Scott Morrison is a man under pressure.

The country he leads is fed up and tired after a summer surge of COVID-19 that has robbed many of the break they were desperate for after another gruelling year living in a deadly pandemic.

Voters, if the polls are to be believed, blame him and his government for the struggles they're contending with — from rising petrol prices to regularly stripped supermarket shelves and battles to find rapid antigen tests.

Irrespective of how much he is ultimately responsible for, he's starting the political year having to take his medicine for the state of the nation. 

The Prime Minister, like Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese a week earlier, sought a political reset in addressing the National Press Club on Tuesday afternoon.

He came with contrition but as Elton John famously offered, sorry seems to be the hardest word.

"I haven't got everything right," he said early in his speech.

"I'll take my fair share of the criticism and blame," he later added.

Regrets? He had a few, like not calling in the military to oversee the vaccine rollout sooner.

But when pressed if he would say sorry for the mistakes he had made as Prime Minister, Morrison was in no mood to abide.

"We're all terribly sorry for what this pandemic has done to the world and to this country," he said.

Pivoting into campaign mode, he announced payments to keep aged care workers in their jobs and a fund to help universities commercialise their research.

Labor up in the polls but election far from over

It's highly unlikely that the voters who will determine the election were watching these Press Club speeches.

But they do offer an insight into where the leaders think the battle in the months ahead will be.

Labor is undoubtedly happy with how it's placed heading into an election likely in May.

But lessons from the last election, one most expected the ALP to win, leave many feeling cautious about what's to come. 

Albanese and Labor are on the hunt for seven seats if they're to form a majority government. 

Sitting on more very marginal seats than the Coalition, Albanese has used the start of the year sandbagging some of the most vulnerable ones he needs to hold if he's to move into the Prime Minister's office.

It's not a coincidence that he found himself in the NSW Hunter Valley, a region Labor copped massive swings at the last election, to perform a policy U-turn on taxpayers funding construction of a gas-fired power station.

Labor insists its new support for government intervention in the Kurri Kurri gas plant isn't a reversal and expects it will ultimately produce green hydrogen.

The Hunter gave Labor a bollocking at the last election. It's a region Albanese is seeking to reassure that a Labor government won't mean an end to mining jobs.

It's a high-wire act for Albanese to perform.

He's desperate to not find himself in the same position as former Labor leader Bill Shorten, who in 2019 was accused of saying one thing on climate change in the southern cities and another on mining in the north.

The other battle Albanese faces is one of defining himself for voters. Labor sources concede that despite 25 years in federal politics, there are large swathes of voters who have no idea who he is.

Morrison running on his record this time

For Morrison, it's a matter of voters potentially knowing him all too well that could harm his chances of re-election.

In 2019, as a newly-installed PM, he wasn't hamstrung by running on a record.

For 2022, Labor hopes to position him as the bloke who headed to Hawaii as the nation burned in 2019 and more recently, failing to prepare the nation against Omicron.

"He doesn't hold a hose and he doesn't give a RATs," Albanese told the National Press Club last week.

"Every action, every decision has to be dragged out of him and so often, after all of the build-up, he gets it wrong anyway and it's always too little and always too late."

A week later, Morrison insisted most voters don't pay attention to politics and are more worried about their daily lives.

His hope is that his failures won't have baked in with the electorate and that he can replicate another shock win.

Further hampering those efforts is that Morrison's own NSW branch of the Liberals is yet to finalise its candidates for the election. It's robbing those who will ultimately be candidates from vital campaigning.

Lessons from Winston Churchill 

At the start of the pandemic, both sides of politics were quietly chatting about Winston Churchill.

Just months after the defeat of Hitler's Nazi Germany in May 1945, British voters offloaded the man who had steered them through the Second World War. 

Labor hopes Australians too will topple the man who steered Australia through the pandemic.

If Morrison's speech is anything to go by, he's keen to remind people that the pandemic "isn't over yet" and it's no time for change.

"So here we are," he said.

"Not perfect but still standing strong, enduring and looking positively to the future as earlier generations did when they faced their time of great generational trial and challenge."

The looming threat of further strains could well prove a political advantage for Morrison.

But his government will need to be better prepared than it was this summer for it to work in the Coalition's favour.

Errors now could well be deadly.