The Sketch: slapstick rules as Muppets write script

Josh Frydenberg and Scott Morrison find a welcome distraction from the shambles of the ‘It’s OK to be white’ motion. Picture: AAP

The Muppet Show at least worked to a script. You see them come up for auction now and then, carefully and cleverly typed sheets of A4 that were followed to the letter.

In the past day and a bit, the Morrison government has been more a cascade of improvised slapstick. Behold the shambles over the Senate’s vote on Pauline Hanson’s “It’s OK to be white” motion. As the mayhem built, some government members who’d tweeted their support for it went on to insist they didn’t know what was in it but voted for it anyway. Like Bill Shorten’s “I haven’t seen what she said, but let me say I support what it is that she’s said”, rebooted.

Government Senate boss Math­ias Cormann looked funer­eal as he called it an “administrative error” for which he took full responsibility.

Come question time, Christian Porter pointed the finger at his own staff; not how one might have pictured the office of the nation’s highest-ranking law official, but these are inventive times.

“Blame the butler,” called a Labor voice somewhere in the vicinity of Chris Bowen.

“I simply want to say that the criticism of me and my office is a completely fair cop,” Porter conceded, so Cormann at least had company on the naughty step.

So I guess the intermission is over pic.twitter.com/wlEL9b5s1w

— James Jeffrey (@James_Jeffrey) October 15, 2018

Then it was time to bend the arc of question time back towards Shorten. “And I use the language ‘fair cop’ because that is the language the Leader of the Opposition widely used when he was criticised for producing a full political television ad meant for the Queensland market with an all-white cast under the banner ‘Australians first’.”

Despite forays into other topics — Christopher Pyne’s attempt to sort out the Israeli aspect of the government’s self-harm, for ­example — that administrative error was catnip to Labor.

What was it going to take to change the subject? Unexpect­edly, it was Joel Fitzgibbon’s question to Michael McCormack, cheekily but obliquely touching on Nationals leadership tensions and anonymous backgrounding.

McCormack rose and opened his mouth … and it was like a deep fissure opening up in the earth. “I always put my name … to a story, I don’t listen to anything where people are not prepared to put their name to it,” he began, embarking on a long, angry soliloquy that kept returning to this point from more angles than you’d find in a misspelt Bible.

Like The Muppet Show, McCormack pulled in a cast of special guests, namechecking Tanya Plibersek and a not conspicuously ­enthusiastic Tony Abbott. It might not have been as tight as the kids’ program but it did capture some of its ethos. As Muppet creator Jim Henson put it: “Life’s like a movie, write your own ending. Keep ­believing, keep pretending.”