Funny things really do happen in supermarkets. You see it quite often.



On Tuesday the funny things were, in no particular order: a protester interrupting the prime minister’s considered effort to project gravitas among the root vegetables; the prime minister pretending to answer a question about whether his communications minister would break curfew to go on a television program; and the prime minister appearing to suggest that if the Greek financial crisis and the current global financial market wobbles posed a problem, then his grocery code of conduct was the solution.

Lest we get overcome by the sheer bizarreness of the sequence – which, for the record, took place in the Wolli Creek Woolworths on a fine winter’s Tuesday morning – let’s deal with these events one by one.

Tony Abbott had come to the Sydney suburb of Wolli Creek for some retail politics. (Yes, you see what I did there.) The cameras gathered, as they do.

Abbott got his opening sequence off before a protester loomed with intent. He appeared close to the onions. I’m not sure what the protester was unhappy about, but the man in the black T-shirt seemed to be concerned about democracy before he was helpfully bundled out of the live television shot.

Between the apples and potatoes, a heckler is moved on. Photograph: Paul Miller/AAP

Normal transmission resumed.

Reporters, as could have been predicted, were quite interested in the vexed matter of whether the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, would, like the agriculture minister, Barnaby Joyce, be sent to his room next Monday night to punish the ABC, which is so deeply and thoroughly punished at the present time that it continues to broadcast Q&A to larger audiences.

Tony Abbott crafted and emitted words that sounded for all the world like Our Malcolm would absolutely be joining Our Barnaby on home duties, but close inspection of the prime ministerial tenses confirmed the pronouncement was rather more ambiguous. The government was, the prime minister observed, not going to “advertise” Q&A. Whether not advertising Q&A meant going on Q&A or whether it meant not going on Q&A remains, for now, moot.

Government MPs have taken to asking journalists whether they can get to the bottom of this intermittent Q&A ban because they don’t quite know what the rule is. A spokesman for the prime minister would only say later that the prime minister’s comments spoke for themselves.

That was all fairly solid as passing strange goes.

But for this particular viewer, peak weird happened when the prime minister was asked to comment on Greece and on the recent market movements in China – the biggest global story of the moment.

Generally when Australian prime ministers are asked about global financial instability prompted by complex economic and political events far from home, their first resort is to reassure.

The reassurance tends to go along the lines that Australia has a sound budget and well regulated banks and financial institutions and senior officials are monitoring events and we have absolutely nothing to worry about. That’s what leaders tend to do in such moments, tell voters they are across the facts and the facts speak well enough for us.

Abbott, however, had clearly come to Wolli Creek to talk grocery codes of conduct and nothing, not even a Grexit, was going to bounce him off message.

“Michael, look the important thing is to do whatever we can to build a strong and prosperous economy locally and again I get back to the grocery code of conduct. This is about ensuring that we have the strongest possible local businesses to supply the strongest possible local businesses. We have a great supermarket system. That rests on the shoulders of great local suppliers. And this is about ensuring that we continue to have very strong local suppliers, the best possible product at the best possible price, so that we get the best possible deal for consumers. If we do that we will avoid the problems that we see overseas.”

Let’s just replay that final observation in our minds for a short moment because it sounded for all the world that Tony Abbott was saying a grocery code of conduct could have prevented the Greek financial crisis.

Knowing that the prime minister couldn’t possibly have meant that, reporters came back for another go. Was the prime minister concerned about intervention by the Chinese government in their stock market in recent days?

The prime minister said he wasn’t going to run a commentary on decisions by other governments. He’d come to Wolli Creek to explain his own government, which was interested in national security and the budget and small business tax breaks and the grocery code of conduct – and the sum of that meant if you produced stronger local businesses that meant strong economies and then all manner of things would be well.

Yes, all will be well.

All manner of things will be well.