And this, as they say, is where the story really starts. The government is officially back to work preparing to launch itself across the uncharted seas of its election promises.

It is not as if the holiday period has been entirely unproductive; apart from the headline items like Bali and Iraq, there has been a fair amount of activity behind the scenes. Legislation is prepared for the early elimination of AWAs, work is well advanced on an apology to the stolen generation, and a review is under way of the grants system to eliminate the corruption of secret ministerial vetoes and approvals and end the pernicious practice of stopping grants to environmental and charitable organizations that criticise government policy.

A government vessel is on the track of the Japanese whalers in the Antarctic Protection Zone. All the new ministers are receiving a crash-course from their departments (and, it is to be hoped, vice-versa) and in spite of the snide comments of the Murdoch tabloids, it is considered unlikely that our workaholic Prime Minister has spent the entire break with his feet up watching television while drinking beer and eating party pies.

However this is the week where it all starts happening – or at least the week when Kevin Rudd and his merry band start making the hard decisions about exactly what “it” is going to entail, at least for the next couple of years.

As has been made painfully clear, some of the promises, especially those made with the intent of neutralising as much as possible of John Howard’s farewell bribe fest, were, to put it mildly, extravagant. The biggest and meanest of them, the elephant preparing to rampage through an already over-heated economy, is of course the tax cuts. Rudd did not quite match Howard’s bid of $34 billion; he had the decency to pare a bit off the edges. But $31 billion is still a lot of loot, no matter how you spin it.

In a situation where the smart money is on yet another official interest rate rise in February and when the banks are already slotting in unofficial rises to preserve their record profit margins, it must at least be asked whether providing a hefty increase in available spending money is quite the conservative economic management Rudd and his treasurer, Wayne Swan, boasted of during the election campaign.

Obviously, Rudd is anxious to keep faith with the voters; he would seriously hate being accused of carrying on the Howard tradition of core and non-core promises. But keeping faith can be looked at in a broader context than just the tax cuts. Rudd’s overall promise was to reduce the burden on working families; for months we heard it every waking hour and one suspects that Labor members were mouthing it in their sleep. This is what he has pledged to deliver, and he simply can’t deliver it through a bonanza of tax cuts which are promptly eaten up by increases in interest rates, never mind the wider damage that a spending spree would do to the economy.

The clever thing to do, from both a political and an economic point of view, would be to hand the money back to taxpayers, but as superannuation, not as an immediate cut; this would avoid putting any pressure on inflation while returning the cash. But this would involve breaking an election promise, and no amount of Howard-style legalistic weaseling could deny it. In this case honesty is simply not the best policy, and the cabinet will have to make the choice. Welcome to the real world of government, Messrs Rudd and Swan.

And while they’re at it, the ministers might like to consider whether other aspects of the me-tooism they indulged in as strategic electioneering should really be considered immutable.

The year opened with the leaking of a report from the Education Department which confirmed what every student of the subject already knew: the Howard government’s schools funding policy is simply unconscionable. Even in its own highly dubious terms (grants to private schools are calculated on the basis of the postcodes of the areas from which students come) it has failed miserably. The distortions in the system have gone beyond the absurd into the truly obscene. They have resulted in huge overpayments to some of the richest schools in the country; the ones that actually declare annual profits of millions of dollars.

It will be recalled that one of Howard’s justifications for making the payments to schools which quite clearly did not need them for any recognised educational purpose was that it would enable the schools to reduce their fees; perhaps some of the children of the deserving poor could also partake of the underground centrally heated rifle ranges and the annual excursions to the cheese and wine tastings of southern France. It need hardly be said that this has not happened; fees continue to soar above and beyond the rate of inflation.

The evidence is clear, the official verdict is in: the system is a crock, and a pretty corrupted one at that. And yet, Rudd made a pledge to keep it going until 2012. This is a promise that can and should be broken: it is a promise akin to one that guarantees he will keep burning down orphanages for the next four years because that’s what his predecessor did. The whole point is that he is not his predecessor: that’s why we elected him. If he made some foolish promise in the process, he can sort that out with his religious advisers.

Politics, economics and common decency, not to mention a new report which provides a perfect excuse, demand that it be declared non-binding forthwith. He should take a deep breath and give it the flick. And then he might like to take another look at the private health insurance rebate…