Allen kicks off with the anecdote, because, “Well, that’s essentially how I feel about life.”

“It’s full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness… and it’s all over much too quickly.”

The same anecdote occurred to me this week when the Liberal Opposition complained about the fact that the time allocated for Budget Estimates had been scaled back by about seven hours from the previous year.

Let’s be blunt: no-one enjoys estimates.

It’s difficult to recall a starker reminder of the vast disparity in resources and stature between the Opposition and their Treasury-bench counterparts.

Government ministers certainly don’t; for them, it means hours boning up on departmental minutiae only to spend half a day stonewalling and reading from pre-prepared self-aggrandising declarations.

Advisers don’t; they’re the ones locked in weeks of research putting together the aforementioned pre-prepared self-aggrandising declarations, and attempting to foresee any potential curveballs, for which their only recompense is a proverbial rocket should the minister be shown up.

The media don’t; it’s far more often than not the most tedious event on the political calendar, content-poor for print reporters and vision-poor for the TVs, days of drudgery regularly yielding little more than a single new revelation.

And the Opposition doesn’t. It’s difficult to recall a starker reminder of the vast disparity in resources and stature between them and their Treasury-bench counterparts.

Almost as difficult, indeed, as recalling a genuine Government scalp claimed under the nominal blowtorch of an estimates grilling.

The Groundhog Day familiarity of the Estimates treadmill – the tedium of prevarication occasionally enlivened by a ministerial spat (generally involving Kevin Foley Tom Koutsantonis) – leads inevitably to the annual observation that the system needs an overhaul.

And yet, of course, when it gets an overhaul – in this case, dispensing with Dorothy Dixer contributions from Government observers and a corresponding truncation of the allotted time – everybody cries foul.

Not that that’s really the kind of overhaul anyone had in mind.

Indeed, given we have an ongoing Opposition-led Budget and Finance Committee, it’s difficult to see the rationale for an estimates process at all. Why not instead simply have a special week-long committee sitting wherein departmental heads can answer direct questions, ministers can be compelled to attend and shadow ministers can sit in?

After all, while I appreciate the notion that more Government accountability, rather than less, is clearly a good thing, only a masochist would genuinely argue for the current ordeal to continue beyond the minimum time allowable.

Indeed, there should be some kind of Geneva convention-style treaty against anyone having to endure more than a week straight of SA parliamentary estimates hearings.

But given the turgid predictability of it all – the same broad questions from the same increasingly-broad shadow ministers – a strange thing happened while I listened in yesterday to the parliamentary broadcasts of two concurrent morning sessions on competing devices. I actually had an epiphany, of sorts.

It occurred to me that this annual ritual is so ingrained, none of the participants (including the attendant media) could really imagine things differently. The Opposition members seemed grimly set in their roles as frustrated interrogators, the Government ministers comfortably cloistered in their airy disdain.

Perhaps more than any other parliamentary ritual, the estimates process crystallises a fact of which we’re only dully aware the rest of the time.

None of these Labor ministers – many of them well established in their political careers – have ever been in Opposition.

Sure, Koutsantonis and Snelling spent a bit of time out of Government in the far reaches of the backbench in Rann’s second term as Opposition Leader.

But never as Shadow Ministers.

The likes of Weatherill and Rau have never known the drudgery of poring through departmental reports, looking for anomalies, or the futility of tabling question after question for which nobody expects an answer.

Nor have they ever been forced into the brutally bloodied mindset of successful Opposition, exemplified by one of its more bruising exponents, Kevin Foley, in his recent Rooster Radio interview, when he reflected on “throwing the kitchen sink at the Liberals and kicking the shit out of them”.

“It was like a boxing match – the more you belted someone in the face, the better you felt; the more you destroyed someone’s career, the better you felt… it was macabre, and sick in many ways,” Foley mused.

On the Government benches, only Martin Hamilton-Smith (of course) has genuinely tasted that side of life in Opposition, while of the Liberal frontbench, only Rob Lucas (of course) has held the reins of power.

If this seems obvious, what is less so – and what becomes clear when you observe the dynamics between Government ministers and their shadows – is that both are in some ways institutionalised in their respective mindsets.

If things ultimately, finally, change in 2018, it will be the Labor side that struggles the most with the transition.

Opposition is an art both instinctive and learned; they have never learned it and I suspect the best part of two decades in office will have dulled the instinct, and the impulse.

Allen’s other quote to open Annie Hall reprises Groucho Marx’s famous line that he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member.

Opposition MPs don’t quite feel the same way about the Government.

They desperately want to gain entry; they just can’t quite find a way to qualify.

We can expect the unfolding Budget Estimates will only emphasise that they haven’t cracked the puzzle just yet – but a few ministers could be ripe for a stint in Opposition.

Tom Richardson is a senior journalist with InDaily. His political column is published on Fridays.