There were two business days in this short sitting week to open the 45th parliament; two question times.



The first I watched on TV. It was a deliberate choice. I wanted to consume the opening in the same way voters would – on their televisions. The second one I watched from the press gallery in the House of Representatives, sitting up behind the prime minister, looking down over his backbench.

The television impression on day one was a prime minister intent on punching up and cutting through. Malcolm Turnbull projected confidence and he roamed up and down the table, Rumpolian, as though he was delivering closing arguments at the Old Bailey.

In the chamber, you get a different perspective. Turnbull was still punching up, nothing material had actually changed, but embedded in the theatre, in the bear pit, the primary take-home impression was one of encirclement.

Across the dispatch box, Bill Shorten is so confident he is almost levitating. The opposition troops sitting behind him are leaning in for conflict, their ranks swelled by election success.

The Coalition backbench veered between surly and pique. There wasn’t the same commonality of purpose. Their leader up the front appeared to be out on his own, filibustering in a theatre of the round, not entirely convincingly.

Events rolled out of the second question time into Thursday night. For weeks, Coalition backbenchers have been fretting in their electorates about an absence of clear strategy from the leadership. Now, the full story was laid bare. There was also no organising principle, and, apparently, no discipline.

The prime minister faced two significant ambushes this week, the opening week of the new parliamentary term. As we’ve touched down on Thursday night, let’s stay there as the first pass. Labor was not exactly subtle in telegraphing its objectives. Week one was about procedural forays to force encounters where the government would lose a vote on the floor of either chamber, preferably the lower house – maximum drama.

If a moment presented, Labor would take it. Nothing covert. All as obvious as the nose on your face.

Under pressure ... Malcolm Turnbull and Christopher Pyne in the House of Representatives on Thursday after the Coalition lost votes. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Having survived during a period of brutally contested minority government, played out during a period of civil war between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, Labor is used to adversity. The opposition also knows from that period that sloppy process can kill you if you let it. It’s a visceral lesson, as Michael Keenan, Christian Porter and Peter Dutton can now probably attest.

While Labor has spent the period since the great eruption in 2010 managing adversity in most all of its forms, the Coalition has been pumped up with a supreme sense of entitlement. Petulance and arrogance have been the order of the day since Labor fell into disarray. The Senate was “feral” because it wouldn’t pass a manifestly unfair budget riddled with broken election promises, and media voices who refused to buy into the masters of the universe mythology, who had the temerity to point out that the emperor was wearing little more than a G-string, were intent on leftist conspiracies.

The overweening arrogance has ebbed in the Turnbull period, but vestiges of it persist as a destructive default in Coalition ranks. The first rule of tribalism is that everything is always someone else’s fault.

Well, it’s crunch time now, folks. Government in this term is not an entitlement, it can’t be with a one-seat majority. It’s tight as a fish’s backside, not to put too fine a point on it. And Labor will make it hard, because that’s politics, and, well, karma.

I said there were two ambushes. The second was a blue-on-blue attack. I advised readers last weekend to watch the burbling activity around the Racial Discrimination Act, and the breakout came in force, with the entire Coalition Senate backbench, bar one, backing Cory Bernardi’s push to remove “insult” and “offend” from the legislation.

I’ve previously explained the totemic nature of this debate inside the Coalition, so we don’t need to revisit that now, we only need note (again) that conservatives inside the government are not interested in suing for peace. The prime minister wasn’t even given a grace period in the opening week of parliament to get his feet under the desk. People wanted to send a message.

If the prime minister is paying attention, and not swamped by the sheer weight of his responsibilities – setting up a summit season that’s about to kick off and absorbing huge amounts of time and energy behind the scenes; putting together a legislative program for the new parliament; and growing eyes in the back of his head – it is possible to learn lessons from ambush week.

It is possible the government as a collective now understands the parliament they are in, and will inhabit for the next three years. Perhaps if you can’t learn humility you can have it thrust upon you.

As to the fractured internals, perhaps at a certain point in time the prime minister will understand that the only way out of the current game of catch and kill is to stand and fight.

Here’s a simple, practical idea. Instead of waiting passively for Labor to sink the same-sex marriage plebiscite, how about taking control of the issue?

How about going to Shorten and saying let’s do this together. Let’s formulate a question, let’s campaign for the yes vote on a joint platform so we can make sure we offset some of the inevitable nastiness that the LGBTI community is worried about. Let’s stop the parlour intrigues and actually achieve something.

Shorten is under huge internal pressure to block the plebiscite, but a sincere, inclusive pitch from Turnbull would complicate the picture for the Labor leader. It would be quite hard to resist, given progressives are starting to fracture over the plebiscite issue, worrying that sinking the plebiscite sinks marriage equality for another three years.

It would also remind the voters about the Malcolm Turnbull they admired, the one who took risks, eschewed tribalism and stood up for principles. Right now, if the plebiscite sinks, it will seen as another victory for the conservatives and every victory for them makes him weaker.

Same with the budget. Right now Labor will very probably get away with flipping on pre-election savings commitments worth a couple of billion dollars because of a perception the government is creating for itself that it can’t agree on anything, or work cohesively and competently to deliver it. I find this trajectory pretty astonishing.



Rather than sending poor Mathias Cormann out to demean himself with jelly analogies, or bowl up a savings bill with a substantial calculation error (what’s $100m between friends?), perhaps knuckle down, check the fine print, then sit down with Labor and get some early runs on the board.

Right now we have a situation where Labor – the party that lost the election at least in part because it could not get its fiscal story together – is wedging the government successfully on budget responsibility. If that’s the trajectory and you are the government, you really are in trouble. Declaring budget repair is a moral imperative carries no water unless you’ve got a strategy to deliver it.

Of course, cooperation of the genuine kind goes against conventional political wisdom. Politics in the modern era is supposed to be post-fact and, grimly, winner-takes-all.

Everyone talks about reaching across the aisle to try to stop frustrated voters storming the parliamentary precinct in an outbreak of pure rage and frustration, but no one actually means it. Flicking the switch to genuine cooperation (as opposed to motherhood statements about the desirability of it) removes the points of difference, and it’s a tacit admission of weakness.

If Turnbull moved decisively in the direction of centrist cooperation, various charges would be levelled against him in predictable quarters. He’d be thumbing his nose at the base. He’d be provoking Ray Hadley. He’d be emboldening Tony Abbott.

Hence the hesitancy. Call for an outbreak of sensible centrism, but lack the follow through, which allows Shorten to take pot shots and pretend to cooperate while pulling every wedge in the book, because it’s all just brinksmanship. We can express these various rationales more directly: the prime minister is acting like a person lacking the internal authority to change the game.

My answer is, again, simple. Given everyone else in politics right now is intent on testing the limits of Turnbull’s authority, why not the prime minister himself? Why not test your own authority by striking a decisive prime ministerial course?

We are not yet at the point of crash or crash through, that would be an appalling, febrile, beat-up.

But the current drift spells danger, and to mess with an old but useful adage, perhaps you can avoid slow death on your knees by living on your feet.