Following February's failed spill motion against the Prime Minister, 7.30 host Leigh Sales interviewed Tony Abbott in his office and interrogated him on his true identity.
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"Who are you?" she famously asked him.
Abbott had trouble answering. Eventually he came up with a response formulated in the Royal we.
"We stand for … lower taxes, smaller government, greater freedom… we are a government that believes in values and institutions that have stood the test of time."
Fair enough. But on a personal, Prime Ministerial level, the riddle remained.
Tony Abbott has been in public life for more than 20 years, and we have a collection of established facts about him.
His Catholicism. His family. His Oxford boxing blue. His adoration of the monarchy. His love of surfing and his sporty tendency to get onto things and into things, be they diggers, trampolines or brown onions, all of which he has molested at various photo opportunities during his career.
Yet the Prime Minister's contradictory positions on the issues which matter now: government debt, Muslims, the status of women, Aboriginal affairs, to name a mere grab-bag, make it impossible to know what he really believes.
His stop-start reversals of policy and even more importantly, philosophy, make his decision-making opaque where he promised transparency. His political persona comes off as childishly fickle, despite his promises of "grown-up" government.
In December last year, Abbott made the point that ISIS had been "roundly condemned" by leading Sunni scholars and there was "no serious religious leader who is defending this". He refused to link the Sydney siege gunman to Islam, saying that "we don't blame the Pope for the IRA".
Then, in February, he offended Muslim leaders when he said that Western leaders often described Islam as a religion of peace, and he wished "more Muslim leaders would say that more often and mean it".
He is the Minister for Women and a self-declared feminist who initially appointed a sole woman to his cabinet. He is the Cassandra who warned about the "debt and deficit disaster" but now tells a confused public that "a ratio of debt to GDP at about 50 or 60 per cent is a pretty good result".
This week saw another stunning re-negotiation of Abbott government values, over the issue of cuts to the Aboriginal Legal Service.
For a while, these cuts looked like the forgotten tale of a rare promise kept.
While the Abbott government was being criticised for all its post-election pledge-dodging, it remained steadfast in its commitment to slash funding to the Aboriginal Legal Service, the desperately needed and chronically under-funded band of solicitors who act for , on an already infinitesimal budget, the most over-represented group in the Australian justice system.
The case of the ALS cuts (which were to be accompanied by cuts to Legal Aid and Community Legal Centres) was the inverse of the Abbott government's form on its other budget measures.
That is, Treasurer Joe Hockey actually announced them before the election.
Hockey said the ALS budget would be cut by $43.4 million over four years. That was 20 per cent of the service's budget, the fiscal equivalent of cutting off its legs.
Just a few months later, the government changed its mind. Actually, it announced, via the December 2013 "mini-budget", it would just cut $13.4 million, a five per cent cut over four years.
On neither occasion was the ALS notified in writing of the government's intentions, and for 18 months neither the Attorney-General George Brandis, nor the Prime Minister's office would say what precisely the ALS could expect.
This made forward planning so insecure as to be impossible. The ALS began a lobbying campaign, protesting the cruelty of slashing funding to the cohort of people who already face jailing at a much higher rate than the general population, and who historically have done far worse in the criminal justice system than other Australians.
Then, as a final twist to the saga, on Thursday Brandis announced the reversal of the December 2013 cuts. There is still uncertainty over funding for a 24-hour hotline for Aboriginal people taken into custody, and the family law practice, which are funded separately.
Funding will also be restored to Community Legal Centres. A large part of their work is representing the victims of domestic violence, an issue which has in the past year become a high-profile subject of public outrage.
"On due consideration the government has announced the economies announced in the 2013 MYEFO [Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook] are economies that should be re-thought," Brandis told journalists.
This is good news. The ALS does a lot of excellent, un-sung work, but perhaps its most important service is its children's court work.
Aboriginal children make up a full half of the population in juvenile detention – a figure so staggering I had to double-check it.
This week I spoke to an ALS solicitor, Sasha da Silva, who works at the Parramatta Children's Court. Her job is not confined to the courtroom. She also refers her child-clients to mental health care, rehab and housing services.
A large proportion of her kids have been taken from their families and are in out-of-home care. They are often charged with "acting out" offences, like property damage, that wouldn't be criminalised if they were at home.
Da Silva is paid a base salary of $60,000 a year (about $68K with salary sacrifice tax benefits). The average Australian fulltime salary is $75,000. She has two degrees. I spoke to her at 7.30am, when she was beginning her work day. The night before she had worked until 10pm and she expects to be working this weekend, as she was last weekend. She loves her job and didn't complain about the hours, she said her colleagues work just as hard. I pried those details out of her.
"It's so difficult to explain the entrenched disadvantage these kids are facing already," she said.
"These are kids from extremely disadvantaged backgrounds who have experienced a high degree of trauma. These are kids who are already vulnerable, but they are resilient and proud."
These are the kids whose funding the self-declared Prime Minister for Aboriginal people came into office promising to cut.
That was what Tony Abbott stood for in September 2013. Now, in the wake of a lot of bad publicity, accusations of hypocrisy, and the airing of domestic violence as a huge social problem, he seems to stand for protecting them.
It's hard to know which version is real.
