It’s very hard, losing an election. Paul Fletcher, a Liberal moderate who survived the May election rout, is now manager of opposition business. Fletcher opened Wednesday cranky, and his mood did not improve.
He collided early with the iron-clad law that politics is a numbers game. Labor had resolved to change the standing orders to give more questions to the crossbench and fewer to the opposition. That tweak reflected the brutal representational mathematics of the May election, the conscious uncoupling of the Liberal party and its progressive heartland.
Augmenting Fletcher’s outrage at the shrinking number of questions was umbrage at the evils of a new government truncating debate. “Indeed, [with] this standing order, Mr Speaker, we will be right up there with the Russian Duma as a toothless legislative body,” Fletcher said. It was a rhetorical flourish which possibly sounded more plausible during rehearsal than it did on the floor of the House of Representatives.
Fletcher’s performative effrontery about the standing orders was the warmup to the first question time of the 47th parliament. It was standing room only for the hour of glower in the House of Representatives at 2pm.
Anthony Albanese’s partner, Jodie, and son, Nathan, sat ringside. The Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, hovered above the chamber in the visitors gallery like visiting minor royalty.
On the day Australia recorded the fastest annual rate of growth in consumer prices for more than 20 years, one might have expected the opposition to test the prime minister’s mettle on inflation, that being the water cooler issue.
But no. It was too soon.
Given the Coalition was in power for the nine years leading up to 21 May, Wednesday’s inflation was, more than plausibly, the Coalition’s inflation. Peter Dutton, it seemed, did not want to chance his arm on Albanese’s responsibility for the soaring price of lettuce, given the tables would not only be turned, they’d be loaded into a slingshot and propelled across the chamber.
The new shadow treasurer, Angus Taylor, however, is a confident soul and he did chance his arm with energy prices. Would Albanese stand by the claims in his pre-election modelling that power prices would come down as a consequence of the government’s climate and energy policies?
The prime minister felt zero pressure to answer. He vaulted cleanly over Taylor’s proposition by unfurling the Greatest Hits of Angus, including the extraordinary decision of the former energy minister to delay an important electricity pricing update until after the election, which left Australian voters in the dark about looming increases in their power bills. (“Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus.”)
Safer for Dutton was some base-pleasing obscurantism. Perhaps a gentle hat tip to the remaining members of the HR Nicholls Society.
Australia’s alternative prime minister dived under the inconvenient tsunami of the Coalition’s record by sharing dark prophesies of a construction union that would now run rampant across the land because the new Labor regime had gutted the Australian Building and Construction Commission.
Solid, three-star Howard-era stuff. Albanese rewarded this predictability by smiling benignly across the dispatch box and schooling the Liberal leader about the trying vocation of opposition. “I wish him well,” the prime minister said, pausing for a beat, “and I hope he stays there for a very long time”.
As the various mini-reckonings and micro-dramas played out, the chamber was quieter than usual. Perhaps the government held its collective breath until Albanese demonstrated he’d done his homework, and therefore wasn’t going to wing it. Early forays signalled he was across the detail; even armed with pre-packaged zingers. New ministers experimented with their scripts, finding their métier. The new elevations clutched their question time brief folders like flotation devices.
The new Speaker, Milton Dick, made it clear he was no Tony Smith – although perhaps even Tony Smith wasn’t Tony Smith on day one. Perhaps Smith’s audacity as an independent chamber arbiter grew in increments over time.
The key moment of the first question time came when the home affairs minister, Claire O’Neil, should have been shut down by the Speaker, but wasn’t.
O’Neil accused Karen Andrews of an “act of cowardice” on election day when Australian Border Force was pressured to draft and issue a statement about an asylum seeker boat interception before the operation had even finished.
Cowardice was a clear reflection on Andrews. The standing orders deem such reflections disorderly. Fletcher doubled down on his performative high dudgeon. Umbrage ensued. Smith would have required O’Neil to withdraw. But the new Speaker was unperturbed.
O’Neil, who lacks the chamber experience of some of her peers, could have lost concentration in the melee. But she did what she’d been cast to do: close the first question time of the new parliament with a forceful j’accuse.
“We should not become immune to these things in our democracy,” she thundered at Andrews, Dutton, and the artists formerly known as the Morrison government. “This was a disgraceful, unprecedented act that should never have happened, and those opposite stand condemned doing it.”
Albanese would have considered Wednesday a solid start.
But this prime minister has been around long enough to know that what goes around eventually comes around.
Parliament checks the overwhelming advantage of incumbency. It’s the only thing that does. The institution and its rituals affords the combatants the closest thing that exists to equal billing – a structural levelling that Morrison never fully grasped, fixated as he was on the faux distancing that he imagined would keep him in power.
As time passes, the price of lettuce will become Albanese’s responsibility. Dutton knows that, and so does Australia’s 31st prime minister.
