The Sketch: a long, tortuous game of snakes and ladders

To mangle a Kevin Rudd-ism, yesterday was the day question time came to the forked tongue in the road. But to get us there, Scott Morrison first channelled Mark Latham.

“We used to have leaders of the Labor Party who talked about the ladder of opportunity,” the ­Treasurer said. “Do you remember that?”

But before anyone had time to ponder this, Morrison’s rhetoric was writhing with more serpent action than Medusa’s scalp.

“This Labor leader is all about the snake of envy. That’s what he’s about.” Having cast Bill Shorten as a serpent afflicted with one of the deadly sins, he added a metaphorical boa constrictor — or Bowen constrictor, depending on your hearing — and just kept on piling reptile upon reptile.

It was a routine he’d premiered in smaller form a few hours earlier, but now it had grown into a long and winding goading, a metaphor without legs that seemed to run forever.

“There are plenty of other snaky characters — plenty of them. If you look at the king brown snake, it has the largest recorded venom output of any in the world. Who does that remind me of?”

(The output honour actually belongs to Africa’s gaboon viper, which dispenses venom like it’s on special at Costco. But the Treasurer is right to be wowed by the venom yield of the king brown. The Australian record for a single milking was set at the Australian Reptile Park in 2016 by a 2.5m specimen called Chewie.)

As to who this Stakhanov of reptiles brought to ScoMo’s mind, the surprise factor was minimal: “The Leader of the Opposition!”

Speaker Tony Smith adopted the ethos of the rattlesnake, giving off a menacing noise in warning: “I will just say to the Treasurer: I don’t like the track he’s going down. He’s about to get bitten!”

But as he hardened his gaze at the Slytherin ranks opposite, ScoMo was clearly not for turning. Not for him any hints of herpetological admiration — his was a Biblical serpent, cursed above all livestock and all wild animals.

So hard did ScoMo labour the metaphor that even when he said “aspiration”, it was hard to hear beyond the first syllable.

The Speaker’s suffering was not over. When Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack moved on from Ben Chifley to allude to possible Labor leadership tensions, he said, “Gone is the light on the hill. Now we have a light on the Bill.”

At the sound of these words, the Speaker’s facial muscles underwent such a cataclysm of contortions that MPs waited to make sure he was OK before they let themselves giggle.

ScoMo, meanwhile, had worked out something for Labor’s Jim Chalmers: “The snake charmer over there, the member for Rankin …”

By which point, it’s possible the Speaker could hear Indiana Jones crying out in the Well of Souls scene: “Snakes? Why did it have to be snakes?”

But he restrained himself to, “No, the Treasurer will withdraw that.”

STREWTH P13