It was a relieved, elated Malcolm Turnbull who celebrated Barnaby Joyce's return to Parliament after the New England byelection earlier this month.
"We're getting the band back together!", the Prime Minister roared at the victory party in Tamworth, a city famous as the nation's home of country music.
The city's musical leanings might have meant that a lot of the party faithful gathered at the Southgate Inn did not notice the more R&B; origins of Turnbull's declaration.
For the source was, of course, the 1980 film The Blues Brothers, the cult story of the chaotic brothers Jake and Elwood who set out on "a mission from God" to save from foreclosure the Catholic orphanage in which they were raised.
They do this by setting out to re-form their band and play some gigs.
We'll presume that, while many members of the Tamworth audience might have missed the full import of the reference, the Prime Minister has enough of a black sense of humour to realise exactly what he was saying.
The film follows Jake and Elwood's odyssey around America collecting old band members, running foul of the American Nazi Party, state troopers, and honky tonk band the Good Ol' Boys, buying their instruments on an IOU, and constantly under assault from an ex-girlfriend who keeps trying to blow them up.
They manage to save the orphanage but get arrested and end up in prison.
After the year that Turnbull has had, the Blues Brothers adventures may have seemed relatively tame. Or maybe he was just ironically reflecting on the wild ride that lies ahead with his party's junior Coalition partner to the next election.
This would not surprise given the more things seem to have gone against the government and the Prime Minister; the more the government seems to have regularly snatched disaster from the jaws of victory, the more the PM seems to have entered some strange zen world of calm which, frankly, some of his colleagues find rather disconcerting.
Some wonder whether, at times, the PM understands exactly how much trouble the government is in. Some speculate that his lack of political acumen actually flows from the zen.
Others say, more kindly, that the approach the PM has taken has probably been for the best given that he and his office were bombarded almost daily by new crises and disasters.
It's not clear whether there is some sort of special soundproofing or other such thing that has kept the Prime Minister's office in Parliament House relatively tranquil. But Turnbull is not the first prime minister to have given off a sense of calm that appears to defy the gravity of the political situation.
Most recently, an image comes to mind of Julia Gillard, sitting in the PM's office very early one Friday morning, well into her prime ministership, impeccably presented from head to toe, completely briefed on all the issues of the day, and calmly setting out her plans for the year ahead. There was absolutely no sign of the unrelenting pressure she had been under since day one of her minority government.
In regard to the present PM, there have been so many disasters, so much static, so many predictions of his demise, that it is sometimes difficult to notice that he is finishing the year more or less where he wanted to.
The issues that have plagued him – particularly internally – have been largely sorted: same-sex marriage and energy are the obvious examples. But it has been a year when most of the budget and policy disasters he inherited from Tony Abbott have also been dealt with.
There is a new schools funding package that stole Labor's clothes and, in David Gonski, the architect of a revamp of schools funding. The midyear budget review bedded down the issue of university funding – no matter how unsatisfactorily that might be from the university sector's perspective – in a way that avoids a showdown with the Senate.
The May budget might feel a long time ago now, but it represented a sea change in the rhetorical and intellectual framework of the way the Coalition approaches government spending that, once again, steals some of Labor's clothes.
There was an interesting two-pronged development of Australia's foreign policy positioning: on the one hand a rather anodyne foreign affairs white paper coupled with a muscled-up statement about foreign interference in Australia's politics and institutions that was clearly aimed at China.
All of this was part of a plan that for months was aiming for a point in time when the government could return the discussion to the economy and the budget, a discussion in which Turnbull plans to play a major role.
Nobody likes to talk about luck in politics (except perhaps Labor frontbencher Andrew Leigh who has written a book about famous examples of the role luck has played in politics), but 2017 finishes with a sense that the balance of political luck of the past couple of years is in a state of flux.
Whatever his missteps, Turnbull has had his share of bad luck in politics – most notably that the citizenship debacle happened to emerge on his watch rather than that of any of his predecessors.
But as the year ends, even the citizenship debacle seemed to be rebounding more on Bill Shorten than Turnbull, with Labor facing the spectre of several of its MPs facing challenges in the High Court and a series of byelections that could see the opposition facing off against the Greens, with the Coalition strategically staying out of the contest, in the first half of next year.
The economy also appears likely to be the government's friend, with the midyear review of the budget revealing the most benign economic conditions in years – and a corresponding improvement in the budget – in 2018.
At the same time, things have been going conspicuously sour for Labor's Bill Shorten.
The year is finishing with the explosion of a story about factional intrigue in his party – and his involvement in it – which plays directly into the government's attacks on him as a factional hack and creature of the union movement.
Political rivals – and the media – will continue to obsess about the path of opinion polls in 2018, particularly as we get closer to the mythical 30 Newspolls mark in around March.
But the reality is that, despite all the disaster and chaos, the polls have finished the year not all that far removed from where they started. The Coalition's primary vote, according to the December 17 Newspoll, was 36 per cent, compared to 35 per cent on February 6. Labor's primary vote has moved from 35 per cent on February 6 to 37 per cent.
It is not always clear why the focus is on the lack of a lift in the government's figures – given that the dominant story this year has been one of Coalition disunity and disarray – when the more likely story, frankly, should have been whether the polls could go even lower.
The low primary votes of both parties point to the entrenching shift in our politics away from the major parties, one that will continue to make politics an uncertain beast in 2018.
The reality of the Coalition maintaining a grip on the next election, however, rests on what it can now do to win back the disaffected voters of Western Australia and Queensland.
Keep that in mind every time the government does anything and it might explain a lot. The big question for 2018 will be whether Bill Shorten becomes the best thing going for the government.
