Extract from The Guardian
Last modified on Wed 26 May 2021 22.12 AEST
What set Tony Smith off?
Had the Speaker of the House of Representatives spied Clive Palmer engaged in a performative lunch date with Craig Kelly in the parliamentary dining room and acquired a searing case of indigestion? Had a normally reliable aide failed to water his favourite pot plant?
If you watch politics closely, you will know these are rhetorical questions, because Smith brings seriousness, a retro professional earnestness, to his presiding in the chamber. The current Speaker plays a straight bat. He runs a tight ship.
So let’s recount what happened during question time on Wednesday. At 2.09pm, the Speaker issued a general warning.
“If members want to continue interjecting, I’ll eject them,” Smith said with just the hint of a pursed lip. “There’s no point in me repeating myself over and over again. I’m going to be unusually succinct. If anyone doesn’t understand what I’m saying, feel free to approach the chair.”
Given the acrimonious hubbub in the pit of the poseurs showed no signs of abating, the first ejection of a rowdy Labor MP followed less than a minute later. A second followed shortly after.
Just in case his message was missed, Smith backed up with a second homily. “I’m just making very clear to the House, members might be happy to behave in an unparliamentary way every single question time,” he said. “I’m not prepared for that to continue. I’m making it very clear.”
Let’s call that PM warning one.
When Morrison burbled on relentlessly, contending that Albanese hadn’t “sought to help the government fight the virus” the Labor leader took a point of order on relevance, noting the prime ministerial denunciation was neither “relevant nor is it true”.
Smith then lobbed his second warning.
“I’m asking you to return to the question,” Smith said to Morrison.
“Happy to do that, Mr Speaker,” Morrison soothed.
Smith promptly called Morrison’s bluff. “I don’t care whether you’re happy or not,” the Speaker said. “You need to return to the question.”
The melee continued and Smith promptly booted another MP. On, the relentless grandstanding and accountability avoiding went.
The treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, was in the middle of the “big dog little dog” routine he likes to trot out against his opposite number, Jim Chalmers, who Frydenberg refers to as “the shadow of a shadow” – a putdown that probably sounded more devastating when he was practicing it with his hairbrush in the mirror at 3am than it does on the floor of the chamber – when Albanese rose on a point of order, noting this was question time, not sledge time.
Smith, from his green throne at the top of the chamber, chose to impose himself again.
Frydenberg had been asked by one of the backbenchers about alternative policies, so Smith insisted on some black letter lore: “What I do ask of ministers if they’re asked about alternative policies – refer to them.” Imagine.
Persisting with his aspiration that words be tethered to facts, Smith noted the invocation of the words “alternative policies” wasn’t a green light for a minister to give a political speech or provide a character assessment of their opposite number.
“You’ll need to stick to the policies,” the Speaker counselled (which is a completely radical idea because it defeats the purpose of “alternative policies” – which is the designated preamble to “my opponent is a dickhead”).
Smith completed his triptych with Greg Hunt, the health minister, who was either affronted by the persistence of Labor’s quarantine questions – or pretending to be.
For his part, Smith was affronted by the health minister, who appeared intent on defying warnings one through 10.
“The minister for health will resume his seat,” Smith bellowed. Hunt remained resolutely upright.
Smith bellowed again. “The minister for health will resume his seat.” Hunt was still upright. Smith persisted: “I’ve now asked the minister for health to resume his seat for the third time.”
“The minister for health can resume his seat, full stop. I’m not going to be ignored. We’ll go to the next question. I asked him three times to resume his seat.”
This persistent shirtfronting by the Speaker was all pretty bracing, and its pointedly didactic tone was reasonably unusual.
But the truth is, Smith has been on a path of securing a course correction for some time. A serious man, hoping for a sliver of seriousness in serious times, he has some external backing for his crusade. A bipartisan parliamentary committee recently handed down 11 recommendations to try to improve question time – recommendations that seem sensible, all but guaranteeing they will be ignored.
Looping back to where we started, what set the Speaker off? The hard truth is nothing would have been required to set Smith off on Wednesday because question time, objectively, is an abomination.
It is a disgrace.
Watching parliamentarians debase themselves with simpering, scripted questions punctuated by Pinter-esque pauses, watching the alleged answers to these “questions”, and enduring all the schoolboy roiling and the chortling, crass, contempt for accountability, could easily spark rage in any sentient person if the session wasn’t akin to enduring a self-administered lobotomy.
So the mystery isn’t really what made Smith snap. It’s what took him so bloody long.
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