Tony Abbott was of almost Howard-like nimbleness in executing a 360-degree turn in five easy steps, all the while claiming a Coalition monopoly on virtue and policy certainty on the topic.
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In polling terms, it might even work. It is doubtful that it is early enough for voters to decide that they were conned and to rush back to Labor's womb.
Those who were watching would have little difficulty in detecting, and judging, Abbott's sophistry, prevarication, or tergiversation. They would occasion little surprise about Abbott, whether among his admirers or his enemies, nor of themselves add much to the number of each. By contrast, the shamelessness and lack of political art of the inept, but probably lucky, Christopher Pyne has increased the number of those who think him to add more decoration than ballast, more scandal-in-waiting than insight, experience or wisdom.
Labor and its leader, Bill Shorten, who ought to understand the mechanics of Gonski policies, may have felt some encouragement from the crisis of the week but made little from it.
Abbott's problems, at the moment, are not primarily from concerted Labor attacks (or attacks in combinations with the Greens) but from dismay at the Abbott on display within his own ranks, not least among the more libertarian conservatives.
Abbott has kept a fairly straight bat, if hardly hitting any runs, over issues such as grovels to Indonesia and Malaysia, or the Indonesian spy affair. But he's still in. It's what's on view with his captaincy, his judgment and his economic and political management that is causing the worry - about whether he has the potential to make a big score. The side has been in for three months without doing much.
Voters have not developed a feel for what it is, or what it stands for, apart from not being a Gillard government. That's hardly enough.
Gillard herself and Kevin Rudd are increasingly distant, if, for some, still unpleasant, memories. Yet it is far from clear that it is a confident conservative government in power, that it has found any stride, or that it is comfortably in the popular mind as the status quo.
The country is rapidly heading towards Christmas and perhaps six weeks' distraction from serious politics (unless there are natural disasters such as floods, cyclones or bushfires), or international conflagrations, but there is, as yet, little stamp of authority, of legitimacy or of purpose about those in charge of our fate.
The critics from the right - and commentators from abroad, particularly the US - have already seen the government bow to pressure from its rural nationalist rump to prevent a market takeover of GrainCorp by a major American operator.
Not only is this being read as an ominous sign about the government's free-market intentions, and about whether the restoration of the Coalition makes Australia ''open for business'' again, it is also being read as evidence that Abbott and some of his senior ministers - even Treasurer Joe Hockey - are susceptible to lobbying, and special pleading by vested interests, and that they can be quickly ground down by an organised campaign.
The Gonski reform episode was largely an own goal, with the states and private and public school lobbies providing the pressure, rather than the opposition.
But, if it is to be an example of how this government buckles after about a week of adverse headlines, imagine what would happen if there was a concerted campaign - of the sort that the mining industry applied to Labor in 2010 over resource rent taxes - with major rent seekers such as the motor industry, the tobacco lobbies, the drug cartels or the domestic defence industry.
The mining industry campaign is said to have cost about $20 million - with a threat of spending a further $50 million - and to have ''saved'' the industry more than $2 billion in taxes.
That's hardly a signal to desist from such campaigns.
During the election, Abbott made a conscious decision to reduce any ideological divide between Labor and the Coalition over schools. As Pyne observed a few weeks ago, that did not have to mean that the Coalition was there simply to administer Labor policies but it is hardly surprising that castration of the policy would not pass unnoticed. One might have expected, by now, that Pyne, or cabinet, had a plan for what to do. But the events of the week showed not only the absence of a plan but of a process to get one.
Many who observed the chaos and ad hockery expect much the same with health and hospitals policy. That's all the more a risk because Abbott has ample experience of the consequences of handing decision-making or responsibility back towards the states.
Big business had never had high expectations about Abbott's ideological purity, or devotion to small government free-market principles. They have recognised him as being a big government man, centrist and interventionist, in the old Menzies, Fraser or Democratic Labour Party mould.
But they have had higher hopes in the capacity of some of more mainstream Liberals and conservatives, including Hockey, Mathias Cormann and Andrew Robb, to restrain Abbott, and, in particular, to hold back spending increases, bigger deficits, or more borrowing.
In two years down the track, the events of the past week may be remembered not for the Pyne pratfalls or the shifts by Abbott. Rather, they will be remembered as proofs the Coalition did not have its act together on fundamental problems (relations with the states, schools and educational standards and government spending), nor a mechanism of controlling public expenditure - instanced by how Abbott was able to pluck a notional $1.2 billion from the ether after but a brief discussion with the leadership team.
Just as significantly, it confirmed that cabinet government is not yet operating. Instead, Abbott is working as he did when opposition leader - with a large amount of discretion to make (or remake) policy on the run with, at best, apologies for avoiding the processes, being made in arrears.
There is already good reason to think that this tendency is aggravated by the Prime Minister's private office, which, as during the reign of Rudd, is more the engine room of government than the cabinet. The Rudd experience (or, before that, the Keating and the Gorton experience) confirms that ad hoc gatherings of minders or ministers are no substitute for institutional processes and cabinet scrutiny, review and debate.
Particularly when there is someone, such as Abbott, whose political charm, such as it is, depends on testing the rules, going too far and retreating only when called out, on deft use of fine print and on the expectation of extreme unction. He's at that point in his political life where he's almost forgotten how he got there and is beginning to think it was by faith and merit alone.
Jack Waterford is editor-at-large.