Question Time: GST, Shorten, Groundhog Day and Clive Palmer

Groundhog Day for Bill Shorten, new constituency questions prove farcical, and one MP comes up with “good ideas’’.

Clive Palmer attends Remembrance Day services at the Australian War Memorial ahead of Question Time today. Picture Gary Ramage

It’s Groundhog Day for Bill Shorten and GST as the new system of constituency questions proves farcical. Here’s what we learned in Question Time today

1. What we have suspected for a few days has been confirmed — the new system of constituency questions is a farce. The bold idea as part of the new politics of optimism and inclusion under Malcolm Turnbull was that Government backbenchers would be able to ask unprompted questions from their constituents instead of the pre-prepared Dorothy Dixers fed out by ministers. It hasn’t worked.

Instead of surprise questions from real voters the questions being bowled up during the “constituency questions” are pre-warned, scripted and designed to give the Minister and backbencher a bit of extra local publicity. Today the spontaneity charade was destroyed when the Liberal MP for Corangamite, Sarah Henderson, announced on Twitter, before she asked the question, what it was and which minister it was going to. As assistant Communications Minister Paul Fletcher has been shamed into trying to hide his script in the palm of his hand.

2. Malcolm Turnbull’s attendance at the G20 in Turkey is a parish pump issue. Under the guise of a constituency question the Prime Minister gave a bland and broad preview of his trip to Turkey which will hardly keep the residents of Sydney’s inner western seat of Reid awake at night as much as traffic noise on Victoria Road.

3. Bill Shorten’s got more patience with the GST than Malcolm Turnbull. The Opposition Leader is continuing to direct “hypothetical” questions to the Prime Minister on raising the GST to 15 per cent and is happy to appear boring and repetitive as long as Turnbull and Government Ministers are talking about the GST. For his part Turnbull confessed today after the third question that he’s having difficulty coming up with answering GST queries in any different or creative way. That’s what Labor wants. Especially when the script began to shift on the question of GST on health.

4. Malcolm Turnbull is a fan of Bill Murray and the movie, Groundhog Day. The PM mentioned it at least 4 times as he tried to deflect Labor’s GST questions and down play their “unfunny scare campaign”.

5. Chinese dinners at the Wild Duck in Canberra leave a lingering sense of kindliness. When Clive Palmer asked Malcolm Turnbull about possible capital gains tax changes he was heckled by Liberal MPs but the Liberal leader, who has famously dined with Palmer at the up-market Chinese eatery, was all compliments and praise for the independent MP who was prepared to “come up with ideas”.