Parliament teeters between infantile and absurd

By ABC's Jonathan Green

Photo: This is our unfolding reality: a Parliament of constant bargains and no guarantees. (AAP: Daniel Munoz)

Our Parliament seems to be teetering between the infantile, the grotesque, stubborn stalemate and the absurd - so maybe a double dissolution is the best outcome, writes Jonathan Green.

Chris Kenny's probably right:

Yes. Maybe the best thing we could do is wipe the slate clean and start again. Dissolve both houses, present the unpicked litter to the people and have us make of it what we will.

Because at the moment, our politics just seems to have stopped making sense.

What's the ordinary punter to pull from a day in our parliament like yesterday?

Another day in which Question Time was its routine and tedious farce of expulsions, shouts and gibes; all "suppositories of wisdom" and "irritable bill syndrome"?

Just moments of puerile byplay on a day in which our Government also decided that if you are seeking asylum on the basis that you face less than a 50 per cent chance of torture in your home country, then maybe we should just send you back to take that chance.

But hey, never mind torture. "Irritable bill syndrome!" Ha! Hilarious. Our bipolar Parliament, in turns asinine and inhumanly cruel.

At this point we might need to remind ourselves that torture is more than just a selection of vowels and consonants, an empty, almost theoretical possibility in a bill that whispers through our lower house. We might want to recall that torture is the systematic application of pain and wit-snapping terror to the point at the which the victim crumbles, losing what vestiges of dignity and humanity they might have preserved in a mess of screams, blood and tears.

And to what end? Perhaps no more than that degradation. A process you might endure by accident of your faith, your name, some dumb fault of circumstance.

And that might be enough to lead you to mock execution: a blindfold, a gun's cold and hollow steel pressed to the skin of your head and then ... an empty click of the unloaded chamber and the sudden smell of your own terrified stink. That's torture. The use of electric shock, of beatings, stabbings, sexual assault, sensory deprivation, asphyxiation. A 50 per cent risk? More likely than not? Well, what are you worried about? What are we worried about? Go home and take your chance.

Welcome to the cold shoulder of the Migration Amendment (Protection and Other Measures) Bill 2014.

Don't let the middle school japery of Question Time fool you, nor the dumb show of rote public announcements, the stupid repetitions of the day's empty and mandatory phrases, the vaudeville-for-dummies of politics.

This is still a Parliament capable of consigning nameless and desperate wretches to unmentionable horror. In our name.

And then Glen Lazarus, Clive Palmer and Al Gore walk into a bar. Sorry, the Great Hall of our Parliament.

Lazarus, Senator elect, the man formerly know as the brick with eyes, walks out to introduce a press conference featuring his eponymous party leader and Clive Palmer's new ally in the fight to save the world from climatic calamity, former US vice-president Al Gore.

But Palmer, for all the superficial absurd pantomime of his late afternoon stunt, has played canny politics around the carbon tax; a tax that he will repeal at the price of a sleeper ETS, a trading scheme lying in wait for the world.

This is a prospect Prime Minister Abbott will need to either accept or drive his Government to the brink of dissolution and the vagaries of a new election.

This will vex the Liberal party ... Palmer's ETS is a prospect uncomfortably close to the scheme that so offended the party it deposed Malcolm Turnbull in Abbott's favour. Will they swallow it now, even in the shadow form proposed by Palmer, in order to quickly "axe the tax"?

It's a move of such quiet cunning that it must make some in the Government wonder at the prospects for the budget once Palmer sinks his teeth in, and whatever other legislation he sees fit to turn to his own cunning purposes in the upper house.

And this is our unfolding reality, a Parliament of constant bargains and no guarantees, with a government struggling to hold its course.

The PM seems to have little patience for it, especially when it comes to the budget, that set of bold but unheralded desires, things never tested by a popular vote and now set out in bills that will bowl up again and again to test the determination of a teetering Senate. A house whose resolve is still a mysterious unknown.

A determined PM said of his budget on Tuesday night, "We may not get it through the first time or even the second time, but I think we will get it through."

Twice rejected will be enough to take both houses to the people, a prospect that some in the PM's camp, like Mr Kenny, are coming to consider; maybe even welcome.

And perhaps the only way for all of us to reset this strange machine of our Parliament, a body of men and women elected in a process that hardly gave informed consent for the parade of transformation our Government seems determined, subsequently, to implement.

Sending refugees to take their chance with torture, Medicare co-payments, even a gutted ABC. We weren't asked.

And in that vacuum of consent is the new Senate's opportunity: its excuse to impose confounding stasis on this Government. This was a Government elected on a slim set of slogans and precious little detail, one that can hardly insist on the obedient respect that might have accompanied a precisely detailed mandate.

Nothing was made plain pre-poll and now everything is in play.

Perhaps that is the gift that a return to the ballot box might bring: a new vote that might force both parties to spell out a clear set of intentions.

It could be our best chance to rule a line under an unfortunate period in our politics, a time caught in a narrow band between opportunism and self interest.

Because for the moment our Parliament seems to be teetering between the infantile, the grotesque, stubborn stalemate and the absurd.

Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.

Parliament teeters between infantile and absurd - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)