Julie Bishop late yesterday confirmed that there had been some throwing of crockery in the shadow cabinet room and the office of her leader Tony Abbott.
It was a comment which also confirmed that the Opposition lost the week to the Government because it could not get its leader out of the spotlight.
``It’s a shame that the Labor Party doesn’t have robust policy debates within its cabinet,’’ Bishop told Parliament.
There was an emphasis on the word ``its’’ from which you could deduce that Bishop was acknowledging there had been some doozies among her front-bench crowd.
The most recent was between her and Abbott over cuts to the foreign affairs budget for which she has shadow responsibility. The cuts were contained in the package of budget changes Abbott put forward to pay for, hypothetically, flood and cyclone reconstruction.
For a day and a half Bishop fought the measures, which included scrapping aid to Africa. But she was also fighting for her standing as Abbott’s most senior colleague.
The cuts are never going to happen and fighting over a phantom would have been silly. The Opposition Leader’s problem with Bishop wasn’t virtual policy. It mainly was one of process.
Bishop was not consulted on the pretend cuts and was furious when they were simply lumped on her in shadow cabinet. She didn’t take a backward step and she and Abbott went at it, probably regretting some of their exchanges.
By yesterday, however, Bishop was chatting and joking with her leader and the pair at one stage walked together down a Parliament House corridor without any signs of tension.
One reason was that continuing the fight was pointless. A second was that Bishop’s position was being endorsed widely, even by former Liberal Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.
The third was that leaking of the row had rammed home the damage squabbling can cause, despite strong performances against the Government in Parliamentary debates.
Senior Opposition figures decided that they had been shoved to the brink of a public display of disunity, and took a step or two back.
But in the wake of this rather willing tiff was the fact that yet again Tony Abbott had been made the focus of attention.
That is why the Opposition lost this, the first parliamentary week of the year.
Abbott was centre stage from the start because of his refusal to acknowledge that the Liberal Party had bungled by using a PS at the bottom of an email letter by him to appeal for donations to fight the Government’s flood levy.
That was followed by Abbott being dropped into the centre of the row over Opposition flood recovery funding plans.
Then he decided to be the strong silent type, for several long, painful seconds, in the Channel 7 interview over the ``shit happens’’ comment.
Abbott was never even close to being dismissive of a soldier’s death. He had nothing to defend.
But it was a silence pregnant with restrained intent. Abbott looked like he wanted to snot reporter Mark Riley. The most articulate man in Parliament—with both the written and spoken word—was mute with fury.
Abbott again was the centre of attention.
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