After a three-year campaign to paint this government as dysfunctional, recovering the Australian people's "pride in their parliament" may be a task beyond even the reach of an Abbott government, writes Jonathan Green.
Finally, should there be a change of government on 14 September, this parliament must be a better place. There has been too much venom and too many baseless accusations of bad faith ... We are better than that, and I hope to have a chance to demonstrate that we are better than that. After 14 September I am confident that the people of Australia will be able to have more pride in their parliament. (Tony Abbott, Matter of Public Importance, House of Representatives Tuesday.)
You'd have to say there's a fair chance that our post-September Parliament, our overwhelmingly Coalition dominated 44th Parliament, will be a model of civility compared to the humming little hive of hate, hubris and thwarted ambition we've borne witness to since 2010.
Why should it not? The vast bulk of its members will find themselves in a happy state of continual furious agreement. The Opposition will be a rump, and presumably a rump bitterly divided against itself. The crossbenchers will be shoved significantly off-centre thanks to the expansive bulk of the conservative majority.
Parliament will become a relatively affable rubber stamp for the legislative intentions of its new and substantial ruling class.
Very few Australians take any active interest in the day-to-day doings of their Parliament, of course. Prolonged exposure is the slightly sad privilege of a precious and obsessively dedicated few, and even for the enthusiast it is normally confined to those portions of proceedings that are regularly broadcast. For television watchers this means, almost exclusively, House of Representatives Question Time.
At its best, Question Time is a spectacle caught somewhere between procedural tedium and unedifying displays of spite, ignorance, shouted mendacity and basic incivility of the sort of raucous intensity that would shame a year 9 detention class. At its often-repeated worst, it is all the evidence you would need to hold parliamentarians in something close to contempt; which by strange coincidence seems to be the broad community view.
It is after all the window to national affairs most routinely selected for broadcast in small, almost inevitably angry snippets on the TV news, creating an impression of parliamentary process that is at wild odds with its normally sober and industrious reality. That may suit the media mainstream's thirst for politics as soap opera for aging uglies, but it hardly serves any broader public interest.
This has been a hung parliament, yes, but one that has without doubt been assiduous and surprisingly productive. As New England Independent Tony Windsor told Lateline's Emma Alberici earlier this week:
Well I think it's been quite a good parliament actually. I think for the number of parliament - I think I've been in seven parliaments. This is the second hung parliament. There's a lot of similarities with this one and the first one. But I don't think I've been in a parliament where the committee processes have worked quite as well as this one. And that's really because the executive reflects the hung nature of the Parliament and hasn't been able to control the committee processes as much as it does in normal majority parliaments.
So we saw for the first time ... the Murray-Darling committee was a good example where all the players - Liberal, National, Labor, independent - recognised that they could have some real input in the decision-making process and so put a lot of hard work into it. Whereas in the past, the government of the day would have had the numbers on the committee and a lot of people felt they were wasting their time going through the process without having a real impact on the outcome.
And there's a window into the working reality of this parliament, a place of hard-working intellectually rigorous committee work, of complex legislation and sometimes sweeping reform.
Which to be honest is not more than one might expect from our elected representatives, activity that might be characterised as "doing their job", of being an effective parliament discharging its duty: running the country.
But this is not the impression we receive, not from a media ever anxious to place policy and programs a long last behind the more tantalising prospects of interpersonal rivalry and gritty, purely political positioning and conflict. And nor has it been in the interests of the Abbott Opposition to paint this 43rd Parliament as an industrious house getting on with the job of governing.
Theirs has been a three-year campaign to paint this government as dysfunctional, as a house of cards riddled with thinly papered cracks that might crumble under the slightest tension and provocation. It has been in the political interest of the Opposition to diminish respect among the broadest possible section of the public for the country's government and its elected office holders, to undermine the very notion of its legitimacy.
And in this task, in denying the reality of a diligent parliament that despite the balance of its numbers has provided a stable platform for legislation and substantial reform, the Opposition has had resounding success.
Kevin Rudd has done his bit too, of course, injecting a frisson of frustrated ambition that has undermined the Gillard prime ministership at every step ... other than those that actually led to legislative achievement.
Surpassing even the efforts of Rudd, creating an impression of perilous dysfunction has been the chief achievement of the Abbott Opposition ... and for very sound political purpose.
The remaining question is whether the institutions of government in this country have suffered any intrinsic harm as a result, whether public faith in the process and substance of our democracy has been reduced.
If it has, and that remains to be seen, recovering the Australian people's "pride in their parliament" may be a task beyond even the reach of an Abbott government fat and happy in its majority.
Can it be "a better place"? Or is this a cause our next prime minister has already done too much to undermine?
Jonathan Green is the former editor of The Drum and presenter of Sunday Extra on Radio National. View his full profile here.