Question time returns, but you wouldn’t want to look here for answers

12 hours ago 2

It took barely a minute before the first caterwauling broke out. It was a half-hearted effort, however, barely worthy of the name.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was responding to the first question from newly minted Opposition Leader Sussan Ley about the housing crisis and broken promises.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese answers a question from Opposition Leader Sussan Ley.

Albanese was trying a bit of a jibe, pointing out the previous Coalition government didn’t have a housing minister for half its time and had shown “complete contempt for public housing”.

Cue the inevitable dull roar from the opposition that signalled question time was back in business for the first time since the May election.

The emphasis, however, was on dull. And roar? An exaggeration.

It’s tough, clearly, to summon up a proper holler when you’re so outgunned and dispirited that the mere word opposition is an embellishment of the situation.

Andrew Leigh, centre, and several other Labor MPs could now be classed as “those opposite”, a common refrain in question time.

Those of us who perch in the press gallery peering down at the nation’s elected representatives - like crows on a fence eyeing off a dead sheep, as Kim Beazley once graphically described it - haven’t seen a Lower House remotely like this in a generation.

The last time a government had to find 94 seats for its MPs in the House of Representatives was in 1996.

That was after John Howard’s Coalition smashed Paul Keating’s Labor government.

All these years later, Anthony Albanese’s Labor government, having reduced the Liberal-Nationals Coalition to even worse ruin than Keating’s remnants, has precisely the same novel numbers problem.

Labor picked up 17 extra seats at the election, meaning they now fill more than half the chamber, forcing the crossbench around towards a severely depleted opposition.

And as Albanese and his colleagues have discovered, there just aren’t enough seats on the government benches to accommodate 94 posteriors.

So overwhelming are the government numbers that Albanese no longer has just front benchers and backbenchers, but a group we might call assistant side benchers.

The side benchers, squeezed out of the government’s regular seating arrangements behind the prime minister, have been consigned to spots across the House of Representatives aisle from the massed ranks of their Labor colleagues.

All five are assistant ministers, which is to say, not quite of the front rank in the pecking order, but a step up from mere backbenchers.

The intriguing question, unanswered, is whether they are being taught a chastening lesson about status, or granted prized territory, allowing the prime minister to look fondly across at them as he rises to speak at the dispatch boxes.

The new government assistant side-benchers, anyway, are in spots previously occupied by crossbenchers – independents and Greens, who rarely attracted a fond gaze from a prime minister.

The independents, most of whom are known as teals, plus the single remaining Green and the hard-to-describe-but-certainly-independent Queenslander Bob Katter, have all been shoved further sideways to benches that were once occupied by Coalition MPs.

Labor MPs (red) in the House of Representatives now stretch across the aisle, while the Coalition (blue) are a hugely reduced opposition.

There are, of course, plenty of vacant spots for the incredibly shrinking Coalition after the Liberal Party’s rout at the May election.

Their numbers have been reduced to even fewer than Labor’s scant numbers after Howard’s 1996 landslide.

Labor lost government in 1996 and was left with 49 seats. Now, the Coalition has just 43.

Liberal and Nationals MPs sit huddled together in a corner of the big house, an awkward partnership since their brief post-election break-up, trying to summon up the strength to caterwaul satisfactorily, and failing.

Side-eyes, you can be sure, are cast.

Angus Taylor and his disappointed minions of the Liberals’ harder right must endure the sight of Sussan Ley leading them on a relatively moderate adventure.

Angus Taylor didn’t muster much energy in Wednesday’s question time.

Even deeper into the Coalition’s age of discontent, two former Nationals leaders, Barnaby Joyce and Michael McCormack – bitter enemies of the past, now the living embodiment of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend” – have joined forces to cause current leader David Littleproud as much discomfort as they can.

Across the chamber, Albanese’s assembled ranks, hip to hip across the benches, not a spare seat to be found, apparently figured that old standby of question time, the bellowing of feigned outrage, was no more than wasted energy in such an uneven contest.

Butter, it seemed, would not melt in this government’s collective mouth.

And hip to hip? Right at the back of the backbench, some comedian had assigned side-by-side seats to a pair of physical giants: the new member for Leichardt, Matt Smith, who is a former Cairns Taipans basketballer, and the member for Hunter, former Olympic shooter Dan Repacholi.

Hard to miss … Labor MPs Dan Repacholi and Matt Smith on Tuesday.

Smith stands at 2.1 metres (6 feet, 11 inches) and Repacholi at 2.02 metres (6 feet, 8 inches).

The first two Dorothy Dixers were given to Labor’s leader-slayers: Ali France, who took down the opposition’s previous leader, Peter Dutton, and Sarah Witty, who dispensed with the Greens’ Adam Bandt.

France wanted to know about the government’s efforts to ease the cost of living and Witty asked about reducing student debt. Utterly inoffensive, naturally, and designed for nothing more than drawing attention to their winning ways.

There were quite a few more questions, most of them predictable. Just don’t call this first session of the 48th parliament “answer time”.

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