This task of summing up is a sorting and evaluating exercise which selects key issues from the day-to-day business of politics and from the passing storms which erupt and then subside.

The following represent some of the significant issues: legalisation of same sex marriage, dual citizenship of MPs; national energy policy; asylum seekers and refugees and the dogged refusal by the Commonwealth government to countenance a banking and financial services royal commission before its ultimate capitulation.

Politics moves so quickly that by now foreign influence on Australian politics should certainly be added. Furthermore, the general characteristic of them all is that they are ongoing, not done and dusted.

Legalisation of same sex marriage will morph in 2018 into a continuing controversy over freedom of religion, conscience and speech. The Ruddock committee, due to report in March, ensures this.

Section 44 (1) will be subject to continuing examination by the High Court as more cases are referred by the Parliament. Further by-elections and replacement senators will keep the conversation going and constitutional reform will remain on the agenda.

Despite the Prime Minister's confidence that he has found the answer in the National Energy Guarantee the battle between the relative merits of coal and renewable energy runs deep and is highly ideological.

Energy crises and household energy prices will ensure the issue doesn't go away.

The Turnbull government has held the line on asylum seeker and refugee detention on Manus Island and Nauru despite extraordinary community pressure, sometimes international, and often including non-partisan push-back from the highest levels of society.

Any policy change is tightly linked to the security of the prime minister's position within the governing Coalition.

The newly announced banking royal commission will become a most important arena for bigger struggles. The corporate world will struggle to contain or neuter it, while the broader community will take the opportunity to challenge the failures of yet another established and deeply flawed institution.

Within the community the distrust of government is still measured by steadily growing support for minor parties and independents.

None of the bigger social institutions came away unscathed either. Trade unions maintained a very low profile in the big community debates apart from industrial relations.

Aid and international development groups have been submerged by the security-dominated international environment. Environment groups are struggling too. The Indigenous community has once again been rebuffed.

The business community has had the most mixed year. Tax cuts for the biggest corporates have stalled and there will now be a banking royal commission (although they have shaped it as best they could) as well as increased pressures against tax minimisation. 

Led by Brian Joyce of Qantas big business embraced the community mood on same sex marriage far better than the parliament in what may become a model of future corporate responsibility.

John Warhurst is an emeritus professor of political science at the Australian National University.