A friend and longtime National staffer once told me that their time in opposition was the most fun they had in decades of working in politics. 

While losing is never easy - it can sour relationships and create a palpable tension in the workplace - as a staff member that loss doesn't come with the same public shame an election loss does to the people with their faces on billboards and the sides of their car. 

Generally too, it is more fun to criticise than to provide practical solutions. 

For them, opposition was a dream as the role of the opposition is to criticise what the government is doing wrong, essentially existing as backseat drivers while the government tries to steer our rickety national trailer around tight mountain passes. If you've seen the criminally underrated tense action thriller Sorcerer, you'll understand the nail-biting tension I mean. 

In the excellent recent documentary series on Australia's chaotic power struggles, Nemesis, former Prime Minister Tony Abbott is accurately described as a great opposition leader but completely out of his element once elected to the top job. 

Abbott was a great attack dog, he had a flair for biting one-liners, but once elected he almost immediately began breaking campaign promises. 

The knives were out quickly, because Abbott failed to step out of opposition and into the big job of actually leading the nation and a public sector he had criticised day-in day-out for years. 

Comparatively, our new Government has been very stable, albeit quite distracted by the actions of its coalition partners. It would be ludicrous for the proverbial knives to be out so early, but there is a lot PM Christopher Luxon could learn from the mess that the Australian Liberal Party became during the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison governments. 

Abbott's greatest political sin was breaking campaign promises not to cut health and education budgets. He argued that the government books were in much worse shape than they had previously appeared - stop me if you've heard that one before - and the cuts were necessary. 

Voters can begrudgingly accept such cuts if warned about them significantly in advance, as our current government has done with our oversized public sector, but Abbott dropped them on the public and his own caucus without warning, during Budget Day. Many of his MPs had promised not to make said cuts. It was a humiliation. 

To the public, and to his own colleagues, Abbott had lied to them. The gains he had made in opposition were gone; he became untrustworthy - the death blow to any political career. 

Our coalition government is a complex mix of factions and ideologies similar to the Liberal government of Abbott’s era. 

While Act has fulfilled its campaign promise to submit and publicly debate its Treaty Principles Bill, for National this has been an unhelpful distraction. 

Post-Waitangi, some of the furore has settled down, it is time for the PM to tackle his own agenda and refocus our national discussions on his plans to tackle practical issues. 

Politely, it's time for him to step out of David Seymour and Winston Peters’ shadow and make his mark on the big challenges. 

You know the ones - housing, health, education, law and order - the same issues that sank the last government. 

It's important to note that the last government's solutions to these problems were popular when first pitched. I've never voted Labour, and likely never will, but even I was optimistic about KiwiBuild when first pitched. I don't think it would be unfair to claim that, if Labour had built every house they promised, we would have a Labour government right now. 

Our still-new Government was elected largely as a response to such broken promises and the Jacinda Ardern/Chris Hipkins Government’s prioritising the wrong things, like the district health board amalgamation. 

National in particular was very vocal about the deterioration of law and order under the last government. Ardern and Hipkins did not explicitly run on a promise to reduce the length of prison sentences and shrink the number of offenders serving jail time but did so anyway. 

New Attorney General Judith ‘Crusher’ Collins and Police Minister Mark Mitchell promised to address this immediately. 

So far so good. 

The decision to end cultural reports, written by seemingly anyone, that argue for leniency based on the hardships the defendant may have faced during their lifetime, was a big one. 

While there is a fair case that the more information a judge or jury can learn about an offender before sentencing the better, these reports became a way to get virtually automatic sentence reductions regardless of the brutality of their crimes. 

There was also no substantive verification of the validity of each report's claims. They were just a yarn, written by anyone, for pay, with the power to put a violent criminal back on the streets quicker. Their demise should be celebrated. 

While most of our local media has obsessed over the Government's proposed ban on gang patches - I congratulate you on choosing to subscribe to ZB Plus, the thinking person's choice - far more impactful is that gang membership will now be considered an aggravating factor during sentencing. 

My inner libertarian worries about whether this is a breach of one's rights to freedom of association, but my more realistic side knows this will put high-risk offenders away from people they could victimise for longer - including me, where the well-intentioned inner libertarian lives. 

For a lot of people, this is what they have been calling for and shows this government is tackling the hard stuff. 

Other big issues will take more time to crack. As Labour found out, increasing housing supply is a long game and will take multiple solutions - from forcing zoning changes, to addressing skills and building material shortages, to facing down intentionally obstinate councils. 

Anyone hoping for overnight solutions will be sadly disappointed, but for the first time in years we have a government that is on the same page as the public, and one that appears to be practicing what it preached in opposition. 

The political year started with a focus very much on a vague constitutional matter, the kind of thing former Australian PM Tony Abbott would have loved to fixate on. Abbott would be a great Act MP, but a terrible Luxon replacement. 

It's now time to move towards the hard but meaningful stuff, the stuff this government was actually elected on. 

It is here - in health, education, growing the economy, housing and law and order - that Luxon's political fate will be decided.