It’s been only three months since Tony Abbott’s decisive victory on 7 September, and already the critics are baying for blood. Incompetent, untrustworthy, inefficient, embarrassing: all these barbs have been hurled in the Coalition’s way. Funny thing is, these are precisely the sorts of adjectives which conservatives in these columns would often apply to the Labor governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. What’s going on?

We don’t know precisely why the Australian people have so quickly soured on Abbott’s team, but two things seem clear. The past three months are a far cry from the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years of spin, mendacity (or should that read ‘misogyny’?), profligacy and ineptitude.

And yet the early signs of the Abbott era leave much to be desired. Admittedly, many of the stumbles of the first hundred days of the Abbott government can directly be slated to either events beyond their control (Snowden/Indonesia) or landmines left by the departing Labor rabble (Gonski/debt limits). Other problems stem from Bill Shorten’s suicidal decision to carry on carrying on about those very issues that so comprehensively riled the electorate, from climate change to boats.

But where the Coalition should have been on solid ground, a worrying perception has crept in that there is no grand plan with no philosophical backbone. Mr Abbott’s refusal to spell out core Liberal principles of small government, free enterprise and individual initiative, combined with his (in many ways laudable) preference for avoiding the media frenzy, have left punters unclear about where he stands. GrainCorp was a betrayal of basic free-market policy making, unexplained in any credible way other than as a sop to the Nationals, and the flirtation with propping up Qantas while (sensibly) giving Holden the flick further muddies the waters. The backflip on Christopher Pyne’s (equally sensible) answer to the Gonski shambles exposed a lack of clarity of purpose and a political clumsiness unfamiliar to the Howard years.

As great postwar leaders from Menzies and Churchill to Thatcher and Reagan recognised, conservatives are at their most effective when they stick to their guns. That events have conspired to make a surplus that much harder to achieve should not prevent the Coalition from arguing passionately that spending must be reined in. Throwing away foreign investment opportunities, offering preposterous entitlements and pandering to state and union interests is not the way for the Coalition to win favour.

Our Christmas wish is that this government spells out coherently how it will rapidly grow the economy. It is not, as Mr Abbott has claimed, a question of ‘ideology versus pragmatism’, nor about treading water. It’s about pulling out all the stops to encourage growth and reduce welfare-dependency so that all Australians can be confident they and their children will be better off, under a government that knows how to do it.

The dogs of satire

Forget repealing carbon taxes, abolishing mining taxes, repealing 18C and so on. The major reform of our new government slipped through parliament last week largely unnoticed. We refer of course to the long overdue repeal of one of the most draconian and anti-democratic pieces of legislation to blight our major governing institution: the inglorious anti-satire standing order.

At the behest of Prime Minister Tony Abbott and with bipartisan support, our 44th parliament graciously removed the anachronistic restriction forbidding parliamentary footage of MPs being used ‘for satire or ridicule’. Leader of the House Christopher Pyne — himself no stranger to  the sting of the satirist’s quill — was quick to warn his fellow federal MPs that they’d better swiftly ‘develop thick skins’.

For any new readers unfamiliar with the rules of political satire, a sophisticated satirist will juxtapose a serious political issue with an unrelated contemporaneous event in order to make a hopefully humorous political point. All well and good. Alas, those of lesser abilities might merely resort to, say, sticking the head of an unpopular individual onto the body of a person fornicating with an animal — in the name of ‘wit’.

No doubt we can now look forward to the ABC and other sponsors of undergraduate humour excitedly getting hold of footage of our parliamentarians and cutting or pasting them onto unseemly images in order to ‘make a point’. We trust Mr Abbott won’t regret letting loose the dogs of satire.