Last Thursday the Sydney Morning Herald splashed with the headline “Costello marks out his territory” – but was does our wannabe PM actually stand for? Oddly enough, it’s a subject that hasn’t been much discussed despite the events of the last 10 days.

Big brother Tim told the ABC last week that we will now see “the man behind the smirk”.

“I think it’s very fitting that he’s going to try and broaden his views or at least stretch (them) out,” he said. “I guess people might remember when (Paul) Keating was in this position of treasurer of eight budgets. People wouldn’t have guessed that as prime minister his breadth of vision was so enormous . . . that he really took the agenda on reconciliation, the republic and engagement with Asia. I think Peter now has . . . a chance to say some broader things.”

It is probably doubtful if the Treas liked the simile. We know he’s a republican and marched for Aboriginal reconciliation, but anything with even a whiff of Keating doesn’t really go down well with the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party – let alone with the geriatric rednecks that make up most of the rank and file membership.

Still, those were the issues the Telegraph highlighted a week ago in the wake of the Treasurer’s comments that he would speak on sensitive issues outside his portfolio, including making a statement on “tolerance”. “Aboriginal reconciliation and republicanism will get a boost as Treasurer Peter Costello tries to differentiate himself from Prime Minister John Howard…”, was how its report opened.

No wonder, then, in the Sunday Telegraph, Coz was telling Piers Ackerman “I’m the strongest supporter of the Government’s asylum policy outside Howard himself… All that stuff – Aboriginal treaties, letting boats into Australia – it’s all crap.”

So what does Peter Costello believe in? The Ackerman interview was a very obvious attempt to let the Howard battlers – and those tribunes of the people, the shock jocks – know he isn’t, as it said, “the soft man in the Liberal leadership ranks”, rather than a statement of philosophy.

The only person who seems to have come up with anything has been Paul Kelly, in his column in the Oz on Saturday:

“Costello will ventilate his national vision under three broad heads: reform to deliver intergenerational equity to meet Australia’s unfolding demographic and ageing crisis; the need to tap and generate new sources of social capital as Australia moves away from dependence upon government; and a greater premium on tolerance as a community-wide value basic to national cohesion. (It was Costello in opposition to Howard who took the initial stand against Hansonism.)

“Anybody who thinks Costello will mount a leftist critique is a fool. He won’t call for a new refugee policy, an Aboriginal apology or social libertarianism. This has never been Costello’s agenda and it does not constitute the alternative inside the Liberal Party. His focus will be the coming national issues. He will put an emphasis on the next phase of economic reform, the plight of the under-privileged and the way to integrate social capital and economic progress.”

He won’t get many complaints from Crikey with an agenda like that – but it sounds very much like all the welfare big bangs the Howard Government has promised so often and never delivered on.

It is also an agenda that doesn’t sit easily with the populist panic that’s been apparent in so much policy making since the shocks of early 2001 – particularly the tendency to throw money at the ever growing pool of oldies, no matter what their incomes are – let alone the Government’s abandonment of serious economic reform. All of that could be awkward.

Where it has benefits, however, is in the opportunities it offers to fill the vacuum created by the Prime Miniature’s lack of domestic policies.

If this what Costello believes it, it’s something that’s quite appropriate for a Treasurer – and a Treasurer who wants to Prime Minister – to be articulating. With other ministers bogged down dealing with potentially unpopular changes in areas such as health and education or lacking in ideas, it gives him a chance to look like a leader, a dynamic force, to build his credibility as more than an economic manager – and even steal a march on his boss.

Is he hiding his light under a bushel at the moment, waiting for the right moment to emerge to show the real Peter Costello? Timidity now won’t help his cause – those “ticker” insults that were whispered last week were meant to hurt.

It would be in Peter Costello’s best interests if he started to let us know very soon just what he actually believes in.