TONY Abbott went missing in more than one sense this week.
The electoral strategy of ''triangulation'', devised by the American political svengali Dick Morris, is designed to wrong-foot rivals by simultaneously moving to the middle ground of an issue and rising above the left versus right dichotomies that turn off many voters.
Yet Mr Abbott was not so much triangulating as veering off at a radical tangent when he decamped to the outback for four days while Kevin Rudd was selling his health reforms.
The escapade displayed qualities that make Tony Abbott at once attractive as a human being yet ill-disciplined as an opposition leader just months from an election campaign.
Caught short by Mr Rudd's health announcement on Wednesday, Mr Abbott yesterday hastily arranged a visit to Alice Springs Hospital to meet an Aboriginal woman, Nora Ward, who is a victim of the "blame game" that bedevils the hospital system.
Mrs Ward, from South Australia's remote north-west, came to Alice Springs for renal treatment, only to be told she may have to travel 1535 kilometres south to Adelaide because the SA government will not pick up the tab for her treatment in the Northern Territory.
The hospital was not happy to have a media scrum materialise on its doorstep so Mrs Ward was wheeled outside to illustrate Mr Abbott's claim that Mr Rudd's plan would not address her plight and that of people like her.
So how did the Opposition Leader manage to triangulate himself so far from the issue of the day? He first visited Kings Creek station, about 300 kilometres south-west of Alice Springs, last year as the opposition's indigenous affairs spokesman.
He was much taken with the ideas of the station's owner, Ian Conway, a vigorous, self-made Aboriginal entrepreneur pursuing several laudable initiatives to help local indigenous people become more self-reliant.
By revisiting the station and articulating his ideas on indigenous affairs, Mr Abbott was seeking to outflank the Prime Minister. Mr Abbott and his staff were trying to create television images of a practical man of action, hard at work out in the real world, in contrast to the bookish Mr Rudd closeted in Canberra with the bureaucrats.
But for Mr Abbott's colleagues and the Liberal Party organisation there were ominous elements to the week an opposition leader went walkabout.
First, the trip was poorly advanced and managed. Mr Abbott put his itinerary largely in the hands of Mr Conway, which led to the ''Abbott lost in the wilderness'' blunder: hardly what the Liberal Party needs when Labor is trying to portray Mr Abbott as reckless.
Second, the venture suggests that Mr Abbott is yet to buy into the political discipline he will need for the election campaign proper.
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