The list of priorities was hammered home. It included scrapping the carbon tax, scrapping the mining tax, repaying Labor's debt, stopping the boats, fixing the education mess, ending the waste, cutting 12,000 public servants, and visiting Indonesia early as part of a foreign policy realignment to be more Jakarta, less Geneva. On top of this, honour would be returned to politics after the taint of the Craig Thomson/HSU affair and Peter Slipper's travel claims. Results thus far vary between underwhelming to outright failure. Again, not always due to matters in the government's control. But Abbott never gave Julia Gillard any leeway from opposition, so he should expect none now. Frustration is beginning to show. Within the government, the anger at Senate intransigence portends unpredictability. Tuesday's party room meeting was all but overtaken by a sudden swell of conservative anger at the ABC and its decision to team up with the Guardian website to break the Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono phone-tapping story. In his pep-talk, Abbott told MPs they could be ''pretty happy'' with the government's performance which he ventured, resulted from their ''dealing in the right spirit'' with the challenges facing the nation. Really?

Voters certainly do not see it that way with both major polls, Newspoll and Fairfax-Nielsen, charting a marked drift away from the government. A more useful assessment came that same morning from the conservative commentator and former Howard chief of staff Grahame Morris, who tweeted in the aftermath of the second Gonski capitulation: ''Sometimes in the life of a Fed Govt a bad month needs to be taken outside and shot. Nov was such a month. December now looks better.'' No doubt looking for a distraction, Abbott threatened to make Parliament sit deep into December. It might have made some sense if the problem were an obstructionist Labor-Greens filibuster or a huge legislative agenda in need of progressing. But it isn't. They could be forced to sit on Christmas Day itself and it would still not see Labor or the Greens roll over on the carbon price for example. The legislative roadblocks, and sheer government incompetence evident in the school funding shambles, have some government MPs pulling their hair out. Some are again blaming Abbott's office and particularly his chief of staff, Peta Credlin.

According to one staffer, Credlin's insistence on ''micro-managing'' threatens to ''Ruddify'' decision making processes causing pile-ups amassing in the Abbott in-tray. Critics are aghast at the insanity of allowing the entitlements story to take hold and at allowing the chief liability in that furore, WA backbench MP Don Randall, to sit on the Parliamentary Privileges Committee - the body that polices MPs' standards. After Abbott failed to stem the political bleeding from the entitlements abuses, news of Randall's appointment to the committee on Thursday was another compound error. In the end it was Randall himself who stepped back. Loading Conservative supporters are already looking past the 100 days and are banking on the Christmas break, in the hope of starting again next year.

Mark Kenny is Chief Political Correspondent.