Can Joe Hockey recover? Certainly, but that does not make it inevitable. Credit:Andrew Meares But back to last November. Understandably, the new Treasurer wanted to hit the ground running. Not for him the shaky start of Wayne Swan – whose ongoing parliamentary presence incidentally, Hockey would use to personify Labor's economic performance. From day one, as his opening comments showed, Hockey planned to own the parliament in the tradition of dominant treasurers past – names such as Paul Keating and Peter Costello. In large measure he did. That was also true of the coalition in those early months as a confident Hockey provided the new government with the policy direction it otherwise seemed to lack. That was then. Scroll forward to this week though and the Treasurer who reluctantly weathered every opposition question in parliament on Tuesday – having his words jeeringly quoted back to him – was a pale version of that earlier image.

Gone was the forceful mastery at the dispatch box – replaced instead by a sullen resentfulness and the body language of a man in extremis. Absent too was the bravado of those initial reform plans now that his first friendless budget is ensnared in the Senate and subject to daily pot-shots from a still energised opposition and an ever-emboldened cross-bench. By Wednesday, Hockey was regaining his equilibrium – a function as much of Labor's inability to keep the pressure on as anything else. But his return to the pack to rank along with other ministers is a mark of his diminished authority with voters and no doubt his reduced prestige inside the party room. Can he recover? Certainly but that does not make it inevitable. Liberals acknowledge he's taken a hit, and that his confidence is down but say he needs to learn from such difficulties. Some remain critical of the way in which the government first delivered a budget of backflips and then put in only a piecemeal effort in defending it. Hockey's problems are an important subset of the broader government dilemma but its collapse in standing with voters long pre-dated the budget. It is still young, yet it has now trailed in the monthly Fairfax-Nielsen poll series for half the time since the election.

Insiders counsel patience noting that the week just passed was only the third sitting week of the new Senate. In one sense, this does justify the government's modest returns to date on its reform score-card. But in another sense, it is a reminder of how little it has actually done when measured against the "emergency" it warned of. Yes, the carbon tax is gone which it claims as a major achievement. But even that repeal was a long drawn out affair which had to wait for the new Senate and then fell hostage to the mercurial Palmer United Party's Al Gore side-show. The government lost control of it. The final but nonetheless tortured passage of its financial advice reforms was another mess which became "Palmerised" doing little to instil a public sense of a government in charge. Beyond these, the record is fairly underwhelming. With many of the most contentious budget measures still not even introduced to parliament, negotiations went nowhere over a long winter break. A further wasted opportunity. That landscape was punctuated instead by some colossal own-goals from senior ministers who should have known better. Take your pick but Hockey's fuel-tax-is-progressive-because-the-poor-don't-drive-as-much argument, was probably the low point. The danger for the government in this surfeit of political posturing is that high-volume low output politics is tiring for all concerned and threatens to prematurely age the Abbott government. Remember, it is still shy of its first anniversary which is September 7.

There was a moment quite early in the term of the Rudd Labor government when the penny dropped for many Australians: they realised the banal truth that their government was simply, not very good. That recognition now looms as a clear and present danger for Team Abbott. Loading Mark Kenny is Fairfax's chief political correspondent. Follow us on Twitter