It was always going to be interesting to see what the nascent prime minister would do once we entered bushfire season. As a long-term volunteer member of the NSW Rural Fire Service, would he continue to undertake this community service or play the statesman instead?

It turns out we found out quicker than anticipated with the early onset of bushfire season.

In some ways Abbott was faced with an invidious choice. He could continue the practice he’d established as opposition leader (fight fires when he’s on call and his unit is deployed) and risk being seen to be exploiting a potentially tragic event for a photo opportunity. Or he could put his new higher duties first and be accused retrospectively of only having done it for the cameras when in opposition.

Sure Abbott is a genuine bloke and he wants to do things that a regular bloke does – including pitch in with his RFS comrades. But his recent firefighting foray smacks of orchestration when it occurs at the same time as his government restricts eligibility for disaster payments, and his fellow first minister Barry O’Farrell is copping a backlash for closing fire stations.

And then there is the safety question. Would the supporters of Abbott’s continued fire-fighting while in high office be equally sanguine if he took on similarly hazardous tasks in the Defence Force Reserves? Or if there was no community-service element in the risk-taking and he spent his weekends skydiving or white-water rafting?

As Laurie Oakes pointed out in an otherwise extraordinarily sycophantic piece that spookily echoes Lisa Simpson’s “why is your campaign like a runaway freight train?”, this behaviour causes considerable headaches for his security detail. This is in contrast to the PM’s decision to stay in a Spartan flat at the AFP College while in Canberra, at least in part because it helps the AFP keep him secure.

As much as I’m sure Australia would survive perfectly well with Nationals Leader Warren Truss as interregnum PM, isn’t there a point at which a Prime Minister who engages in potentially high-risk activities accepts the need to reduce that risk in the interests of stable government?

For it was the prospect of stable government that attracted voters to the Coalition (or at least away from Labor). This is a government that has set itself a substantial amount of work to do, not only (eventually) scrapping the carbon tax/price, stopping the (information about the) boats, and building the (cheaper but still pretty fast) alternative NBN, but also implementing the NDIS and having a less revolutionary education revolution. Not to mention saving the car industry. Oh and producing a federal budget.

We were told by Tony Abbott many times during the four years he was opposition leader, and even more during the election campaign, that voters wanted a grown-up government, a government that was not obsessed with the media-cycle (and attendant photo opportunities) and one that would get on with the job of governing.

Inconveniently for Abbott, having vacated the field in an attempt to slow down the news cycle, muzzled new ministers and imposed what is effectively a blackout on "sensitive" government information, voters have next to no idea whether their newly minted Coalition government is doing what he promised.

Meantime, they see glimpses of their prime minister doing heroic things on the television which seem to have little connection with strong, stable government.

At what point do Abbott’s Putinesque cameo appearance at the beach, on a bike or near a fire, stop reinforcing voters’ perception of the prime minister as fit, strong and decisive, and start to look like mere self-indulgences?