Abbott just needed to stay the course, they agreed, and campaign against Labor dysfunction, the debt, the carbon tax and the boats. Because the leader might change but those constants would remain. But the reality of the resurrected Rudd is applying a world of pressure to this plan. Because the constants are suddenly not-so-constant - Rudd has made announcements to reform Labor, rework the carbon tax, harden policy against boats, and, for his next trick, will address the questions of debt and deficit. Labor, as the polls show, is now in a competitive position with the Coalition and the pressure is starting to show. The three latest signs of rising panic from the Liberal leadership have emerged in the past two days. One was the transparent attempt by Abbott to out-tough Rudd on boat people. When Rudd outflanked Abbott on the right by announcing that no boat people who arrived without a visa would ever live in Australia, Abbott first welcomed the policy, then criticised it, then, on Thursday, tried to move yet further to the right. An Abbott government would put a three-star general in charge of the boat people co-ordination committee in the bureaucracy. It was an effort to look tougher than Rudd not by changing policy but by putting a general's tin hat on top of it.

It was flim-flam. It was conceived in haste, without consulting the shadow cabinet. "I can't see it making any difference at all," said a former chief of the defence force, retired admiral Chris Barrie. The government mocked the idea. Defence Minister Stephen Smith observed that the present co-ordination system was run by a two-star commander. Abbott's policy amounted to replacing a two-star commander with a three-star, he said. The second sign emerged on Friday, in an entirely different realm. In essence, the Coalition appears to be running away from a tenet of responsible national budgeting, one introduced by the Coalition itself. It is a rejection of the umpire's call. This is a starting reversal. When he took office as treasurer, Peter Costello introduced the Charter of Budget Honesty to deal with the slipperiness that had long bedevilled election campaigns.

Governments would claim all was well with the national budget, the election would be held, and it would emerge that, lo and behold, the government had been concealing a huge shortfall. To eliminate this, Costello's charter required that 10 days after the calling of an election, in the caretaker period where the government has limited authority, the Treasury and the Finance Department would issue their independent best estimate of the true state of the budget. This excellent innovation was burdened with the unhappy acronym of PEFO - the Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook. Governments could never again hide the truth during an election. Today, the Rudd government is trying to deal with a new problem of a shortfall in national tax revenue of about $6 billion for this financial year. Under the old system, the government might have tried to hush this up until after election day. But that's now impossible, so the government is preparing an economic statement to deal with the problem. Treasurer Chris Bowen has said the government will keep its pledge to return the budget to surplus by 2016-17. So that means it will have to make up the shortfall. This puts the government in the difficult position of needing to announce $6 billion worth of spending cuts or increased taxes in the weeks before the election.

So it's the government's predicament but it seems to have worried the opposition into thinking that this will also put pressure on it to similarly tighten its spending plans. The opposition's response? Joe Hockey has declared that the Coalition will not recognise the Treasury and Finance statement, the PEFO. In other words, it is preparing to reject the statement from the only authorities that have possession of the facts. It is a rejection of the umpire's call. This is a startling reversal. Two months ago, Hockey said: "We have always said that the only numbers we can actually rely on are the numbers released by the secretary of the Department of the Treasury and Finance, 10 days into the election campaign. Because they belong to the public servants rather than these numbers which belong to the government." But now Hockey says: "We're not going to cop the Treasury being bullied by the government into producing PEFO numbers that are closely aligned to the government's". This is not credible. It looks very much like the Coalition preparing the way for it to reject the official numbers so it can keep flexibility in its policy or, worse, make it up as it goes along. Hockey wants the government to respect a stricture that he himself will not.

The third sign of sweat on the political palm was the Coalition's sudden change of policy on the school funding changes once known as Gonski and now called "Better Schools". Abbott and his education spokesman, Christopher Pyne, had earlier said they would repeal any such arrangement unless it had been adopted by an "overwhelming majority" of the states and territories. They'd been scathing of the plan. But Rudd, taking up where Gillard had left off, reopened negotiations with the states and territories and has been making progress. In the past two weeks Rudd's Education Minister, Bill Shorten, has finalised arrangements with the Catholic school system and the independent schools. He's been closing in on a deal with Victoria. By Friday, the states were divided right down the middle - three states and one territory had signed up, and three states and one territory had not - with Victoria in the balance. This is a long way from an overwhelming majority, yet the Coalition announced that it would honour the Labor deals for at least its first year in power.

Abbott and Pyne evidently feared Rudd campaigning against them on education as mean Scrooges. But before these three latest signs of acute nervousness, the Coalition also gave two other clear indications of concern. First was in Abbott's response to Rudd's proposal to dump the carbon tax and move to an emissions trading scheme a year early. He derided the Rudd plan for an emissions trading scheme as a "so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one". Invisible substance? This sounded like a leader who was sceptical about carbon as the agent that is reshaping the global climate. It was a mistake. Instead of competing with Rudd on the economic and consumer benefits of how best to address climate change, Abbott seemed to be arguing about the science. His spokesman assures us otherwise but it reminded many of Abbott's earlier dismissal of climate change as "absolute crap".

Fifth was the Coalition decision to oppose the government's decision to tighten a fringe benefits tax concession on cars that are supplied to employees as part of their salary package. The decision was that instead of allowing a standard formula for claiming the concession, people would have to give some evidence that they used their vehicle for work purposes and not only for private. This is entirely fair. It's a prudent piece of fiscal guardianship that the government estimates will save $1.8 billion over four years. If the Coalition is serious about its credentials as the party of fiscal prudence and sound management, it should have quietly accepted the decision, allowed Labor to take the political pain of closing a tax loophole, and added the $1.8 billion to its own tally of savings in the event that it wins power. Indeed, that's exactly the approach the Coalition took to Labor's savings in the May budget. But that was in the Gillard era where Coalition victory seemed assured, and this is in an entirely new era. The Coalition is now searching with rising desperation for any tiny advantage it can find - even the silly and the irresponsible. On today's polls, the Abbott Coalition is still likely to win more seats than Labor. And, in the end, the rush of Rudd reforms could all unravel. But on the present signs, the Coalition is starting to panic and could be its own worst enemy. All this, and it's only been four weeks.

Peter Hartcher is the Sydney Morning Herald's political editor.

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