The Sketch: golden moments as Scott Morrison works his alchemy

Scott Morrison communes with a lump of coal.

In the end, unexpectedly, it was Scott Morrison who threw the switch to vaudeville yesterday.

Armed with a Dorothy Dixer from backbencher Andrew Hastie­, he approached the despatch­ box and, with a flourish worthy of a budget magician, whipped out a chunk of black.

“This is coal,” said the Treas­urer, brandishing it at the oppos­ition. “Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared.”

Hewn from the earth beneath the Hunter Valley, it was a generously proportioned lump — bigger­ than a cat’s head, darker than a South Australian night.

Given that Hastie’s question had ultimately focused on his own electorate, which does gold and bauxite but features as many coalmines as the Vatican, it was a daring­ segue. But it was impossible to look away.

It was supplied by the Minerals Council of Australia, which probably chalked up yesterday’s effort as a success. Certainly more than that time Ian Macdonald wore one of their Australians For Coal hi-vis vests in the Senate and got chewed out by Bill Heffernan.

Once Morrison had been ­gently tut-tutted by Speaker Tony Smith, he entrusted the lump to Barnaby Joyce, who looked as thrilled as a kid who’d won a goldfish at a fair.

Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg had a brief fondle of it; likewise, Social Services Minister Christian Porter­. Yet their coal love seemed somehow wanting. Just as canines quickly sense the most genuine dog-person in the room, the lump soon returned to Joyce. He examined it anew before placing it tender­ly on the carpet between his feet, where it absorbed some of the glare from his stridently red socks.

But Joyce was unable to resist its siren call and quickly had it back in his hands, turning it over and over, staring into its darkness like the apes gathered around the alien monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Selfishness is not a trait of the Deputy Prime Minister and he knew the time had come when he must relinquish the black precious and let his backbench colleagues into the circle of love. It travelled briefly, but the enthusiasm proved finite and the coal came to rest on the desk of Ann Sudmalis.

Coal is a mineral of many possibilities. One government MP recalled­ a line from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: “Pardon my French, but Cameron is so tight that if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks you’d have a diamond.” Presumably not a lump this big.

It was only as question time drew to a close that the Treasurer took back his coal and, with it perched on his folder, conveyed it from the house with a fitting air of reverence.

“Nice pet rock,” called a Labor MP. “What’s its name?”

The real fun will be when Morrison decides to plug uranium.