Helen Clark's press conference after the last cabinet meeting was a disappointment for journalists.
It was a slow news day. The Prime Minister was supposed to come to the rescue with a headline or two.
Reporters baited their questions accordingly as they awaited her arrival in the Beehive's theatrette.
But Clark didn't bite that afternoon. She ignored invitations to lash out. She refused to buy into the argument of the day about Maori claims on petroleum and mineral reserves. She suggested that some questions were better directed to the relevant portfolio minister. The full-on Minister of Everything had taken a step back and become the considered Chairman of the Board.
It is easy to read too much from one press conference. Clark - as Race Relations Conciliator Rajen Prasad found out this week - is ever alert to those crossing her Government. They will still get both barrels - and sometimes a couple more for good measure.
But things have changed in the Beehive. Clark and her colleagues are now trying to cool the political temperature rather than raising it through provocative agenda-setting.
While Labour's poll support is okay, the Government's wobbly winter ended with a dramatic switch in another key indicator of public mood. By a margin of nearly two-to-one, people think the country is on the wrong track. And that's a killer.
Confident their policies are the right ones and what the public by and large wants, Clark and the cabinet have done some hard thinking about their essential problem: their failure to get their message across.
The Coalition has been taught an expensive lesson: if you don't bother to repeatedly define what the political argument is about, others will and you'll lose it.
Having thought everyone would recognise the intrinsic wisdom of what it was doing, the Government has found itself on the losing end of two crucial issues, both of which are largely responsible for the damaging switch in the "right track-wrong track" poll.
Much to Clark's annoyance, the flagship Closing the Gaps policy has been widely interpreted as giving preference for Maori. Likewise, her opponents relentlessly fuelled the perception that economic gloom could be blamed on the Coalition's inherent failure to understand what business wants.
Once established, such perceptions are extremely hard to eradicate. But the Government is belatedly trying. If nothing else, last Tuesday's Business-to-Government forum has taken the heat out of the economic debate, for the moment.
The forum worked as a safety valve. And it forced Government critics to come up with something positive, rather than just whinge.
Clark tried to turn the event to the Government's propaganda advantage by triumphantly claiming that it marked a departure from National's economic liberalism and the start of a more pragmatic era.
That hinges on the followup. The pressure is on Clark and Michael Cullen to transform the forum's plethora of ideas into something concrete. Yet, if the pair manage to pull the bulk of business sentiment with them, National will be neutralised and those who continue to bleat will be marginalised alongside the Business Roundtable.
Political massaging is also being applied to the Closing the Gaps policy, with Government insiders saying it will be repackaged to shift away from its unfortunate "brown-white" connotation emphasis to alleviating poverty across the board.
Because of the sensitivities in her Maori caucus, Clark has to choose her words carefully. Her public flailing of Prasad was pitched in that direction. Beneath the surface, however, Clark is paddling furiously to get the policy back onside with wider New Zealand - and applying more time to political management generally.
She is committed to attend this weekend's South Pacific Forum in Kiribati and next month's Apec meeting in Brunei, but has cancelled trips to France and Antarctica to keep tabs on things at home.
She is giving her ministers more breathing space, no longer holding their hands in public or hanging them out to dry when things go wrong in their portfolio.
But she is prodding them hard in private, especially when she thinks key policies are bogged down in the bureaucracy.
Early-warning systems have been installed in the Beehive to ensure there are no more bombshells in ministers' speeches of the Tariana Turia variety.
Clark is also boosting the monitoring function of her Prime Minister's Department, fearful time-bombs are lurking within the recesses of the public service which could blow up in the Government's face.
Meanwhile, she is turning her mind to a December reshuffle to ease the load carried by her cabal of senior ministers and get more out of her effective junior ones, such as Mark Gosche.
It is not clear yet whether she will take portfolios off less successful performers, such as Margaret Wilson, Lianne Dalziel and Marian Hobbs.
Overall, Beehive insiders are stressing the need for discipline. In that regard, Cullen is biting his tongue and has become a model of vocal rectitude. He has accepted advice that what may seem a funny quip inside Parliament can reverberate badly outside.
The Government's search for equilibrium has been helped by other factors. Bad publicity from accident compensation and industrial relations law reforms has receded.
At last, easier-to-sell measures are emerging from the policy pipeline after months of fine-tuning and Coalition consultation. Take Cullen's superannuation fund. Regardless of the scheme's merits, the political spinoff was a Government unafraid to tackle the most intractable of problems and delivering something of real substance. Its unveiling also forced the Coalition's opponents to respond on its terms.
Government strategists plan a steady drip-feed of announcements to maintain that momentum after the buffeting of recent months.
Clark is inherently cautious, however. She is acutely aware that previous Labour Administrations have stumbled to early deaths by trying to do too much too quickly to satisfy unrealistic expectations.
Her game-plan is to make next year one of consolidation, bedding in this year's policy changes and making sure programmes actually work in practice and not just in theory.
Then Labour can campaign credibly in election year saying it has done what it said it would do. In short, that Labour has kept its word.
<i>The week in politics:</i> Clark clicks - less is more
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