The Sketch: Julie Bishop slips out before the bubble bursts

The thing about bubbles is how beautifully transparent they are. As Labor’s Jim Chalmers fired “Hockey owes me” across the start of question time like a rogue three-word slogan, the bubble served as an endlessly, elegantly curving window that let you see perfectly the mayhem inside.

Nevertheless, Scott Morrison responded to this late-breaking, Joe Hockey-enhanced Helloworld evidence — the latest frag­rance in the pong of mateship, money and favours in power’s upper circle — by reaching for it like a cherished weapon.

“The good old Canberra bubble­,” he fumed as angrily as a fisherman who’d just trod in the chum bucket, “where the leader of the Labor Party dwells.”

If “bubble” implies one layer of separation, “Canberra bubble” surely implies two. This may come as a surprise to the residents of what is Australia’s largest inland city and the eighth-biggest on the continent, a city connected to the rest of the nation via all the usual means. (For those seeking a bit of national capital earthiness yesterday, Canberra-based MP Gai Brodtmann delivered during her valedictory speech when she remin­isced about the time a possum died in her roof and the house subsequently filled with blowflies.)

On question time bubbled. Given Chalmers’s demeanour — as cool as a sniper who makes his own bullets — the government must have known what Labor’s unrelenting theme would be. So it seemed a touch counterintuitive that the first backbencher it wheeled out to ask a Dorothy Dixer was Ian Goodenough, who has been under his own petite, lobster­-shaped cloud.

How distant seemed the talk of medivac and borders, the new-found spring in the government’s step subdued. Even an innocuous assertion from Kelly O’Dwyer (“We are for small business”) served as a segue to more questions about Helloworld. “The Australia­n public are not stupid, Mr Speaker. They can work their way through the Canberra ­bubble,” offered Christopher Pyne in a moment of clarity.

Bill Shorten provided some welcome variety, such as this when he asked Assistant Treasurer Stuart­ Robert: “How do you spend $40,000 on the internet? What on earth were you down­loading?”

But then he returned to the job at hand, vowing Helloworld would be the first item for a national integrity commission.

Throughout it all, Julie Bishop seemed to sit apart from it all. When it was done, she rose — a vision­ in carefully chosen, un­sullied white — and announced her resignation. In her surprise, ad hoc valedictory, she was surround­ed by attentive ears as she deliv­ered a kicking to Labor, a subtle burn to her own party and a tide of gratitude.

Without waiting to hear any response­s, she turned and, evident­ly having decided she’d rather be elsewhere when the bubbl­e bursts, slipped out.