income I suppose), and that if people want to own a home in our hyper-inflated property market all they need do is "get a better job".

In September, after yet more gaffes, blunders and autocracy, enough was enough. Abbott's communications minister Malcolm Turnbull launched a challenge against Abbott and blew his leadership away. Joe Hockey went along with it, though rather than continuing to serve the constituency that elected him as a mere backbencher, he opted to retire from politics. Sort of. He was given the sinecure of Ambassador to the United States. It's really easy to get those better jobs to pay for a house when you have a parliamentary pension coupled with an extremely well paid and undemanding diplomatic post that was handed to you on a platter by your Parliamentary colleagues, isn't it Joe? Joe admitted that had he stayed on in Parliament he would have been seeking revenge against those who brought him down. I suppose that he deserves brownie points for honesty, but seriously this is a good reflection of where the man's priorities lay in terms of serving himself versus serving his electorate and the people that he supposedly represented.

Abbott didn't retire, and remains on the backbench. However rather than representing his electorate he seems determined to shoot his mouth off at every opportunity about matters that are no longer part of his purview apparently with some grand delusion that he will be recalled to the Prime Ministership.

In any case, both of these posters relate to a time past as of the time of writing.