The Sketch: ScoMo’s masterwork gets short shrift when citizenship hits the fan

Scott Morrison in full swing during question time yesterday. Picture: AAP

During yesterday’s fresh avalanche of citizenship resignations, a question arose: whither the budget? By the start of question time, as one’s eyes alighted on the hectares of freshly vacated green leather, it seemed the hoopla over Scott Morrison’s masterwork had been doomed to a life so brief it made the average butterfly look like Methuselah.

There was only thing left for it: shouting, and lots of it.

It’s safe to say ScoMo’s main topic in question was indeed the budget, but much of the detail was lost in a cataclysm of decibels. Some burst through in flashes of blunt clarity (“It’s their money, you Muppet!”), but ScoMo didn’t sound like a Treasurer basking in the triumph of the budget he’d handed down the night before. Instead he was like a man so angered by the very idea of Labor that one half expected one of his bellowing bouts to be enlivened by the spectacle of his spleen bursting clear of his body, bouncing off the dispatch box and ricocheting around the room, finally collapsing on the carpet in an angrily steaming heap.

He’d spoken in more measured tones earlier in the day at the National Press Club where, like a boffin working at meteorology’s speculative edge, he pondered the existence of “some sort of almond latte fog”.

But that was then. In question time, he just kept shouting in response to every query; if it had been a quiz show, it would have been called Blastermind. Some of those perched above in the press gallery, still delicate from a long night of carefully lubricated budget analysis, winced with the air of those realising they’d forgotten the safe word. ScoMo was either unaware of or indifferent to their suffering and kept lashing away.

The heckles from Labor MPs — at least those that could be heard — were a mixture of irony (“Speak up!”) and desperation (“Sit down!”).

When Urban Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher limbered up to have a go, it was with a keen understanding of the sonic reality. So when he was ultimately disciplined, it was for interjecting in “a particularly piercing tone”.

Coalition backbenchers kept standing to loyally ask Dorothy Dixers about the general splendour of the government’s plans, trying their best to give these limp celery sticks of rhetoric a little extra oomph. ScoMo responded with uncomfortable mental imagery: “… when the Australian people know where you sit on tax and where they sit on tax …”

Deputy PM Michael McCormack had a go at yelling at Labor over road safety on the Bruce Highway, but he could only sustain it for a few seconds. When it comes to going the shouty distance, MickMack is a wind-up car compared to ScoMo’s Voyager space probe.

But eventually, even ScoMo was able to bring some cheer when he wielded the words “tricky” and “shifty” against Labor. One can only imagine Labor MPs were suddenly filled with nostalgia over that old leaked memo in which John Howard’s MPs fretted about their government being seen as “mean and tricky”. It was very energetic nostalgia.

Eventually, Malcolm Turnbull called time. Lest any minds were settling into budget thoughts, Christopher Pyne piped up to ask the Speaker if he’d received the day’s job lot of citizenship-related resignations.