The hard part begins now

CAMPBELL Newman brought up the milestone of his first 100 days in office on Tuesday by declaring that he was having lots of fun as Queensland Premier. And why wouldn't he?

Campbell Newman

CAMPBELL Newman brought up the milestone of his first 100 days in office on Tuesday by declaring that he was having lots of fun as Queensland Premier. And why wouldn't he?

On the rare occasion state parliament has sat since he galloped into government on March 24 -- just 12 days to date -- Newman has had at his back no fewer than 76 Liberal National Party MPs (excluding Speaker Fiona Simpson).

The ALP opposition is a forlorn rump of seven. Despite his election night promise to govern with "humility, grace and dignity", Newman has not for a moment let Labor forget who's on top.

But amid the predictable backslapping from team Campbell this week, which naturally released its own checklist to affirm that Newman had met or was on track to achieve the targets he had set for his first 100 days, there was the glimmer of a reality check for the LNP government.

An automated ReachTel poll of 1051 Queenslanders found that while Newman had lifted the government's vote by nearly seven points on the election result, and led the ALP by a staggering 56.5 per cent to 21.8 per cent, the Premier's own personal approval was a peg lower on 51.5 per cent.

It's hardly something he would worry about. After all, Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott would be over the moon about anything that put a plus sign in front of their stubbornly negative net approval ratings in Newspoll (the difference between those who approve and disapprove of how they do their respective jobs as prime minister and opposition leader).

And, yes, we are talking about a robo-poll, in which people respond to a recorded phone message rather than the more nuanced questioning of a trained operator. Still, ReachTel made a pretty good fist of calling the Queensland election.

Given the magnitude of the LNP victory, and his steamrolling progress in government, Newman's personal popularity might have been expected to have had a rocket attached to it.

Wayne Goss routinely posted satisfaction ratings in the 70s during the opening phase of his premiership in the early 90s in Queensland; Peter Beattie, towards the end of that decade, captured the approval of 64 per cent of voters in Newspoll. On the conservative side, Colin Barnett, on the back of a considerably smaller win than Newman's in 2008 in Western Australia, posted 56 per cent satisfaction in his first outing in Newspoll.

This suggests that Newman's honeymoon with the electorate may be shorter-lived than those of his predecessors. As one commentator put it this week, the man they called Can-do at City Hall, where he was mayor for eight years, has turned out to be more about Can't-do after moving office to the state executive building.

One of Newman's first acts was to cut funding for the Premier's Literary Awards, a small but symbolic saving that outraged the arts fraternity, and which he balanced by also giving up the corporate boxes available to himself and state ministers at the football and other sports events.

He has continued to wield the axe, especially in a state public service he says is overstaffed by up to 20,000 positions. Some 2000 jobs are tipped to go at Queensland Rail and hundreds more at state-owned power utility Translink and the Department of Justice.

It's not yet clear what Queenslanders make of Newman. This week's ReachTel poll also covered the public service cuts, and found that 52.7 per cent supported them, against 33.7 per cent opposed, with 13.6 per cent undecided.

So far, Newman has delivered on his promise to make the hard decisions he says are required to get the state back on track and reduce the heavy debt load he inherited from Labor. The question for the next 1000-odd days is whether he holds his nerve.