Malcolm Turnbull will play the lead role in his own re-make of Mission Impossible in 2017, complete with a cast of villains and traitors and no end of unpredictable subplots.
The storyline is familiar enough – our hero finally gets to put his stamp on the government he leads while keeping the malcontents at bay – though the recent climate change debacle highlights the potential for a very unhappy ending.
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The surprise is that one opportunity for a fresh start looms in the area that, more than any other, Tony Abbott claimed as his own, only to mightily disappoint those who hopes he had lifted.
Abbott called himself the Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs, brought the portfolio into his department, and governed the country from remote Indigenous communities for one week in each of the two years he led the country.
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But his tenure was punctuated by controversies over funding cuts, verbal spats over what he called the "lifestyle choices" of those who choose to live on country, and roadblocks on the road to recognition.
No one was more disappointed than Noel Pearson, who never received a considered response to the reform blueprint he and seven other Indigenous leaders released in March 2015 in response to the call for empowerment made by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody 25 years ago.
So why does the area of public policy that is more fraught, more multi-layered, more fragmented and more associated with failure than any other present as an opportunity for Turnbull?
One possible answer is that the body the Prime Minister inherited from Abbott has the potential to be transformed into one that will drive change and back the good ideas that are already in the marketplace.
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Abbott's Indigenous Advisory Council was appointed in September 2013 with Warren Mundine as its chair, but it has been an amorphous body without clout or a clear purpose.
One achievement was to secure the support of Turnbull and Bill Shorten for the No More campaign against family violence, though that was more the result of lobbying by one member of the council, Josephine Cashman (with Marcia Langton and Charlie King), than any effort by the council itself.
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When the terms of council members expire next month, most are unlikely to be renewed.
The opportunity for Turnbull is to recast the body under a new leader who can match his own optimism with ideas and energy. My tip for the new chair is Dr Chris Sarra, the Aboriginal educator Turnbull approached for advice soon after toppling Abbott.
As Sarra, chairman of the Caboolture-based Stronger, Smarter Institute, told it, Turnbull sought him out at last year's NRL grand final and asked for three things he could do in Indigenous space that would make a difference.
It was too important and complex a question to answer on the spot, Sarra replied, but he promised to come back with a response that Turnbull repeated in Parliament when he tabled the 2016 report on closing the gap in February.
"Firstly, acknowledge, embrace and celebrate the humanity of Indigenous Australians. Secondly, bring us policy approaches that nurture hope and optimism rather than entrench despair. And lastly, do things with us, not to us," he quoted Sarra as saying.
In the same speech, Turnbull promised to take the first step toward implementing the empowered communities model and apply the Sarra formula to the challenge of achieving constitutional recognition.
Since then, the last month's Productivity Commission report on Indigenous disadvantage has revealed progress in health and education outcomes, but the situation is getting worse when it comes to violence, mental health and imprisonment. Much worse.
If evidence of the latter was needed it came on Monday when Dylan Voller, the boy we saw shackled to a chair in a spit hood, painted a horrid picture of institutionalised cruelty in a system hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with those supposedly in its care.
The commission's brief is to identify failures and make recommendations that will minimise the risk of others being failed in the way that Voller and many others were (and are) – in the Northern Territory and other jurisdictions, too. Among them is Miss Dhu, whose death in custody, a WA coroner found on Friday, was preventable.
A beefed-up expert advisory body has the potential to play a big role in driving reforms once the commission hands down its findings next year.
On recognition, Turnbull's challenge is to maximise the prospects of a successful referendum when this is complicated by the lack of consensus about what form recognition should take and by the concurrent push for treaties, including a form of national settlement.
One worry is that those Aboriginal leaders who entered into the process in good faith fear Turnbull will not accept any proposal that extends beyond the most minimalist change. They need reassurance that their work matters.
Another is posed by conservative opinion leaders who argue that any talk of treaty is a step too far that will derail the recognition process.
Turnbull expressed this very concern during the election campaign, but he needs to accept that the treaty horse has left the stable, with the Victorian and South Australian governments taking the first steps down this path and a host of prominent Aboriginal figures, including Sarra, committed to a treaty, even if it takes many years to achieve.
The difficulties of negotiating such a document, or set of documents, were apparent this week at the second treaty forum in Melbourne, where the challenge of connecting with elders and reflecting their aspirations loomed large.
Kutcha Edwards, the singer, songwriter and activist, was left with no illusions about the challenge, but remained optimistic. "You've got to have hope or else my great, great, great-grandchildren are doomed," he told me. "They'll grow up not knowing their connection and not feeling their voice will be heard."
The imperative for Turnbull is to allow the Indigenous consultation process on recognition to run its course, confident that all options for constitutional change will be seriously canvassed before and at a convention at Uluru in April.
One of those options is Pearson's proposal to change the constitution to provide for an Indigenous body that would be consulted on legislation affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Such a body could also play a critical role in progressing treaty negotiations that will require legislative, not constitutional, change in state jurisdictions.
Revamping the body Abbott set up under the leadership of someone he knows well and trusts would be a decisive step in the right direction – and signal that Turnbull is determined to leave his mark on other fronts, too.
Michael Gordon is The Age's political editor.
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