Watching Parliament can be worse than Test cricket, with wickets rare, and questions simply going through to the keeper.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
When the division bells ring, even these proceedings get interrupted.
From our gallery vantage above the Speaker's chair, a recurring side-discussion among journalists would sometimes ponder which MPs would be good value at a dinner party.
It wasn't completely pointless. The object was to pick out MPs who seemed one-dimensional on TV but were, in fact, more complex.
Tony Abbott for example. His reputation as an arch conservative - or "young fogey" as Paul Keating dubbed him in 2007 - polarised voters. Especially women. But Abbott was also a perceptive analyst, self-deprecating, and good humoured.
A point often misunderstood about Abbott was that at some level, he "liked" his opponents.
It was the pluralist in him which respected his adversaries (assuming they were men admittedly) because their existence justified, even honoured, his own battle.
For Abbott, the point wasn't so much to win the war as to wage it. It was all very Roman Catholic (perhaps more Roman) - the idea of constant battle, of permissiveness never quite defeated, but always wrestled with.
Abbott's perennial war mindset strangely worked in the role of opposition but was disastrously inadequate once he was prime minister.
Victory in the 2013 election had extinguished Abbott's political reason for war, his casus belli.
New fronts of disagreement were necessary - the very antithesis of what national leadership requires.
This explains the needlessly aggressive 2013-14 budget, his crazy refusal to budge on marriage equality (even though he knew the change would occur), his dogged protection of Bronwyn Bishop as Speaker - surely the worst in the nation's history - and his plainly absurd knighting of Prince Philip.
Boring, Abbott was not.
Parliament has always had figures who were more interesting and convincing in person than on the box - and some who go the other way, like Kevin Rudd and Scott Morrison.
At their respective peaks, both scored well with voters on likeability - although Morrison never reached Rudd's rarefied numbers.
But neither man had ever been well liked by colleagues.
Two who were surprisingly poor at relating through television were Peter Costello, who never made it to The Lodge, and Julia Gillard, who did.
Voters would obsess about small things like her accent, and his smirk, to the point that they missed the arguments being put.
Yet for most who dealt with them in person, they were each quite magnetic - big personalities, the ones you'd happily have at a dinner table.
Warm, funny, and whip-smart. Costello's final press conference was unusually compelling.
Gillard's comic turns at Parliament's Midwinter Ball were peerless. Both were dynamite at the Dispatch Box.
Just as Morrison's private nature seeped out through scarifying "textimonials", an MP's popularity in the party room provides a pretty reliable predictor for whether they have the psychological balance, and the numerical ballast to survive.
All of which brings me to the inversely popular Peter Dutton.
Inversely popular because colleagues like him almost as much as voters tend to hold him in disdain.
And it is not just Queensland colleagues. Progressive Liberals seem to have time for Dutton in the way many didn't for the flim-flam man who brought them to their current nadir.
There is even some enthusiasm for the idea of matching up their "authentic" leader against that of Labor.
Conservatives love him because he's one of theirs and despite the drubbing handed out by centrist-minded voters on May 21, believe Dutton can sharpen the Liberal Party's presentation to the electorate as more determinedly conservative.
The madness of this speaks for itself.
More interesting is what the party's moderates say. The arguments seem to be twofold. First, they say Dutton is actually less "right wing" than he has appeared, suggesting that some of his positions, (presumably his China war-drums, his Turnbull hatred, his climate jokes in the Pacific, his African gangs scaremongering) were political theatre. We shall see.
More persuasively, they say if the party is to tack back to the "sensible centre" on climate, First Nations recognition, and integrity, this must be led by a conservative.
A moderate would would encounter fierce resistance from the peanut gallery on Sky "after dark". A conservative split could not be ruled out.
Still, Abbott's "Dr No" model of blunt oppositionism was been cited admiringly by some Liberal supporters who reason that it worked before and remains the best way to rock an uncertain Labor government.
READ MORE KENNY:
According to this logic, Dutton was to be preferred over Josh Frydenberg, although voters in Kooyong have since made that discussion moot.
One thing is clear. Against the inclusive centre-left Anthony Albanese who is already showing signs of being better at governing than campaigning (how refreshing), Dutton will need to reposition and rebrand.
He must hold the new and relatively inexperienced government to account without becoming more hardline in the process. And without reminding voters of how pointless the last Coalition period of government was.
His colleagues' goodwill is a useful start, but history suggests his tenure will be short-lived.
Opposition leaders appointed in the shocked aftermath of a loss of office rarely survive long enough to become prime minister.
After all, the last one-term government in Australia was nearly 100 years ago.
- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute.
