Tune in to Truman Show

Every moment of his studious inactivity is now being scrutinised minutely by a captive audience.

Yesterday, the former treasurer went for a televised walk. Clad in tracky daks, he surged out of Parliament and was immediately followed by a curious media pack. Why do we follow him?

All he did was walk around for a bit then go back inside to do a radio interview with Alan Jones.

Costellonomy, like bird watching, is a discipline best suited to the very patient.

In all the TV archives across Australia, how many hours of footage are filed under: "Peter Costello, possibly about to do something interesting"?

Probably millions. But we can't turn the cameras off, in case he does decide to do something.

So this crazy routine continues, as Truman goes on defiantly, conspicuously, flagrantly, doing nothing.

In question time, as Costello sat in the second-to-back row doing nothing, he was lit beautifully by ministerial cinematographers. Every second Government speaker mentioned him in some way. Kevin Rudd called him the "alternative leader of the Opposition", while the Minister for Sport, Kate Ellis, twitted him about voluntary student unionism.

The Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, could speak of little else. "I've known him for a very long time - longer than you characters have known him," he told Costello's Liberal colleagues. "And I can't work him out. Does he have a cunning plan?"

Queenly Bronwyn Bishop rose, and straightened her skirt. "If the answer to every question is Peter Costello …" she began. The rest of her point of order was, as you can imagine, lost.

Tony Windsor, the independent member for New England, was next: "My question is addressed to Peter Costello," he began stagily, before asking his real question of Rudd. You get the picture.

Malcolm Turnbull smiled along, but he must be starting to wonder if this is all some sort of hidden-camera joke at his expense. Every minute the cameras spend on Peter Costello doing nothing is a minute they don't spend on Malcolm Turnbull doing something. This is Turnbull's central difficulty.

Because Costello isn't actually doing anything, Turnbull can't call him out. But neither can he persuade viewers to tune out of The Truman Show, the top-rating fixture on MPTV. It's like being out-rated by the test pattern.

The grim news of job losses yesterday could have been political haymaking for Turnbull, but he just can't get the eyeballs.

Perhaps to attract attention, Parliament's other denizens were especially disorderly yesterday. Jenny Macklin called the Opposition front bench "ambulance chasers" [much outrage] and Christopher Pyne was thrown out for his retaliatory claim that the Government was "a bunch of criminals". Interesting, but it won't beat Truman.

Source: smh.com.au