No cheers for this tired Canberra circus
The circus that is the 45th Parliament is grinding to a close and it’s passing won’t be mourned by anyone in their right mind, writes James Campbell.
James Campbell
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It’s been a great show, but the curtain is coming down on the 45th Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia.
If you look at the sitting calendar for 2019, there are three days scheduled for the first week of April but no one can say for sure if they will end up happening.
It’s possible Prime Minister Scott Morrison could have a change of heart and decide to call the election in March, potentially consigning Josh Frydenberg to the Wikipedia list of Australian treasurers who didn’t deliver a budget — alongside the Whitlam administration’s Jim Cairns and Frydenberg’s Labor opposite number Chris Bowen, who had three months in the job at the fag end of the second Rudd government.
SHORTEN SAILS INTO STORMY WATERS
If Josh does get his big moment in the spotlight on the first Tuesday in April, in the normal course of events two nights later Bill Shorten will rise to give the Labor Party’s reply. Or at least he will if Scott Morrison lets him have the platform.
Over the years Shorten has done rather well in budget in reply speeches — this will be his sixth — and the Prime Minister might decide that it is not in the government’s interest for the last word in this parliament go to Shorten. Instead he could call the election a day after Frydenberg has finished doing his thing.
So while there is a good chance we will be back here for at least one day in April, this has been the last normal week of parliament before the May election, with departing cast members Jenny Macklin, Wayne Swan, Kate Ellis and Kelly O’Dwyer giving tearful valedictory speeches to the House of Representatives.
But in reality there has been nothing normal about the way parliament has been operating since the end of last year, when Kerryn Phelps won the Wentworth by-election and Julia Banks walked out of the Liberal Party.
The two sitting weeks of minority government the Coalition has endured have been horrible for them, far worse than anything Julia Gillard went through in her almost three years as prime minister without a majority.
Certainly, Gillard had to rely on the votes of the Green member for Melbourne Adam Bandt and the three amigos — Andrew Wilkie, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott — to get her way.
But somehow she made it seem easy compared with the hard work Morrison has been making of things these past two weeks. Last week, of course, the government was defeated on the medevac bill that will make it easier for asylum seekers in Papua New Guinea and Nauru to join us here, though it remains to be seen how the politics of that legislation will play out.
This week has been worse, with Morrison forced into three policy U-turns to avoid another defeat on the floor of the House.
The first saw the government abandon its opposition to a royal commission into the disability sector — a handy win for the nation’s hardworking legal community. The second saw a doubling of penalties for corporate crooks, and the third saw a change in the law to make it easier for small businesses to sue for breaches of competition law — another handy win for the nation’s hardworking legal community.
In between all that, Shorten, Bowen and Labor’s financial services spokeswoman Clare O’Neil held a press conference waving around draft legislation they were hoping to introduce that would give effect to a small number of recommendations from the banking royal commission.
The legislation had been drafted by the former federal court judge Ray Finklestein, who older readers will remember as the lead author of the advice that our Premier Daniel Andrews relied upon for his claim that the East West Link contract “wasn’t worth the paper it was written on”.
Considering the bill for getting out of that contract ended up being $1.4 billion, Finklestein can probably be regarded as the current record-holder for the most expensive advice in Victorian legal history.
In which case we should probably count ourselves lucky, for there is no chance of his bill becoming law, because even if Labor were to get the numbers to introduce it, there is no chance of it passing parliament before the election.
There might have been time to pass it if Andrew Wilkie had gone along with Labor’s attempt to hold more sitting days in March. Luckily the independent member for Denison was too sensible and the country has been spared any more of this farce than is already pencilled into the calendar.
The past two weeks have, in fact, been a frightening glimpse into an alternate reality in which the 18th century never ended and instead of cabinet government, in which the executive automatically controls the lower house, we have a system where a coalition of votes has to be cobbled together from scratch for each piece of legislation — which the parliament can then amend at its pleasure. Basically the system of government which operates in the United States.
Luckily — barring disaster — this is a nightmare from which Australia will wake in May when we get ourselves a majority government again. Seriously, this circus can’t end soon enough.
James Campbell is national politics editor.
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