The Prime Minister had had quite enough of his rotten start to the parliamentary year, and, as he unloaded on the nearest target – Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, who he portrayed as a social climber sucking up to billionaires – Malcolm Turnbull's colleagues couldn't get enough of him.
"We have just heard from that great sycophant of billionaires, the Leader of the Opposition," Mr Turnbull began, responding to accusations by Mr Shorten that he was cutting family payments to pay for a $50 billion hand-out to businesses and banks.
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Malcolm Turnbull's extraordinary spray
Barnaby Joyce can barely contain himself as the Prime Minister brands Bill Shorten 'a social-climbing sycophant'.
"All the lectures," parried Turnbull. "Trying to run the politics of envy. When he was always a regular dinner guest at Raheen with Dick Pratt, did he knock back the Cristal [champagne]? I don't think so."
Warming to what he clearly sensed was a killer picture of Shorten supping at Raheen, the great Melbourne mansion of the late billionaire and Shorten friend Richard Pratt, Turnbull declared: "There was never a union leader in Melbourne that tucked his knees under more billionaire's tables than the Leader of the Opposition.
"He lapped it up, yes, he lapped it up," Turnbull taunted, his colleagues on the ministerial benches beginning to shriek their support, picking up that their leader was working himself up to the sort of storm they desperately needed.
Turnbull's enemies have called him "Mr Harbourside Mansion", but he was in such stride he was happy to use the term as his own weapon.
"[Shorten] likes harbourside mansions, and you know why? He is yearning for one, he's yearning to get into Kirribilli House [the PM's official Sydney residence]," he roared. "Because somebody else pays for it.
"This man is a parasite and has no respect for the taxpayer, any more than he has respect for the Australian Workers Union."
Flipping from Shorten's alleged taste for the Pratt family's Cristal, Turnbull cited evidence from the royal commission into union corruption, savaging the Opposition Leader for "betraying" low-paid workers when he led the Australian Workers Union, "selling out" their penalty rates for "a payment to the union".
On and on Turnbull went, bellowing, turning his ire on the entire Labor Party, while MPs on the government benches were whooping and cheering.
"They call themselves the Labor Party," Turnbull hissed. "Well, Mr Speaker, manual is a Mexican bandit as far as they are concerned. Most of them have never done a day's work in their lives."
For a fine blazing moment there, Turnbull and the Coalition could forget the insults of President Donald Trump, the betrayal of Cory Bernardi, plunging polls, the harping of media commentators.
The Prime Minister, for this moment at least, was back on song.
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