Federal Parliament has finally voted for a new speaker. New politics will be much tougher to find. Tony Smith faces his first test in question time Tuesday and there will be attempts from both sides to pretend some of the nastiness has evaporated as fast as Bronwyn Bishop's political career. Unfortunately, any truce is unlikely to last - despite the improved efforts of Speaker Smith. Not when the political stakes are so high and the way ahead so uncertain.
The latest declines in business and consumer confidence are as much to do with the mediocre economic outlook as the impoverished political outlook. But they do reflect the sense of drift in Australian politics and an increasing lack of faith in the ability of its leaders to deal with the bigger issues facing the country. 
Facing flagging public confidence is hardly unique to Australia's political class, of course. Even when demonstrating a spectacular ability to implode his own campaign with offensive comments, Donald Trump's early success in drawing attention and support is part of the general distaste for US politics and politicians as usual. And despite Greece's unhappy experience, populist movements are still strong throughout most of Europe.
But the mood of Australian politics is stuck in a particularly deep funk, one that extends well beyond the furore over entitlements. All reputations have certainly been badly burned by the spreading intensity of the Bishop bushfire sparked by her Melbourne to Geelong helicopter ride.
The ability to now pore over all individuals' travel records and count up business class fares and accommodation costs make it the ultimate "Gotcha". For voters, it's the sense of entitlement being exposed as much as the dollars. Yet it's also relatively meaningless - in terms of policy as opposed to symbolism.
The real problem for the Abbott government remains the inability to explain what it's doing - and why. That includes selling a sense of economic direction to cope with challenges ahead as well as the opportunities. That's particularly important when it's apparent the easy wins and revenue of the past decade are gone.
After the debacle of the leadership challenge-that-wasn't-quite six months ago, Tony Abbott belatedly promised the start of good government from that day on. His backbenchers are still awaiting to see more evidence of that commitment. After all, the voters had wrongly assumed that is just what they were entitled to after booting out Labor in   September 2013.
The issue now is how firmly set their very negative judgment of Tony Abbott's Prime Ministership has become. The polls suggest the steady state of disaffection with him is unlikely to change much. Fears of Coalition MPs about what this means for their own seats have not disappeared. If anything, disquiet has increased again over the parliamentary break.
Even though the Coalition dismisses Labor's obvious vulnerability on economic management and insists voters will be deterred come election time, backbenchers and ministers alike appreciate the electoral logic of the corollary. Such Labor weakness really means the government should be comfortably ahead or level rather than so uncomfortably and continually well behind the opposition.
So Tony Abbott's official focus on jobs and growth may be the right slogan but it needs a lot more substance behind it to be at all persuasive to his party as well as to the public. Instead, there are always more reviews, more things immediately ruled out, more political distractions, more policy impasses with the states or in the Senate. This is far from being all the fault of the federal government. The Coalition still has to bear responsibility for negotiating those fault lines as best as it can. So far, its mark for managing this remains perilously close to an F.
It's not just that any (modest) momentum possible out of the   May "small business" budget has been stalled by the protracted diversion into political expenses, compounded by Abbott's failure to grasp the obvious for far too long. More generally, it's the lack of any coherently expressed view about how to encourage the jobs and services of the future.
The free trade agreements negotiated by Andrew Robb are a great start but only that. The latest expensive package of ship building jobs for South Australia are seen as "too little-too late" to assuage the state's disillusion with Canberra and its worries about rising unemployment. Nor does the announcement dovetail into any broader national strategy on the future (what there is of it) of advanced manufacturing in Australia. Or do we just concentrate on services and agriculture and an eventual rebound in mining and hope for the best?
There are never clear cut answers to these issues and individual businesses will have to figure out the opportunities that do exist. Avoiding risk is no longer a sustainable strategy for business leaders as much as for political leaders. Many smaller businesses are desperately trying to fill the gap, under the radar of the announcements by big businesses about job losses and restructuring.
But confidence is always key to investment and the government doesn't help by effectively suggesting it's all a bit hard to do much more.
Note to Joe Hockey. Having a tax white paper doesn't constitute actual tax reform - especially when the Abbott government is unwilling to take its chances campaigning on a promise to deliver real change. Post the mining and carbon taxes, the mantra of "lower, simpler, fairer" remains a thought bubble.
This excess caution is largely due to the continuing backlash against the government's clumsy and ill-fated attempts to sell its first budget and spending cuts. It's also a failure of policy imagination that will end up costing us all.
Advance Australia Where?