By ABC's Marius Benson Posted February 09, 2012 15:11:49
Photo: Peter Slipper robes up for Parliament. (AAP: Alan Porritt)
Peter Slipper's term as Speaker is already shaping up as one of the most genuinely diverting cameos in Australia's parliamentary history.
Without a friend and without a future in parliament beyond the next election, Mr Speaker looks determined to be noticed during his limited tenure. In the first active days in his post he has revived traditions not seen for decades and seems hell bent on positioning the Canberra version of the Westminster system somewhere between Charles I and Louis XIV.
The robe is back, the mace is returning as part of a weekly ceremonial progress to the chair. The wig can't be far away.
And why not? Much of parliament is pure theatre. Tony Abbott expresses melodramatic dismay at the ruin to which the Government has brought the country. The Prime Minister responds with confected disgust at the Opposition's hijacking of job losses for political ends. Parliament is pantomime and every show needs a dame.
Interestingly wardrobe has not been the only change in Federal Parliament since Peter Slipper replaced Harry Jenkins as Speaker. The new man has issued warnings that he will take a less forgiving attitude to the classroom antics which are the standard dynamic in the House. Harry Jenkins tried to assert control with a mix of bluff and bluster and what always appeared to be the danger that he might actually explode.
Slipper's tones are more measured and a little menacing. He began his tenure by tossing out several Opposition members. Since then he has cut off their endless points of order, well short of the hearing Harry Jenkins allowed. That has produced a slightly better flow in Question Time, but he has yet to show whether he can do what no speaker does in Question Time - that is, get the Government to answer a question.
In fact standing orders don't give the Speaker the power to force the Government to answer a question. Instead there is the endlessly repeated charade of an Opposition member, perhaps Christopher Pyne, interrupting a minister's answer with a point of order:"Relevance Mr Speaker, the minister was not asked....etc."
It will be interesting if Peter Slipper is prepared to lean on ministers or the Prime Minister to make the answers bear some relation to the question, and sit them down if they don't.
Peter Slipper's path to the Speaker's chair has been unique. It came at the end of the parliamentary year when, according to the Prime Minister's account, Harry Jenkins came into her office at 7:30 in the morning to announce he wanted to quit the job he loved and spend more time developing policy with his colleagues. Harry has never been a famed policy wonk and nobody believed that fiction. Fellow Labor backbencher Mike Kelly summed up Jenkins's real motive when he tweeted that in quitting Harry had "taken one for the team".
Within an hour of that supposedly unheralded Jenkins announcement the PM had lined up Peter Slipper and rung independent Andrew Wilkie to assure him nothing would change simply because the defection of Slipper from Liberal ranks made Labor less critically dependent on Wilkie's vote.
The appointment elevated Slipper from the relative privation of the backbench to a better world where salaries are higher, pensions plumper, offices bigger, staff more numerous and a sense of self-importance sumptuously supported.
In fact the inducements are such that a deal like that, if it happened in, say, the NSW parliament, would attract the interest of the state's Independent Commission Against Corruption. But in Canberra Julia Gillard generally got a good press for negotiating the minority Labor Government a little further away from the political abyss.
If Peter Slipper feels at all sheepish about the circumstances in which he came to his lofty position he's not showing it. Nor does he manifest any anxiety over the Opposition possibly using a dirt file against him by asking questions like: "Why do you take so many cabs to Kings Cross around midnight?"
He has taken to his new role with a relish, taking a tougher approach to tossing out members, cutting back time for answers and of course turning the clock back decades in his personal dress code.
It is early days but right now Peter Slipper already looks like he will be a figure in Australian public life as distinctive as any seen since Sir John Kerr was tipping his top hat to the favourite at the Melbourne Cup.
Marius can be heard covering federal politics on ABC NewsRadio's breakfast program each week day morning. View his full profile.
