Friday in Canberra started with a bitch, swerved into blather, then escalated to a boom.
The morning dawned with reports the foreign affairs minister, Julie Bishop, had, sotto voce of course, called her opposite number, Tanya Plibersek, a bitch in parliament. Or was it a snitch, or, dare we suggest, a witch?
Before we had time to fathom the allegation, the treasurer, Joe Hockey, was being asked by Sydney radio host Ray Hadley whether he could “take one for the team without blueing or screaming”.
Ray had, of course, read the Daily Telegraph. The government gazette had revealed (not for the first time, or possibly for the last time) that the prime minister was pondering a “radical reshuffle” – which didn’t actually include Hockey, although Hadley evidently thought it should.
Hadley: “Let me say to you this. You know I like you as a person, I genuinely like you. I’ve known you for a long time. I warm to you … ”
Hockey: “Oh no, here comes the killer blow … ”
Hadley: “However, for some particular reason since you’ve come to government, I’m talking about you individually as opposed to the collective group of people that you share government with, the gloss has gone off you. I don’t know why.”
Faced with the imponderable, delivered by the insufferable, Hockey ventured the theory that his colleagues didn’t like him because he’d cut their budgets. It’s always something, isn’t it?
As for the reshuffle, the prime minister stopped to deliver a line to the journalists intent on chasing him into a meeting. “Reports of end-of-year reshuffles are absolutely a dime a dozen,” Tony Abbott noted sagely to his pursuers.
That observation is quite true, at least as true as the reshuffles themselves, which turn up with monotonous regularity late in the year before a federal election, particularly in circumstances when the voters are inclined to conclude the government reeks.
Someone, somewhere, a hopeful someone, always feels the rearrangement of deck chairs will help with the cursed street appeal. Politics is very often the triumph of hope over experience. Where are we now? September?
Abbott went on to note the reshuffle reportage was just “insider gossip” of the type the government was always very keen to avoid. Work to do, and all that jazz hands. Viewed in that context, it really was generous of him to stop to make a special remark about it.
Presumably it would be unproductive to have the alleged losers milling about pondering the precise expression of their umbrage when they are all so happy in the service.
I suppose Abbott could have done what the trade minister, Andrew Robb ,did in the House of Representatives on Thursday: just roar at the naysayers to “shut up”. As it turned out, Abbott had already done the berating.
So Abbott didn’t yell shut up, not with cameras present.
Instead, he just got drawn into a convivial little chat about Pacific time in front of many of his closest media friends, armed with phones, voice recorders and cameras – and, as the social services minister, Scott Morrison, eventually noted with an upward glance and a terrifying closed-teeth smile – a boom microphone.
The immigration minister, Peter Dutton, doubtless mildly jetlagged from having to fly to Geneva to have a conversation he could have presumably conducted over the telephone, observed to Abbott that Friday’s meeting with community groups about Syrian refugees was running on “Cape York time”.
“We had a bit of that up in Port Moresby,” Abbott noted of his regional colleagues at this week’s Pacific Island forum, followed by one of his sardonic chortles.
Dutton, somewhat ambiguously: “Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door.” Perhaps he was making a pitch for the environment portfolio in the Canberra “insider gossip” reshuffle? A climate change warrior hidden in the suit of a head-kicker.
It was at that point in the conversation Morrison directed their collective attention to the presence of the boom microphone directly over their heads. It was a significant move of the eyebrows.
Helpful, that Scott. Very, very helpful.
