Coming almost 10 months after the Labor Party was swept to power on a promise to tear up the WorkChoices laws, the Workplace Relations Minister’s speech fleshing out the details of the Rudd Government’s replacement industrial relations regime was met with anger from unions, particularly over the revised unfair-dismissal rules.

Kevin Rudd and former New South Wales premier Morris Iemma struck a secret deal last October to cut the unions down to size after the federal election. But once safely elected on November 24, the Prime Minister squibbed on the undertaking, leaving Mr Iemma fatally exposed in his battle to privatise the state’s electricity assets.

Opening question time today, Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull challenged the Prime Minister to explain what he was doing to fireproof the economy in the wake of the crash of Wall Street giant Lehman Brothers. But Treasurer Wayne Swan accused Mr Turnbull of vandalising the surplus by blocking budget measures in the Senate.

For whatever reasons, Brendan Nelson’s poll figures are dismal, his impact nowhere to be seen, and under his leadership, the Opposition is going backwards. Senior Liberals need to learn from history and not make the same mistake they made with Howard in 2006: someone needs to tell him that it is time to go.

Both Costello and Hanson were third party figures who hijacked the national conversation early in the life of a new government. Costello did it by saying nothing; Hanson did it by saying things that had never been said before by federal politicians. Both became self-fulfilling sagas at around the same point in the cycle - after the new government had delivered its first budget.

According to his own memoirs, Peter Costello thinks he could have won the last election. He says John Howard should have stood aside, let him lead and, because he was younger, and not so reviled, he would have beaten Kevin Rudd. As Costello must in some part of his heart know, this simply isn’t true.

It is a measure of the Prime Minister’s commitment to national security that with the economy slowing and the country suffering increased unemployment and the effects of international financial crises, he should so specifically recommit to real growth in the defence budget of 3 per cent a year for the next decade.

With the mood turning against Labor in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, Kevin Rudd may need a new plan. How about an action plan? For more than nine months, like a period of gestation, we have waited in anticipation for the change that the Prime Minister claimed this country needed after the Howard years. Smarting from attacks that his Government lacked direction, Rudd hurriedly rushed out a few planks in his education revolution a few weeks ago.

The surreal is everywhere. Witness Alan Carpenter, failed Premier from the rivers of gold state Western Australian telling the ABC’s The 7.30 Report on Monday that he wants to start “a completely new era in Western Australian governance” by teaming up with the Nationals. No, it wasn’t Clarke and Dawe. Don’t check your sets, this is supposed to be serious.

Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson will shortly announce a $30-a-week increase to the singles rate for pensioners and a bonus payment of about $500 a year to be paid shortly. The Coalition is trying to capitalise as the Rudd Government ties itself in knots by conceding pensioners can’t live on what they are paid now. The Coalition resisted pressure to lift the pension rate in the dying days of the Howard government - including rejecting a push by then minister Mal Brough.