Here was Shorten trying manfully to puncture Abbott's blithe spirit. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten listens as Prime Minister Tony Abbott quotes The Killing Season during question time. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen "Before the election, the Prime Minister said, 'only the Coalition can be trusted when we say there will be no deals with the Greens... Given the Prime Minister has now done dirty deals with the Greens on the debt ceiling and slashing part pensions, how can Australians believe a single word this Prime Minister says?" Abbott barely stilled his hand from blessing himself in gratitude. "I am a little surprised that the Leader of the Opposition should choose to start question time today talking about trust, given what we were told on The Killing Season last night," he chortled.

As Labor MPs howled and leapt about in protest, the Prime Minister took another shot. "One by one the guilty men get to their feet," he jabbed at the opposition manager for business, Tony Burke, a leading Gillard man in the demise of Kevin Rudd. Such was Abbott's ebullience he offered a benediction to no less than the organisation he considers his tormentor. "I want to say publicly 'thank you to the ABC. Thank you to the ABC'," he crowed, throwing his arms high and wide. "I don't normally say thank you to the ABC but I have to say Australia is indebted to you on this instance."

The ABC, of course, is responsible for The Killing Season, a slasher movie in three parts. On Tuesday night it recreated the midnight replacement of Rudd by Gillard, a parade of senior Labor figures helpfully re-enacting the grisly scenes. Rudd used the word betrayal again and again. Gillard confessed to having offered Kevin false hope of a reprieve minutes before the axe was wielded. Shorten did not offer his services to the documentary makers. Still, he was portrayed wielding a hot phone in a Vietnamese restaurant to marshall the numbers for the final blow. A Gillard adviser claimed Gillard was counseled not to make Shorten industrial relations minister because he could not be trusted, and would use the union movement to "knock her off". The series finishes next week, and will undoubtedly record that Shorten did indeed play a leading role in knocking off Gillard and replacing her with Rudd Mark II.

As for Abbott's dirty deal with the dreadful Greens? Abbott, to whom broken commitments have become water off a duck's back, has only to remind Parliament that Gillard - Shorten's one-time champion - had to rely daily on deals with the Greens to form and maintain government. The Killing Season is, we imagine, on constant replay in Abbott's office.