Parliamentary conventions may be neither rules nor law, but the authority of the Speaker is the lynch pin of Parliament

I listened with mouth agape in disbelief yesterday, as Coalition MPs on the Opposition benches deliberately colluded to disrupt a House of Representatives sitting day and openly, repeatedly defied the Speaker.

 

With not a thought for conventions, precedent, or the fact that over hundreds of years good men struggled and sometimes died so that the institution of Parliament could exist, former Howard Government ministers and frontbenchers brought their parliamentary parties into disrepute and the House into peril.

Having lost government with good reason in a democratic election, the Liberal and Nationals MPs chose to disregard this fact and attempted to bully the Speaker and Deputy-Speaker into bending to their will.

 

The demonstration that these neo-fascists put on for public consumption had an international as well as domestic audience.

The US Secretary of Defense and Deputy-Secretary of State arrived in Canberra yesterday for the annual AUSMIN talks.

 

For all their pretended outrage at the change to sitting days, I do not think that it is sheer coincidence that the Opposition brought the House to anarchy yesterday as these US officials arrived.

Coalition parties see a conservative, Republican US Administration as a natural ally that they have been able to spook in the past by talking up the idea of a Labour federal government as bogeyman.

 

A blatant attempt to create an impression of a destabilised government may have worked to their advantage in the 1970s, but this set of Opposition MPs will find that they can't try the same confidence trick twice.

 

I remind those wilful and arrogant Opposition members that parliamentary conventions may be neither rules nor law, but the authority of the Speaker is the lynch pin of Parliament no matter who holds government and attempts to weaken that authority lead the House down a dangerous path.

Institutions exist at the will and pleasure of the society.

Societies have been known to dismantle institutions in which they no longer have confidence.

Parliaments are no exception.