This short week of parliament may have felt like a Twenty20 match, but it really was just the start of a long test series.
The big shock was when Kevin Rudd declared his innings, but as is to be expected with Kevin Rudd, his name stayed on the scoreboard. Furnished, most appropriately with quotes from “a senior source”, came the news that Rudd had struck a deal to get his daughter Jessica, preselected in his seat of Griffith.
The story lasted about an hour, before (unusually for a story involving Rudd) someone went on the record – Jess Rudd in fact. She tweeted that she was much more interested in being with her young children than being with MPs in Canberra.
And with that, the Rudd era is over.
Now the ALP sees its two previous captains out of the game. And like the Australian cricket team in the mid-1980s after the retirements of Greg Chappell and Kim Hughes and the loss of talent due to age or rebel tours, the ALP needs to start afresh.
But in this parliament Labor finds itself bowling uphill and into the wind on the flattest pitch in memory. Christopher Pyne by amending the standing orders to include a proposal to limit moving suspension motions to Government ministers and to remove supplementary questions has taken out the heavy roller to make sure himself and other government ministers will nary face a ball moving off the seam.
And should by bizarre chance the opposition be able to get one through the defences, the appointment of Bronwyn Bishop as speaker has ensured no Minister will be out LBW.
There were some who thought Bishop might be an objective and impartial speaker. But nothing she has done in the past 20 odd years in parliament would suggest she would do anything other than ensure the Liberal Party gets the right result. Speakers in Australia have always favoured their own side but a bit more cynicism about the current holder of the office would be nice.
Her very first ruling on Wednesday morning to allow “Electricity Bill Shorten” to be used, when even the use of an MP’s name rather than title in the past would have been ruled out of order, displayed where she sits – and it ain’t in the centre.
In such circumstances the opposition will need to work long hours plugging away hoping for an edge.
Fortunately they already have one minister doing his best to help them. When Scott Morrison yesterday replied “I have no information within my folder here which goes to the matters that would deal with the briefing I would give tomorrow” he put himself up as the candidate for Minister most likely to be run out due to tripping over his own smugness.
But the ALP cannot rely on easy wickets. They will need a good line up of bowlers – ones able to go for the whole test series, not just a session or two.
Tony Burke has shown himself to be handy – working well in his appeals to the umpire. And Anthony Albanese showed some good leg spin yesterday when he quickly responded to an answer from Warren Truss referring to the Mackay Regional Council by asking Truss a smart off-the cuff question about why the government had withdrawn a $411,000 grant to that council.
It is the type of work that the ALP front bench will need to do in the long hours in the field.
For the pitch is a belter, and the flat-track bullies on the government front bench all think they can make a century.
Greg Jericho is an economics and politics blogger and writes for The Guardian and The Drum.
