Chief Minister Howard Quayle will be centre stage as the 2018/19 parliamentary year drags itself into action, writes Paul Speller.

That tricky third year of a parliament - when patience is replaced by expectation - gets underway this week.

Mr Quayle will give his rather grandly-titled ’state of the nation address’ at today’s sitting.

Last year, Mr Quayle used this important moment in the parliamentary calendar to have a pop at the standard of local journalism.

His timing was almost perfect, given that just days later he got to experience what it was like to have a bad press on the international stage as the Paradise Papers row broke.

Which messengers - if any - he chooses to shoot this year, we shall have to wait and see, but we can be fairly confident that the word ’Brexit’ will come up once or twice.

We will probably be told, also, that no one is complacent, we are on the right track and that a consensus approach is what is needed, rather than negativity.

Feel free to draw up your own Quayle Bingo card, if listening in.

Policy and Reform Minister Chris Thomas has been quite quiet this summer, but he’ll make up for that with two statements, one on the living wage - the one that is higher than the minimum wage, but is only advisory and hasn’t even been applied for all government workers - and another on rates modernisation.

Then it will be all eyes on Treasury Minister Alfred Cannan for another statement on the Steam Packet, possibly to tell us how well everything is going following Tynwald’s decision to buy themselves a ferry company with our money.

As if guiding the most contentious piece of legislation in living memory through the House of Keys last year (abortion reform) wasn’t enough, Dr Alex Allinson now has to convince Tynwald to vote for a new pricing strategy that will see water rates go down and the toilet tax more than double.

Can we find something easy for him to do next, please?

Later on, the public accounts committee will ask if it can hand over the reins for the inquiry to the Media Development Fund and the multi-million-pound losses in the film industry to three ’alternate’ Tynwald members.

That’s because all of those on the PAC could be perceived as having a conflict of interest for various reasons.

Tynwald will also be asked to recognise the sacrifice made by Manx people during the Great War, which ended 100 years ago.

A late addition to the agenda will see proposed new eligibility criteria for public sector housing.

In question time the new-ish children’s champion Tim Baker (Ayre and Michael) has questions covering the education of looked-after children, fostering services and what relationship remains between the government and the Children’s Centre.

The woman he replaced in that role, Daphne Caine (Garff) has tabled more questions seeking performance data from schools.

Last week the UK school inspection service Ofsted announced plans to reduce its emphasis on data, because ’focus on data is coming at the expense of what’s happening in schools’.

Other subjects range from the Post Office to housing.