Knives swiftly unsheathed as Australian parliament returns

Any good drama should open with a high-octane, thrilling first episode.

Having gone to the July election with a massive 30-seat majority, and returned with a majority of two, it was natural for Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull to preach bipartisanship as parliament resumed this week.

The opposition Labor leader Bill Shorten also said the public were looking for more co-operation from their elected representatives.

Mercifully, these fine sentiments lasted about five minutes.

By close of business on Thursday, the government had lost three consecutive votes – the first majority government to lose any vote since 1964. The reason was a lack of numbers caused by poor housekeeping. When a motion was called to adjourn parliament – an uncontroversial procedural matter – Labor gambled that some on the government benches were already on their way home, and opposed the adjournment.

With the backing of minor parties and independents, Labor won the vote to keep parliament open and two further votes before the three missing MPs (all ministers) were located and returned to parliament in a hurry. It was a stunt and an ambush, but showed the precarious position of a government that, minus the speaker, has 75 votes in a 150-seat parliament.

For Labor it also, momentarily, took the focus off senator Sam Dastyari, who was in the news for getting a businessman linked to the Chinese government to pay a $1,670 (€1,125) bill for him when he overspent on travel entitlements. He also previously got another Chinese donor to cover a $5,000 legal bill for him.

Turnbull suggested the handouts to Dastyari were about buying influence. “Is the Labor party’s foreign policy for sale, was this cash for comment?” he asked. Dastyari said Turnbull’s comments were “disgraceful and offensive”.

The most touching moment of the week was when new Labor MP Linda Burney, the first Aboriginal woman elected to the lower house, pointed out that for the first 10 years of her life Australia knew how many sheep it had, but not how many Aboriginals. (Indigenous Australians were not counted in censuses before 1967).

The most bizarre moment was when former prime minister Tony Abbott visited the far right One Nation leader Pauline Hanson for a chat and held an excruciating joint press conference with her afterwards. Hanson has previously blamed Abbott for her being jailed for electoral fraud in 2003 (she was exonerated and released after 11 weeks), but the Liberal-National government needs the backing of nine crossbenchers to get legislation through the senate, so One Nation's four seats are crucial and deals will be done.

Exactly what kind of deals will be under careful scrutiny. One of Hanson's colleagues, Malcolm Roberts, is not just a climate change denier; he is the leader of a climate change denial advocacy group called the Galileo Movement.

In 2011, Roberts wrote a letter to then Labor prime minister Julia Gillard demanding she sign a contract exempting him from the carbon tax. He signed the letter as "Malcolm-Ieuan: Roberts., the living soul". This is a style of nomenclature used by the extreme right-wing sovereign citizen movement, which believes the use of punctuation is a way of avoiding consent to identities – birth certificates, passports and licenses – controlled by governments.

Roberts, who refuses to do interviews that are not live on radio or TV as he thinks his words will be distorted, denies he is a sovereign citizen. But with friends like him, the Liberal-National coalition hardly needs its enemies. It’s going to be an interesting three years.