Opinion PM’s ‘decent’ aspirations may collide with heat of political battle
on Australia’s environment; her Liberal predecessor had received it eight months earlier but kept it to herself. Two days before that, Scott Morrison delivered a speech in which he appeared to suggest people should not place their trust in government.
Which is the point that parliament will help usher in, with its stark visual representation of who is in government and who is not. There will be no Scott Morrison, no Josh Frydenberg. As Michelle Grattan reminds us,. Parliament will tell us much about the character of this government on its own, not merely as a textbook contrast with the previous one.
But I suspect the greater force came from Albanese’s own deeply ingrained political identity as a parliamentarian. He was a noted Leader of the House, in a fractious minority government. He has deep knowledge of and strong views on all rules pertaining to parliament – and on their fairness. I suspect he genuinely bridled at what he quite reasonably saw as a rort-adjacent sweetener offered to crossbench MPs by successive Liberal prime ministers.
Beneath all this runs an important question. What, in the eyes of the government, is the parliament for? The answer will be found not only in Albanese’s answers and conduct, but in the ways his colleagues choose to answer questions, both from their opponents and their colleagues. Dorothy Dixers will remain , but this does not mean they have to be facile reruns of slogans we’ve heard before.
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