Kevin Rudd’s terrible week (job figures aside) continues to get worse with the Chinese Government putting the spotlight back on Stern Hu, whose incarceration by the murderous Beijing regime had slipped out of the media spotlight for most of the last six months.

Back in July, his case was the prompt for the Opposition, the tabloid media, broadsheet chinstrokers, old China hands and Sinophobes and Sinophiles alike to berate Rudd for not being close enough to, or being too close to, Beijing.  Most of the Hu commentary was a variation on either that the Chinese only understood strength, or that they were a thoroughly inscrutable lot. Thereafter, purpose served, Hu was forgotten.

The return – or more accurately non-return – of Hu of course follows poor polls, a flat – though hardly disastrous – appearance on Q&A, a truly grubby handover of taxpayer funds to the free-to-air television networks, more controversy over the NBN Co job of Mike Kaiser (and old story, and not even the worst example of jobs for the boys at NBN Co, but anyway) and, worst of all, the Environment Department’s comprehensive bungling of the Green Loans and home insulation programs.

Barnaby Joyce and the Opposition’s insipid pursuit of Peter Garrett have been the only things going the Government’s way this week – although even the latter could be construed as an effort to ensure Garrett remains on the frontbench. And backbencher Graham Perrett did his best to ruin the pursuit of Joyce last night when he made a wisecrack comparing Barnaby Joyce to Ivan Milat.

Today may yet – hopefully – see some sustained scrutiny of Garrett in Question Time after he was simply let off the hook yesterday by dud Opposition tactics and poor execution. A serious Opposition doesn’t lose the call in mid-pursuit of a wounded Minister.

In short, this finally feels like a proper first term Government, although it has yet to reach the crisis-a-week feeling that pervaded the early days of the Howard Government.

Rudd and his office will now learn that high-handedness and manipulation are fine when things are going well – when you’re up against an inept Opposition and the polls can’t seem to flatter you enough.  But it serves to store up a whole lot of payback once things aren’t going so well, particularly among political journalists, who remember every slight and every effort to manipulate, spin and control political coverage to serve partisan ends.

That’s a problem of management that can be addressed. Journalists pissed off can be buttered up with better access.

Rudd’s more fundamental problem is that a key characteristic of his political personality is proving unsustainable over a long period.  For all his talk of taking tough decisions and being willing to risk unpopularity and awareness that there are no magic solutions, a key element of the Rudd personality is the assurance that he shares voters’ concerns on pretty much any issue raised with him and wants to do something about them.  Rudd’s instinctive reaction on virtually any issue is to express concern, without committing to any specific action, or without any follow-up.

It stood him in good stead in the lead-up to the 2007 election, where he was able to express concern about issues like petrol and grocery prices and thereby convey that he was on the same wavelength as voters, who felt themselves hard-pressed despite the economic boom.  No one ever lost votes telling well-off Australians that they were doing it tough and needed help.

As a means of catering to the selfish obsessions of voters, it was highly effective against John Howard, who was far more reluctant to suggest that governments could or should be in the business of pandering to the most micro-concerns of voters.  Howard preferred simply to throw money at them at let them work out how to spend it.

The reflexive expression of concern without demonstrated action on the issue is no longer working as a tactic because it can’t be sustained over the long term.  Eventually voters start to wonder what the Government has specifically done. A pattern emerges of concern expressed, but not acted upon.

When it comes to fulfilling its election commitments, this Government has been rather more obsessive about doing so than most. The Opposition can try to pick out promises it claims were breached but Rudd doesn’t come close to the systematic breaching of promises by the Howard Government in its first term – most of which, incidentally, were justified by fiscal circumstances, even though Howard like Keating knew perfectly well just what a dire state the Budget was in before the 1996 election.

But being able to tick off election commitments on a list masks the fundamental truth that Rudd oversold himself as being cognisant of voter concerns and willing to address them, in a way that Howard, even at his Big Government worst, was never prepared to do. There’s a credibility gap that can’t be addressed no matter how often Rudd recites his list of kept promises, a feeling that he is less than what he offered.

It’s not necessarily fatal. Voters were perfectly aware John Howard lied and twisted his own words to suit his purposes but kept electing him anyway, confident in the job he was doing.  There’s no reason why Rudd shouldn’t manage the same, especially with his successful management of the financial crisis behind him. But only if he can overcome his addiction to pandering to voters and convince voters Green Loans and foil insulation aren’t symbolic of his Government’s competence.