The Sketch: not quite a Katterwaul but a parliamentary take on Slow TV

Heartfelt but free-form: Bob Katter speaks, and speaks. Picture: Getty Images

Calamity, as parliament reminded us yesterday, has two preferred speeds — swift and inexorably drawn out. Before Scott Morrison starred in a textbook example of the quick version, it fell to Bob Katter to demonstrate the latter.

His moment — if such a prolonged episode can be defined as such — came as parliament reflected on the floods and fires ­afflicting the nation, both now and a decade ago on Black Saturday.

There was dignity, there was harmony, there was emotion. Then there was Katter.

Speaking on indulgence and thereby freed from the constraints of the clock, the member for Kennedy was free to run wild.

As he waxed rhapsodic about his ravaged “homeland” of far north Queensland, one was eventually reminded of that moment in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when Arthur Dent mistakenly thinks he’s glimpsed infinity. As Douglas Adams wrote, it was “anything but infinite, it was just very very very big, so big that it gave the impression of infinity far better than infinity itself.”

While it’s unlikely Adams ever heard a Katter speech, there’s no proof he didn’t.

On he went, heartfelt but free-form, his moments of clarity like scattered peaks poking above the clouds. As he chugged into what felt like his third hour, a look of something like awe came over Guardian Australia photographer Mike Bowers: “It’s like the parliamentary version of Slow TV.”

Eventually, miraculously, Katter’s lips ceased moving and Townsville-based Cathy O’Toole was allowed to stand. The sound of a voice that wasn’t Katter’s came as a novelty, albeit a fleeting one.

As O’Toole wrapped up, Katter was quick on his feet with some late-breaking afterthought.

Speaker Tony Smith allowed himself one of his rare notes of panic and sat him down.

Even so, Katter was eventually allowed a second go. Sure he was warned to be brief, but there was little reason to think Katter might be familiar with the word. Miraculously, though, he did reacquaint himself with the humble full stop.

Moving more quickly, Labor, the Greens and crossbenchers later rode over last-minute ob­stacles and handed the government its collective posterior on the medical transfers bill affecting ­refugees on Nauru and Manus ­Island.

The second to last time a government lost a substantive legislative vote was in 1929. Funnily enough, that defeat had a touch of boat about it as well, specifically the Maritime Industries Bill. It was a harbinger, with Stanley Bruce’s government losing more than half its seats in the election that followed, Bruce’s included.

But when Morrison emerged in the aftermath last night, he sternly gave the sense of a man who, contrary to appearances, had been given a gift. Prepare to hear a lot about our borders.