The Sketch: Google has the answer as ScoMo casts a line

The Attorney-General delivers a full-throated rendition of the Christian Porter Show. Picture: Ray Strange

Before it reached the twin peaks that were the PM’s fishing expedition and the Attorney-General’s street theatre, question time had to warm up.

Josh Frydenberg delivered the poignant example of a wannabe retiree who, at the age of 53, feels threatened by Labor’s moves on franking credits.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton was so forceful on border security that a Labor voice called: “You should be prime minister!”

Craig Kelly was forceful and heartfelt as he asked about people preparing for retirement, but there was a hiccup. “Without being rude, I can always hear the member for Hughes without a microphone but, for those that can’t, we’ll put it on,” said Speaker Tony Smith, ­before giving a novel instruction to this most sonically self-sufficient of MPs: “The member for Hughes, if you could speak into the microphone.”

Eventually it was time for The Christian Porter Show. During an earlier press conference, Bill Shorten had given the medivac business a large-ish tweak: “If the medical treatment is required and it’s delivered on Christmas Island and it makes people well, well that’s fine.” This cranked the ­Attorney-General’s tractor, and when his question time moment arrived, he roared into life.

“So in one day, we’ve gone from ‘ridiculous’ to ‘fine’, ‘unhinged’ to ‘fine’, ‘hysterical’ to ‘fine’,” Porter said at a volume that made Kelly sound like Marcel Marceau.

Physically his performance combined touches of Frank Spencer, and that time Peter Costello aped Peter Garrett’s dance style, which itself always looked like it was modelled on a man being electrocuted underwater.

(The only person who packed more into a short space of time than him yesterday afternoon was Wayne Swan, who became a grandfather for the second time then gave his valedictory speech.)

Inevitably, attention turned to Finance Minister Mathias Cormann’s travel travails, although the query did arrive in a showbag of other questions.

“You always know when Labor’s in trouble,” Scott Morrison opined, “because they go to the bottom of the chum bucket.”

Labor MPs unfamiliar with the parlance of fishing hit Google. Some found dog food (“So chumpy you can carve it”). Some found SpongeBob SquarePants (“The Chum Bucket is a failing fast-food restaurant located right across the street from the Krusty Krab”). And one found Urban Dictionary (with less than happy ­results).

For the sake of variety, the PM shifted away briefly: “They go to that bottom drawer and they start chucking the mud.” Not where one normally stores mud, but you have to remember the PM recently toured flood zones.

Then he reached back to the chum. It’s American for burley, the mix of fish bits and blood that ang­lers chuck in the water to attract predatory fish, including sharks. For the record, there are parts of England where it’s called rubby dubby (ignore Urban Dictionary on this one). If only the PM had reached for that bucket.