The Sketch: ‘I know you miss me’, beaming Barnaby tells his Labor nemesis

Barnaby Joyce addresses parliament in question time yesterday. Picture: Gary Ramage

Question time started with speeches of congratulations to South Australian couple Esther and Ronald Collings, who are celebrating their 80th wedding anniversary.

“You’ve got to work at it to make marriages work,” Scott Morrison said. Given the latest bout of strain in the bumpy coupling that is the Coalition, it was a solid multi-tasker of a sentence.

Once these reflections on conjugal felicity were done, the chamber resumed its impersonation of the rowdiest, angriest house in a street where the neighbours have grown wearily accustomed to wondering how long it will be before the cops turn up this time.

Morrison helped this along when during a blue over Australia’s embassy in Israel, he accused NSW Labor of anti-Semitism.

Amid the resulting tumult, Speaker Tony Smith accused both sides of a degradation of language.

“I want the standard to improve,” he ventured, his optimism promptly rewarded by Labor MPs calling the PM a grub.

So it came as light relief when Environment Minister Melissa Price had another crack at describing her fateful if patchily remembered restaurant encounter with Labor’s Pat Dodson, during which she allegedly insulted his dining companion, former Kiribati president Anote Tong.

“I stumbled across senator Dodson,” she said, prompting a Labor MP to unkindly ask: “After how many bottles?”

Something akin to happiness was finally attained when Labor’s Joel Fitzgibbon rose with a question for Barnaby Joyce, a query ­ostensibly about the drought but really a cheekily, flimsily veiled provocation about Joyce’s resurrection hopes.

Cue much procedural biff as Christopher Pyne did his utmost to stop the question in its tracks, Tony Burke did the opposite, and Speaker Smith weighed it all up like a latter-day Solomon. For a while it seemed Pyne had the upper hand.

“The leader of the house is right about …” Smith said, pausing long enough for a Labor MP to insert the words “very little”.

Ultimately he gave the green light and amid joyful ululating from Labor, Joyce rose like a ­scarlet sun.

“Well, thank you very much,” he beamed. “I thank the honourable member for his question. I know you find me endearing, I know you miss me, I know you want me back.” It is true that since the fall of his old nemesis, Fitzgibbon sometimes has the air of a man missing a limb.

Joyce eventually slipped back into that vocal setting previously likened here to a man calling a horse race while fighting off a bear and while his successor Michael McCormack did a full-body version of poker face, roared, “Ask me another question. God knows I’ve got a bit of spare time up here.”

Alas, this wish was in vain. Question time only has room for so much happiness.