Leader fails the honour test in Speaker backflip

"HE wants to blow the place up. He'll either be a terrorist or go kamikaze - we'll see."

That is how one of Tony Abbott's frontbenchers summed up his decision to walk away from an agreed parliamentary reform to pair the Speaker's vote.

Abbott will either bring down the government or himself as he presses to destroy the workability of the new parliament. It is an interesting tactical decision.

Abbott is already hiding behind the thin veneer that he is compelled to oppose Speaker pairing for constitutional reasons, despite having previously struck an agreement to do so.

The real reason, however, is political.

Abbott would like the public to believe that constitutional questions about Speaker pairing is a concern that has emerged only now; no one should fall for that.

Abbott's manager of opposition business, Christopher Pyne, brokered the reforms with Labor's Anthony Albanese and the rural independents. Pyne's closest friend in the parliament is George Brandis SC, the shadow attorney-general, who advised Abbott that pairing the Speaker would be unconstitutional.

The Solicitor-General disagreed but did acknowledge that it would be an informal agreement.

That was enough for the Coalition to walk away from what had previously been agreed.

It is hard to believe Brandis did not alert Pyne to his view before signing up to the reforms. At any rate, Pyne knows his way around parliamentary rules as well as anyone. He would surely have known of the question marks surrounding pairing the Speaker before agreeing to reforms.

The bottom line is the Coalition was prepared to pair the Speaker if it were in government but won't agree to it now it is not. That's what most people like to call double standards.

Would Labor have been as lacking in honour had it not won government? Perhaps, but we will never know.

What we do know is that Abbott, and his shadow cabinet, by agreeing with this decision, have failed the honour test.

But that doesn't necessarily mean they will fail tactically. Abbott hopes that the spectre of confusion about the Speaker will play into perceptions that this is just another Labor stuff-up. It's unfair, but it might just work.