Friday-nine-days-ago at the onion farm cannot be forgotten.

"History is a raw onion sandwich. It just repeats, it burps." Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending.

It's been nine days since the Prime Minister travelled to a farm in Tasmania and ate an onion like it was an apple.

In modern-media dog years, nine days is a lifetime. Entire government policies have lived and died in a shorter time frame. These days you can announce $2 billion worth of something-or-other at breakfast and it's forgotten by lunchtime. And yet the insistent simplicity, the metronomic weirdness of Friday-nine-days-ago at the onion farm cannot be forgotten.

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The Tasmanian visit was the latest stop in the PM's national apology tour (in which he pops in to an existentiallythreatened Liberal constituency and apologises for something he said earlier. He also brings cash, because these are not rhetorical apologies).

Earlier in the week, he'd materialised in South Australia to hand back some $100 million in car industry assistance, having evidently thought better of his previouslyexpressed view that the government should not be in the business of subsidising dying industries.

And when he advanced to the Apple Isle, it was to announce $200 million in subsidies to help Tasmanian exporters overcome the disadvantage of being in Tasmania, having evidently thought better of his pronouncement two days earlier, in reference to certain remote Indigenous communities, that it was "not the job of the taxpayer to subsidise lifestyle choices".

In any event, the Prime Minister repaired to a farm to admire some Tasmanian onions, whose one-way fare to destinations unknown would henceforth be supplemented more generously by the Australian taxpayer so as to render these lucky vegetables economically indistinguishable from their mainland cousins.

So far, so good.

It was when the farmer was - literally - showing the Prime Minister his onions that the odd thing happened. Mr Abbott seized one and took a lavish bite, skin and all.

Now: not being surprised by things that Tony Abbott does is becoming a national skill-set. But in the days since, I find that I cannot read or think about anything the government does without thinking of that moment, and wondering who eats raw onions, and why, and what it might possibly mean for the nation that the Prime Minister is one of them.

I know this sounds silly, but I also know I'm not alone; Australians assess their leaders on the degree to which their decisions are rational, consistent, and based on values that more or less reflect their own.

In an environment where the government changes its mind about many other things on a near-daily basis, a PM who redraws social convention ambitiously enough to permit the on-camera consumption of an unpeeled onion is more existentially alarming than a leader who mainlines an inappropriate vegetable in less remarkable times.

Two days after the onion-eating, when the Prime Minister on Sky News last Sunday declared his intention not to give a further inch on his higher education reforms, I was duly attentive but simultaneously conscious of a voice inside my skull murmuring, with quiet finality: "He ate an onion."

On Monday, when Mr Abbott confirmed in Question Time that the government would in fact give quite a few inches and indeed would sacrifice all its planned budgetary savings on university spending, my brain understood that this was a significant development, but the little voice would not let things rest: "It had the skin on. The SKIN."

When the deal was struck on the government's metadata legislation, part of me was cautiously pleased that journalists' sources would receive a modicum of protection, but it was hard to hear, with the voice – not just a voice now, more of a rowdy pub chimp – yammering "Even the onion guy did not think it was okay to eat an onion!"

(The farm's proprietor, David Addison, did in fact concede after the event that the Prime Minister's raw enthusiasm for the product "put us off guard a bit". "I mean, I'm an onion grower, so occasionally I see people eat them," he explained. "But you don't really expect the PM to walk in, bite on an onion and eat it, leaf and all.")

Everything that the Prime Minister has said since – whether it's annoying the Irish by making jokes about guinness (and really - if you've annoyed the Irish, the universe is genuinely cheesed-off with you, don't you think? Time to sacrifice a chicken. Or at the very least, bite the head off a scallion) or expressing his disinclination to conduct a double-dissolution – it's useless. All I can think of is onion.

Mr Abbott is reported barely to have met the crossbench senators on whose vote he depends. In the new Women's Weekly, Margie Abbott reminisces about the first trip her husband ever took her on while they were courting; hiking Kokoda. With his best mate. And a three-man tent. Is it possible that this man does not – socially, at least – answer to the same gods we answer to?

Twitter @annabelcrabb