Shock. Awe. Magician unable to find Abbott

Now you see him, now you don't. A month ago you couldn't switch on your TV without Tony Abbott leaping out at you in a hi-vis vest or crotch-grabbing bike shorts, making that strangled braying noise that passes for laughter. HA HA HA HA.

That was campaign mode. There were fish to be filleted, snags to be barbecued, forklift trucks to be driven, babies to be kissed, daughters to be displayed as living proof that he ''gets'' women.

But now that he's Prime Minister, Abbott is nowhere to be seen. He's gone. Disappeared. Vanished from the face of the earth, for all we know. It's very odd.

For a while I thought he might have made good on his offer to spend his first week in the job with the Yolngu people of north-eastern Arnhem Land. To make sure I hadn't imagined this promise, I found the TV footage and checked the quote. It was late last month, at the Garma cultural festival run by the Yothu Yindi Foundation near Nhulunbuy. In a public speech, Abbott directly addressed indigenous leader Galarrwuy Yunupingu with these words:

''Why shouldn't I - if you will permit me - spend my first week as prime minister - should that happen - on your Country?''

That was well received with a burst of applause, so he continued:

''Now I know there'll be people who'll say: 'You're Prime Minister. You can't do that; you're goofing off; you're not doing your job.' But the fact is, if these places are homes to the first Australians, why shouldn't they be home, even if only for a few days, to the prime minister of our country?''

A noble idea, a grand gesture, can't argue with that. But it never came to pass: did not happen. A check with the Prime Minister's Press Office confirmed that he's been working in Canberra.

So I guess that's Broken Promise No. 1. Perhaps they should have got it in writing.

Stranger still, our two national emergencies have vanished as well. It's as if they had never existed.

You'll remember them, of course. There was the Budget Emergency, which Abbott proclaimed last May and never stopped banging on about. Labor's reckless spending and borrowing had left the nation's finances drowning in a sea of red ink. The socialists were driving us to rack and ruin, beggaring the future of generations. Only the wise heads and experienced hands of the Coalition would prevent us becoming another Greece.

With such horrors upon us, the conventional course for any incoming government desperate to bring the budget back to surplus would be to slash spending, raise taxes and stop borrowing. In fact, the Coalition has done pretty much the opposite.

So far, spending cuts have been largely tinkering at the edges, mostly to throw raw meat at the High Tory ideological nutters frantic to purge such evil beasts as Professor Tim Flannery and his Climate Commission. If the Senate can be persuaded, the carbon tax and the mineral resources tax will go. Labor's spending plans for education and the disability insurance scheme will push on more or less intact, and Abbott will actually lumber the budget with his extraordinarily expensive paid parental leave rort for rich folk, and his barmy idea of bribing carbon polluters to pollute a bit less.

But here's the killer. Guess what. These sanctimonious apostles of thrift and budget surpluses actually borrowed another $2.6 billion just this week, on your behalf.

Without getting too technical, the government's Office of Financial Management issued two lots of Treasury Bonds, at $800 million each, and two lots of Treasury Notes worth $1 billion. Naturally I have been waiting for the outcry from the usual performing troupe of talking economists and Murdoch hacks, but so far not a peep.

The other vanishing emergency is, or was, the sinister hordes of Islamic ''illegals'' storming ashore on our undefended coasts and clogging the M4 in the shiny new Toyota Camrys and Mitsubishi Pajeros showered upon them by Julia Gillard. This crisis evaporated under the weight of the splendidly named Operation Sovereign Borders, which involves a genuine three-star general, uniformed and bemedalled, clear-eyed and firm-jawed, sitting next to Scott Morrison at a TV news conference.

Morrison himself, oozing triumph and hypocrisy in equal measure from every pore, announced that he will no longer be troubling us with news about boat arrivals. Or boats being turned back (in the highly improbably event of that ever happening). Or boats being bought for cash from startled but deliriously happy Indonesian villagers. Operational matters, you see.

True, Indonesia is getting a bit scratchy about some of this stuff. But that, too, can be managed. No matter that the Indonesian Foreign Minister, Marty Natalegawa, is a Sundanese aristocrat with more university degrees than any two Australian cabinet ministers you could name, including a masters from Cambridge and a PhD from the ANU.

One good death stare from the fragrant Julie Bishop will be more than enough to put him in his place.

Mike Carlton