You have to wonder how Paul Keating would approach the dispatch box in Parliament if as prime minister he had a floundering Liberal leader in Angus Taylor standing across from him, while Pauline Hanson was riding a populist wave as the unofficial opposition.
If anything, the former Labor prime minister would be entertaining.
That famously acerbic tongue that delivered lines like "the little desiccated coconut's under pressure" or "slithering mangy maggot" would certainly liven up modern question time.
Newcastle-raised actor, writer, director and comedian Jonathan Biggins is going to answer that question when he performs The Gospel According to Paul: The Second Coming at the Civic Theatre on Wednesday.
Biggins, the co-creator and star of The Wharf Revue, is promising "hot new takes on today's world" as he steps inside the Zegna suit once again.
"He is a naturally theatrical person," Biggins said of his character this month. "He famously said, 'I can throw the switch to vaudeville', and the sense of humour, and the wide range of interests - the intellect. I thought he would be a good theatrical vehicle for a longer piece that went deeper than just a sketch."
The Gospel According to Paul will explore the comedic side of Keating's major political achievements as treasurer to Bob Hawke and as prime minister from 1991 to 1996, as well as his musings on modern political topics from AUKUS and negative gearing to the rise of Hanson and One Nation and the demise of the Liberal Party.
"The world's shambolic parade of hollow populist leaders is definitely not the procession we had to have," Biggins said.
"Oh, to be led once more by the man who knows a reformer isn't just a machine in a Pilates studio."
Biggins spent his formative years in Newcastle on the arts and entertainment scene, where he became a local theatre star, before expanding his career nationally.
He said his study into the former Prime Minister was part-biography, part-history, and an exploration of what it means to be, as he described it, "a true leader".
"I think it resonates because those qualities have been sort of lacking a bit of late," he said.
In the social moment dominated by forces that Keating never had to contend with - from the internet to social media, artificial intelligence and the twilight of the old institutions that carried his public persona - to the global lurch of politics into the age of the celebrated grift, Biggins said the former Prime Minister was uniquely well-suited to cut through.
"I think AI is one of the worst ideas ever foisted on the human race," Biggins said in a moment where the line between the actor and his character blurred. "Keating would look at and think, 'what is the point of this?'"
"It's only to make a few people more money so that can go and hide in their bunkers. And you think, 'God! If that's the sort of company you want after the apocolypse, you're welcome to it'."
"Go to Mars! Do us all a favour."
On politics: "He and Hawke, as a form of government, had policies," Biggins said. "They did the work. They turned up. He said leadership was not about going through some shopping centre tripping over TV crews' cables."
"If you look at who have been making that sort of noise now - Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce - that's all tey do. There's no work in the policies; none of it has been costed, none of it has been examined."
"The populists - Donald Trump - have no policies. He has no clear idea about what is going to be done. There's no agenda other than the ideoligical one."
"That is the interesting thing about coming back to this show now, when there is such a pausity of good detail about how are we actually going to do this - how are we going to make this work?. The modern populist doesn't need to do that. They just tap into anger and people automatically assume that everything is going to be alright because they're saying they're going to fix it."
"It's the disconnect between the reality of governance and the slogans they come up with."
Biggins appeared on beloved Australian television shows such as A Country Practice, Spicks & Specks, and Rake and played Keating on the sitcom At Home With Julia about then prime minister Julia Gillard.
The Gospel According to Paul opens at Civic Theatre on Wednesday, September 23. Tickets are available via the Civic Theatre website.
