The Coalition wants to remove any hint of Labor from the NBN, NDIS and Gonski reforms, but its own policy alternatives leave much to be desired, writes Greg Jericho.

The passing of Australia Day effectively signals the beginning of the year. The tennis and the cricket are done and dusted, and we can return to watching those TV programs which have already finished in the UK but which we have not yet downloaded.

We can also turn our eyes towards the beginning of the political year. But before we do, it is worth noting what has occurred since our attention wandered from the political contest when Parliament rose on December 12 last year.

For the government has not been inactive in the past seven weeks - mostly they have been doing some framing work.

It started on the final day of the sitting period last year, when the Minister for Communications released the strategic review into the NBN. In a week dominated by the news of Holden's closure of production, the topic didn't even rate a question in the final Question Time other than a Dorothy Dixer. This was despite Turnbull dumping the government's election promise to deliver download speeds of 25mbps to the majority of Australian by 2016.

The government's response to the review was such that it led Renai LeMay of the IT news website Delimiter to write:

We cannot call this a "National Broadband Network" any more. That term is fundamentally redundant, when around 28 percent of Australian premises will not receive the infrastructure, and most of the rest will receive a watered down version highly dependent on Telstra's copper network.

But that's OK, the next day the third Test started and Australia went 3-nil up.

The following week Joe Hockey released the Mid-Year Fiscal and Economic Outlook (MYEFO). In it we discovered that the 2013-14 budget deficit had "blown out" from $30.1bn to $47.989bn. Even worse was the fact that over the forward estimates the total blowout was a cumulative $68.1bn.

And yet attempts by Joe Hockey and Mathias Cormann to frame this as evidence of Labor's mismanagement fell flat when it was noted that nearly $54.4bn (or 80 per cent) of the increase in the deficit over the next four years was due to a more pessimistic economic outlook over that period rather than any "hole" left by Labor.

Moreover, the major cause of this year's budget deficit was Joe Hockey's $8.8bn gift to the RBA. It was an amount certainly welcomed by the RBA, but which was not deemed all that necessary by the financial markets (and certainly not that amount).

So that framing exercise didn't go to plan, and neither did the suggestion of the budget emergency. It's tough to tell people that spending is out of control just after you've given an amount of money to the RBA roughly equal to that spent by the government annually on higher education.

It's even tougher to sell something as a budget emergency when you also say we have to wait six months before you'll do anything about it.

Most of the decisions have been handballed to the Commission of Audit, which is due to release its interim report by the end of this month. But not everything had to wait till then.

At the end of December, the Assistant Treasurer, Arthur Sinodinos, announced that the government was rescinding the reforms to the financial planning industry introduced in 2012 by then minister for financial services and superannuation, Bill Shorten.

Shorten had introduced an "opt-in" requirement on financial planner's fees, whereby planners needed every two years to ask their customers to accept (or opt-in) paying their fees. If the customers did not agree, the fee would be dropped. He also introduced a measure forcing planners to send an annual fee disclosure statement to all their clients.

These measures were brought in because it was found that most people had no idea what they were being charged for in their superannuation accounts and many were even unaware they were paying as much as 0.5 per cent a year to financial planners for services which they didn't want (or know about).

The industry of course protested quite vigorously - as you would expect when the opportunity to print money is taken away from you.

Senator Sinodinos stated the government was removing the "need for clients to complete unnecessary paperwork". He added the measures did "not provide any significant consumer protection".

And thus the stripping away of consumer protections was framed as a productivity measure. It is worth bearing that in mind next time you hear Tony Abbott talk about wanting to "cut $1bn in red-tape costs".

But the economy is not the only framing exercise to have been conducted this summer, nor the only one to make use of an "independent" review. After stuffing up his handling of the Gonski funding arrangement with the states by first suggesting he was dumping it, then quickly having to backtrack when the states (and public opinion) let him know that wasn't going to fly , Christopher Pyne turned his gaze to that of history and culture. And like any conservative politician who finds him or herself in government but who has done essentially bugger all policy work, Pyne looked to the past and repeated what previous conservatives had done.

And so we saw the culture wars being fought like it was 1996.

How refreshing.

Pyne suggested the national curriculum focused too much on Asia and not enough on Europe, and needed more mention about Anzac Day. Never mind that it would be next to impossible for any school students to avoid Anzac Day, clearly more is needed. But of course Pyne and his fellow wannabe culture warriors don't want more teaching of Anzac Day, they want more of the same teaching of Anzac Day.

This is clear from how Pyne reacted last April when he first suggested there needed to be more teaching of Anzac Day. Pyne refused to accept that such teaching should in any way include mention of the divisiveness of the First World War, such as which occurred during the conscription-referendum debates. For Pyne "the debate about conscription has nothing whatsoever to do with the campaign in Gallipoli".

So bugger the futility of men dying for no good reason; rather, let's have more praise of the sacrifice that was the making of Australia. You know, the full conservative, pro-Empire-was-great-for-this-nation myth that is spun about Anzac Day.

And to assist him in his endeavours, Pyne enlisted former Coalition advisor Kevin Donnelly and Professor Ken Wiltshire to review the national curriculum. As vocal critics of the national curriculum, hiring them and calling it independent was akin to your partner getting their parent to act as the independent umpire in an argument the two of you are having.

But as with the NBN, as with budget, as with the financial services reform, as with the Gonski funding, as with the NDIS (which on the day after Parliament rose last year saw "launch sites" changed to "trial sites"), it is all less about policy and more about the framing. And this frame does not include any sign of the five and a half years of ALP government.

You like the NBN? Get ready for the Liberal Party's NBN. You liked the NDIS? Fine, you keep it, but only after much effort has been made to ensure what it ends up being is not something for which the ALP can claim credit. The ALP reformed the financial industry? Not anymore.

Thus far, the early signs are that the voters are not completely enamoured with this strategy. It suggests a belief that the rewriting of history has gone a bit too far. Voters for the most part liked the NBN, the NDIS and the Gonski funding reforms. Perhaps they trusted more the Liberal Party to implement them, but voters were perfectly happy with the framing.

After four years of arguing everything Labor did was wrong, the government has yet to find the way to admit that perhaps they need to focus less on the framing, and more on the paint work between the policy frames.

Greg Jericho writes weekly for The Drum. He tweets at @GrogsGamut. View his full profile here.