Amid the clutter and contention of Thursday, the besieged federal employment minister, the outrage echoing around the parliament – sat Barnaby Joyce in question time, a small island unto himself.
As Labor built a case that Michaelia Cash must resign if Westminster conventions were to have any meaning, Joyce worked his way through folders of paper, ticking and flicking. When he wasn’t doing that, the deputy prime minister checked his phone, swiping and scrolling.
When he got to his feet to deliver the inevitable Dorothy Dixer, his regular cameo in the hour of glower, Labor MPs waved like they were farewelling a departing cruise liner, steaming in the direction of the Pacific.
“Bye bye Barnaby,” hollered one pitiless soul.
Joyce ploughed on, mangling metaphors, forming words that no one cared about, not even him.
As MPs crisscrossed the chamber for a bevy of divisions prompted by the parliamentary attack on Cash, a ghost drifted in their midst.
During those divisions, parliamentarians generally gossip among themselves, happily liberated from their seating patterns, but Joyce had eyes only for his phone.
When question time ended, he bolted from the chamber behind the Speaker’s chair, forcing photographers to dangle from the press balcony, their telephoto lenses trained down vertically.
I’d passed another drifting ghost at lunchtime – Nick Xenophon, in the canteen, preoccupied as always, on the phone as always, multitasking as always – but also uncharacteristically recessed and powered down.
They are all waiting on the wisdom of the high court, which will finally rule on the citizenship seven on Friday.
Xenophon has already packed his office, bound for new political adventures. The two Greens, Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters, fell on their swords early, determining their immediate direction – Ludlam out into the world, Waters doubling back to the Canberra cloisters if opportunity presents.
The One Nation man, Malcolm Roberts, looks much as he always does: perfectly, rigidly, implacably certain.
Joyce, and Fiona Nash and Matt Canavan are in a different category.
They hover in the space between what has been and what will be.
Joyce’s last night in no man’s land carries a special penance, because hovering with him is the Turnbull government’s one seat majority in the lower house.
It’s the weight of the world, and the deputy prime minister, who has washed up in the middle of a colossal mess of his own making, is carrying it heavily.
If the high court resolves to make life difficult, could politics all get too much? Could it all be that unbearable? I guess we’ll all find out.
The Turnbull government, which is always a stop-start operation, just finding its footing before losing it again, has been propelled to a defining political Friday in November by a cartoonish overreach on Bill Shorten – a prelude to the high court fireworks.
Cash has lost a media adviser, has lost face, and is lucky not to have lost her job.
Labor pursued Cash on Thursday, dogs with bones in Senate estimates hearings, but down in the House, the pursuit had a strangely languid character, a certain listlessness, a certain going through the motions.
Looking across the chamber, Shorten thought he saw a desperate government “running out of time”. He thought he saw a government spending all its energy on its opponents because it had nothing to say about people.
Shorten thought he saw a clock ticking. He saw the necessary pursuit of Cash, but he thought he saw the shadow of something bigger in the subdued faces across the chamber.
The Labor leader evidently felt on the brink of a bigger political moment. Not knowledge, or special insight, just a feeling, a combatant’s instinct.
Just after 2pm on Friday, we’ll see just how big that moment gets.
