Stephen Parry has treated voters, and his party, with contempt

Stephen Parry speaking during a Senate Estimates Committee at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: AAP Image/Lukas Coch.

The president of the Senate, particularly when so many unpredictable crossbenchers are inhabiting the place, is an important job. If you get the job, your salary is up there with that of a minister and you have your own car and driver.

Normally speaking, however, you don’t ever get to be famous. The holder of that position up until a few days ago was senator Stephen Parry from Tasmania. In a way, he has upheld the tradition by not becoming famous but infamous. This bloke has treated his Prime Minister, his government and the voters who put him in the Senate with a contempt that is really hard to believe.

Just how Parry could sit mute over the past three months as the High Court was dealing with senators Nash, Canavan, Roberts, Walters, Ludlam and Xenophon is mind-blowing. What’s even worse is that Parry knew he was in exactly the same position as Fiona Nash and yet he remained silent. His was the kind of cowardice the army used to execute people for.

We are all left to wonder just what was in his head, although I suspect the answer to that is not much. Was he so full of false bravado provided by the astonishingly stupid claim made by Malcolm Turnbull that Barnaby would be cleared with the words “and the High Court” will so find.

As he sat there presiding over other senators in a state of turmoil, what was he thinking? At some point he obviously decided that honour, decency and honesty were somehow to be sacrificed to his personal interest. Apparently, the concept of the national interest was so foreign to him that it never got a look in either.

As the Attorney-General, George Brandis, was standing at the dispatch box being grilled over whether or not Barnaby Joyce should retain his ministerial portfolio and continue to sit in the parliament and exercise his vote, did it not occur to this idiot that maybe he should mention his predicament to someone like the Attorney-General? Sadly, there was no room for anything other than rank self-interest being harboured there. The salary and the perks must have mattered so much to Parry that he hatched the plot to remain silent and sneak through under the radar when the High Court accepted the Solicitor-General’s arguments, as the Prime Minister was so certain the judges would. I wish I could have seen Parry’s face just after 2.15pm last Friday when the High Court decision was delivered. It was then that the realisation hit him that any audit would discover his secret.

Finally, kicking and screaming, he was forced to come clean. Parry did Bill Shorten and the Labor opposition a huge favour. By the same token, he drove a dagger into the heart of the party that elevated him to such high office. Trailing in the polls, flat out covering up for Michaelia Cash and reeling from Friday’s decision, the Liberal Party just could not afford this act of bastardry. You have to wonder how a weakened, compromised lot like the Coalition can even begin to recover credibility.

We should not have a parliament in which the nation has no confidence, but that’s what we have.

Watch Graham Richardson on Sky News, Wednesdays at 8pm.