By Greg Jericho

Photo: The things done and said while in opposition have come back to bite the Coalition. (AAP: Alan Porritt)

The Abbott Government has spent its first month in office trying to hide from its strong rhetoric on everything from the misuse of entitlements to stopping the boats and paying down debt, writes Greg Jericho.

You can't deny that the Abbott Government has hit the ground running. Their increase in productivity has been quite breathtaking. Usually it takes a few months for a new government to become comedic punch line, but the Abbott Government has been able to achieve this level before Parliament has even sat!

This spring at weddings around the country, the probability of a best man's speech including a joke about claiming travel expenses must be close to 1. As Paula Matthewson has noted, it is a rather similar situation to the first year of the Howard government where seven ministers were sacked for breaches of Howard's "Code of Ministerial Conduct". Tony Abbott, however, won't sack anyone because the ministers involved are far too senior for Abbott to have the gumption, or the authority, to discipline them in any meaningful way. Barnaby Joyce, Julie Bishop and George Brandis are pretty well untouchable.

Moreover, Mr Abbott can hardly sack anyone given he announced on Monday that last week he repaid expenses he had claimed to attend Peter Slipper's wedding (Alanis Morissette can rest easy, finally there was a wedding day that was ironic).

But it all paints a picture that nicely captures this first period of the Abbott Government - one where things done and said while in opposition have come back to bite them.

The favourite surely has been the "stop the boats" line which has changed more to stopping the flow, taking the sugar off the table and going to Indonesia and engaging in what has been very (very) charitably reported by some as a diplomatic success or a "strategic retreat". It involved Mr Abbott pretty much ignoring the issue in his talks with the Indonesian president, despite it once having been so front and centre.

I guess it must have slipped his mind.

What also seems to have slipped his mind is all the numerous times he and now Minister for Immigration (and Border Control, to give him his full absurd title) Scott Morrison trumpeted as loudly and as often as they could about any asylum seeker boat arrival. Now it seems such announcements are "shipping news" for people smugglers that will only encourage more boats.

Given the Liberal Party's election campaign was based on publicising the number of boat arrivals, either Morrison and Abbott are now lying, or they were guilty for the past three years of assisting people smugglers.

Either way it's all pretty laughable, though not as funny as Morrison's latest attempt to say that the Liberal Party never had a policy of towing back the boats. It took about a two-second Google search to find evidence of Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott and other Liberal MPs happily conversing on the subject of "tow-backs" without ever feeling the need to correct the record.

It is beginning to seem that Mr Abbott's comment on Monday with regards to the boat buyback scheme that "there was some misunderstanding of the policies we took to the election" could apply across the board. And as with the boat buyback scheme, the real problem is that everyone understood it all too clearly.

Fortunately the economy hasn't been left out of the strategic retreat. Last week came the news that Joe Hockey was flying off to Washington to meet with credit agencies to convince them to keep our AAA credit rating.

This shouldn't be a problem. After all, in February this year Standard & Poor's said of Australia that it "remains on a sound path in our base-case scenario, with a number of key strengths supporting the 'AAA' rating".

In July, Joe Hockey stressed the importance of the AAA rating, telling reporters that, "it is only the Coalition that's going to preserve the AAA credit rating because only the Coalition is the one that's actually going to deliver a surplus and start to pay down Labor's $300 billion of debt".

But now we discover (to the surprise of no one) that Tony Abbott's desire to be the "infrastructure Prime Minister" will actually require spending money. The AFR reported that Mr Hockey was "'mulling' the idea of separately classifying debt the federal government raises to invest in infrastructure projects from the debt required to finance the budget deficit." And thus Mr Hockey is hoping to explain to the credit agencies that debt raised to build infrastructure is good debt.

Now I would agree with him - borrowing money to build productivity-driving infrastructure is a good thing (and certainly more important than caring about our AAA rating), but unfortunately pre-election Joe Hockey would disagree. Last year to David Oldfield on 2UE he said:

And the fact is that debt is getting the world into trouble. And this Government is addicted to spending and debt. And the fact that they are not including the National Broadband Network in the bottom line of the Budget, yet they are borrowing money, increasing the debt to fund the National Broadband Network, just illustrates that this is a Government that is not telling the truth about the true state of the balance and they are leaving people bewildered.

I guess wasteful government spending is a bit like the adage about a weed just being a plant you don't like - debt raised for NBN spending off budget is bad, debt raised to build the East-West Link is good.

But Mr Hockey should not be too worried. When Standard & Poor's last examined Australia, it noted of our government debt that it "has risen in recent years, although this mainly reflects deficits used to support the economy during the 2009 global recession. Even with this fiscal stimulus, net general government debt is expected to peak... well below most of its peers".

Expect Joe Hockey to give that line a good workout in his meetings, though he might want to avoid saying it in Parliament lest he have to move a censure motion against himself, similar to one moved in 2009 where he stated:

The Prime Minister [Kevin Rudd] expects us to believe that he is fiscally prudent, yet so much of what he is spending is going on the nation's credit card.

Oh, well, if in doubt I guess Mr Hockey need only say he had a misunderstanding of the policies he took to the election.

Greg Jericho writes weekly for The Drum. His blog can be found here. View his full profile here.

What is said in opposition stays in opposition - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)