This week marked the countdown of 100 days to the NSW state election.
It's one of those arbitrary milestones favoured by politicians and their phalanx of media advisers, despite voters' general indifference to such passages of time.
But the milestone suits freshly-anointed Labor leader Michael Daley, who called a press conference to acknowledge the occasion.
With little more than 30 days of leadership under his belt, he can hardly trade on his record. Nor does he want to remind voters of how he came to do be in the top job - a harassment scandal that forced the resignation of his predecessor Luke Foley last month.
NSW Labor Leader Michael Daley.Credit: AAP
That said, Daley has used his honeymoon period to roll out a number of policies, which has handed Labor a fresh bout of media coverage and enhanced the leader's profile before the Christmas dead zone takes hold.
Arguably Daley's greatest success so far has been in reviving the controversial stadiums debate, which had fallen off the radar in Foley's final months despite being the core platform of Labor's election strategy.
Daley triggered a fresh wave of media coverage when he declared last month that Labor would not give Allianz Stadium or ANZ Stadium a "single cent" of the $1.5 billion "of free public money" promised to it by the Berejiklian government.
With that he breathed new life into Labor's "Schools and Hospitals before Stadiums" slogan (which already adorns its campaign bus), and bolstered its narrative of the Coalition as a government of wrong priorities.
But there have also been some signs of unsteadiness.
This week, Daley struggled to articulate his own side's position on the government's policy on road tolls - an issue which is likely to become critical in a number of key western Sydney seats.
He was caught out during his own press conference, which he had called for the purpose of attacking the government's policy of giving free rego to drivers who spent $25 on tolls each week, and half-priced rego to those who forked out $15 per week.
He slammed the policy as "ill-thought out" and "wrong".
The only problem is Labor, under Foley, had already agreed to adopt the first plank of the policy.
Why, if the policy was as rubbish as Daley believed it to be, was it part of Labor's election platform, journalists asked. Floundering, Daley eventually settled on the need to avoid replicating the government's "continual back-flipping". Hardly a sound approach to policy-making.
When the new year begins, Daley will confront the ultimate baptism of fire for any new leader: an election campaign.
If the attack ads aired by both parties this week are anything to go by, this campaign will be especially vituperative and personal - every slip and policy misstep will count.
Inside the party, the mood is buoyant for now.
As one Labor MP put it: "Michael has momentum, but the Christmas holidays might break it."