The semblance of normality that marked the past week in politics is testament to Tony Abbott's ability to create a perpetual state of havoc.
After belting Julia Gillard for having two quiet days during the carbon tax phoney campaign, Abbott took off for Europe for a planned family holiday.
He is due back this week to pick up where he left off on the carbon tax and will head to Perth for the annual Australian American Leadership Dialogue, a diplomatic friendship forum between the two nations.
In the absence of the frenzied, election-campaign atmosphere that Abbott manages to generate, last week more resembled politics as usual early in a new term.
The government was talking about policy and the opposition was chipping away, battling to be noticed.
''Geez, they miss him,'' a Labor luminary said of Abbott's absence.
Granted more clear air than she has had since the election a year ago this month, Gillard put to bed the health and hospital reform deal, kicked along the national broadband network, sealed a forestry deal in Tasmania and began preparing the ground for today's aged-care report by the Productivity Commission.
While Gillard has warned to draw no assumptions between what the commission recommends and what the government will announce eventually as policy, her decision to associate with today's release is pointed.
The government will almost certainly endorse the commission's findings of the need to move towards a user-pays system of residential care, meaning bonds or other forms of payments in return for a bed, but will seek alternatives to selling the family home. Primarily, its policy thrust will be to make residential care a last-resort option.
Conscious that baby boomers approaching retirement have no desire even to move to an aged-care home, the government's aim will be to keep people in their own homes for as long as possible and implement measures to facilitate keeping healthy people productive and socially engaged.
Also this week there will be a response to recommendations to implement a national disability insurance scheme for lifetime care and support for the disabled.
It is a noble concept and widely supported but it is costly and would have to be funded from general revenue. Such a scheme is estimated to cost $6.5 billion a year by 2018, so it is a safe bet that when cabinet deliberates on options today, it won't give the green light for a full-blown scheme starting immediately.
More likely there will be a commitment to establish a series of trial or start-up schemes in a handful of states, including NSW, with the commitment to move towards something more comprehensive in co-operation with the states.
A week of aged-care and disability reforms, neither of which are directly associated with the Rudd era, can only help the beleaguered Gillard as she strives to forge her own agenda.
But it is a reflection of this government's luck that, as soon as it starts developing policy momentum, the global economy starts to tank, casting doubt on Australia's own fragile recovery and the government's program. Gleeful predictions from the opposition yesterday that the government's promise to return the budget surplus in 2012-13 was in doubt were fuelled by the Reserve Bank on Friday, downgrading the economic growth year-average forecast for 2011 from 3.25 per cent to 2 per cent.
But the increasing economic pressures also present challenges for the opposition. With Abbott away, it didn't just provide Gillard with time to get down to brass tacks. The coalition's senior shadow ministers gathered for two sessions earlier last week for an expenditure-review process.
In the year since the election, Abbott has promised the world, all the while eschewing revenue measures.
He will abolish the mining tax and the carbon tax but is still promising tax cuts if elected. He has ignored urgings by senior colleagues to shelve his $3 billion-plus-a-year paid parental leave scheme - to be funded by an increase in business taxes and partly from the budget - and just accept the more affordable scheme Labor has introduced.
Ask anyone from the Coalition about how it plans to pay for everything and the answer is always the same. That's for the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, and finance spokesman, Andrew Robb, to figure out.
When Hockey appeared on Lateline on Wednesday and said the opposition was considering axing the Department of Climate Change, it was no thought bubble. The idea had been accepted in principle at a meeting on Monday.
The climate change spokesman, Greg Hunt, was in the middle of a charity walk around his electorate, so the submission was put forward by Hunt's proxy, Simon Birmingham.
The idea is that axing the department and folding it back in with the Environment Department would save money and the Coalition's own direct-action policy could be administered by Treasury and Environment.
A friend of Hockey's said to expect more such announcements from the big fella, especially as the economy tightens. ''It's Joe's responsibility to find the savings,'' he said. ''It's his neck that's on the line here.''
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