Australia’s parliament teems with people, so the place can sometimes feel like a living, breathing, organism. As Australia’s 46th parliament ground through its final week, at the tail end of three punishing years of fire, flood and plague, it was like the organism felt pain.
The week began with public expressions of mourning. Colleagues shared tributes to the late Labor senator Kimberley Kitching. The foreign minister, Marise Payne, one of the most buttoned up operators in contemporary politics, crumpled and wept. Fellow stoic the shadow foreign minister, Penny Wong, offered Payne tissues.
While some of Kitching’s colleagues and intimates grieved, others, cast as cartoon villains in a febrile media-fuelled melodrama, reached for grace. Typically, Labor’s deputy Senate leader, Kristina Keneally, modelled grace with a sting, noting “those who use the grief caused by [Kitching’s] death for purposes other than honouring her life and her work will find no friend in me”.
Just as the sad and strange cycle of Kitching began to ebb – a new front opened. The Liberal senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells – recently relegated to an unwinnable spot on the Liberal party’s New South Wales Senate ticket – opened a wound on the government side.
On Monday, during her emotionally charged farewell to Kitching, which became (like many others) a homily against factional excesses, the Liberal right-winger slammed the quiescent “sisterhood” of the Liberal party.
Then on budget night she declared Scott Morrison was an “autocrat [and] a bully who has no moral compass”. Fierravanti-Wells said Morrison topped the list of “ruthless” people she’d met in politics. “Morrison is not interested in rules-based order,” she said. “It is his way or the highway.”
Morrison is now reasonably practised in the art of rapid j’accuse response, having been called a liar by Emmanuel Macron, a hypocrite and a liar by Barnaby Joyce, a horrible horrible person (allegedly) by Gladys Berejiklian, (reportedly) “an absolute arsehole” by former ministerial colleague Michael Keenan, (allegedly) a complete psycho and a “fraud” by an unnamed cabinet colleague, and “menacing controlling wallpaper” by the former Liberal MP Julia Banks.
As might have been predicted, the prime minister responded to his latest negative character assessment by going on the offensive. He said words to the effect of hell hath no fury like a woman scorned by 500-or-so Liberal preselectors. The Victorian Liberal senator Jane Hume smiled benignly as she twisted the knife further, noting of Fierravanti-Wells it was “very confronting” when “hundreds of people are telling you you’re not the one they want this time around”.
All very uplifting stuff.
I suspect none of the many backroom operators prowling the parliamentary precinct ever thought to war-game the likelihood of the final days of the 46th parliament furnishing a sound stage for a public seminar on the derangements of major party factionalism, mean girls and bullyboys. But there it was. A rhetorical war zone, with wounds being inflicted and dressed without anaesthetic in full public view.
Given politics had become a rolling maul, the animus spilled over into the courts. Between the mourning and the score settling, Morrison and the New South Wales premier failed to persuade the high court to rule on their power to handpick candidates for the federal election. The high court also declined to hear challenges to the federal intervention into the Victorian branch of the ALP.
Between the squalls, pre-election parliamentary business happened. Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg delivered their fistfull-of-dollars budget, and Anthony Albanese a reply. The intraday bitch-slapping and bathos was also punctured by the gravitas of the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The president managed to electrify the House of Representatives via video link from his war bunker half a world away, being a serious person, navigating the zone between life and death, democracy and autocracy, freedom and tyranny.
The last week of parliament always indulges farewells. George Christensen tried to jag one more vacuous headline by railing in his valedictory against net zero, “woke” corporations and “globalist” elites. Kevin Andrews, in public life since 1991, had finally been cut down by the Liberal preselectors. His wife, Margaret, cried in the visitor’s gallery as he delivered his final remarks.
Then there was Tony Smith.
Smith spent much of the current parliament as Speaker of the House of Representatives. I’ve known him since I arrived in the parliamentary press gallery in 1996. In those days, he worked for Peter Costello, trailing in his wake as media adviser.
Back then, as a term of endearment, some of us dubbed Smith “the pooper scooper” – an extrapolation of a caustic observation about his boss that I believe was levelled by either Jeff Kennett or Andrew Peacock. (If this anecdote is unfamiliar, it was alleged that Costello had “all the attributes of a dog, except loyalty”.)
Smith was earnest in our shared youth, conducting his business with a quaint sort of formality; a serious person cursed to occupy politics in unserious times. In his valedictory on Thursday, he noted he’d come to politics and parliament in “the reform era”. The unflattering comparison with the low-stakes vaudeville of the present was implicit rather than stated.
During Smith’s young adulthood, Paul Keating overhauled the tax system. Costello did it again during the 1990s. Smith confessed it was hard work in Costello’s ministerial engine room. Securing various reforms “took a long time”. There were lots of ups and downs. “It was never popular, but it was achieved against the odds.”
Very little has been heard over the past three years about Australia’s economic reform project. It lingers in the talking points, but it’s near-absent in reality, because so much of contemporary political conflict orbits around personalities and power rather than the battle of ideas.
Sounding decidedly retro, Smith mused that government needed to be about something. “Reforms that deliver greater efficiency, higher productivity and budget improvements will need to occur over the next decade,” he said. “The composition and priority are for future parliaments to consider.”
There was a warning. “Those who might be tempted to think nothing is required in the future years and in the next decade would be mistaken to think a decision to simply do nothing is costless. In fact, a decision to do nothing is an active decision to see things deteriorate and to consign future generations to an Australia with fewer opportunities.”
The 30th Speaker of the House of Representatives also reflected on the state of democracy. He suggested parliamentarians possessed one simple antidote for disaffection. They could engage in a robust battle of ideas, while keeping things civil.
Given entrenched disaffection with the major parties was fuelling the rise of independents and micro party actors, Smith advised his colleagues to look at the root causes. Because the major parties had “been vital in giving stability and certainty in the formation and the conduct of government in our parliamentary democracy” they needed to grapple with why the combined primary vote share of the major parties had gone from 95% in 1975 to a little under 75% at the last federal election.
“I don’t say this out of any disrespect at all to the crossbench, who need to be congratulated for overcoming enormous obstacles to get elected,” Smith said. “I simply make the point that I don’t believe, if there were 151 independents in this house, we would have stable, predictable or workable government”.
Albanese had the last word in the 46th parliament by delivering his budget reply speech on Thursday night. After the adjournment, the House cleared in a rush, but there were a few laggards. One was the former Nationals leader Michael McCormack, who was blasted out of the deputy prime ministership by Barnaby Joyce. McCormack made a point of grabbing a quiet moment with Albanese to shake his hand and exchange pleasantries.
Greg Hunt, the Liberal health minister, who is also retiring at this election, lingered. The shadow health minister, Mark Butler, crossed the chamber to shake his hand.
Smith wandered over and when Butler made to leave, the two Victorian Liberals who began their careers as political staffers before entering the arena themselves sat together for a few minutes on the government bench.
As the attendants moved about clearing the chamber, Hunt and Smith made their way up to the exit.
Smith turned back, just for a minute. He allowed himself one last glance across the chamber he’d either sat in, or served, for the best part of three decades, before striding out into the night. In the 46th parliament, Smith was the last man out of the House.
The Hansard records Smith’s final contribution. “I stood right here, on this spot, on the floor of this great House of Representatives, at the dawn of the 40th parliament and said hello.”
“As the sun sets on this 46th parliament, I say thank you. Good luck. Goodbye”.
