It’s been 18 months since Tony Abbott lost his job as Leader of the Opposition & that’s surely time enough for him to have worked-out what he should be doing as Prime Minister: playing head of government, leading the party that holds the majority of seats in the House of Representatives & acting as chief adviser to the Governor-General.

What he should have worked-out by now is that it is no longer enough for him to play the role of ‘dog-whistler-in-chief’; whether it’s to unsettle the natives over the existential threat apparently represented by the Islamic faith; the hordes of refugees threatening to swamp ‘our way of life’ or a wayward judiciary not sufficiently focused on jailing every unfortunate miscreant who happens to catch his personal attention. After all, isn’t that why we have Alan Jones & his gang?

Of course, given the Prime Minister’s thundering silence on the 300 homicides, 185 workplace deaths, 18,000 sexual assaults, 116,000 physical assaults or 13,000 robberies that occur in Australia each year, let alone the 70,000 bicycle thefts, his mindless public mutterings on the release on bail of an “alleged terrorist sympathiser” & his appeal for clemency for a convicted heroin smuggler appear more than a little contrived & thus entirely consistent with his modus operandi.