TONY Abbott missed the key economic vote of the new Parliament - the $42 billion fiscal stimulus package - because he fell asleep after a night of drinking witnessed by MPs from both sides of Parliament.

Mr Abbott told Chief Opposition Whip Alex Somlyay that he missed five divisions on the night of Thursday, February 12 because he fell asleep in his office.

His nap followed dinner in the Members' Dining Room with Peter Costello, Kevin Andrews and Peter Dutton, where numerous bottles of wine were consumed

Treasurer Wayne Swan, in the midst of a speech on the Government's response to the global economic crisis, noted the absence of high-profile Liberal MPs.

"The Member for Higgins (Mr Costello), as this vital debate in the history of the country is going on, is currently in the dining room,'' he said at 10.10pm.

"He is currently in the dining room with the Member for Menzies (Mr Andrews). He is currently in the dining room with the Member for Warringah (Mr Abbott).

"That is what they think about the strategy ... those on that side of the house.''

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/national/abbott-snoozed-through-key-vote/story-e6freuzr-1111119064644

From Jonathan Green at Unleashed (the Drum):

The carbon tax, he said, would be deadly:

It's going to be a python squeeze rather than a cobra strike ... But it is going to hurt from day one. And as time goes by, it's just going to get worse and worse and worse.

Until, presumably, the constrictor in question swallows the economy whole then slinks off, soporific, to digest.

Not that this descent into animal imagery does anything to reduce the vigour of the discussion. It remains heated, with opposition to the carbon tax/price/python implacable, the prognostication of national ruin dire.

The rhetorical intent is deadly serious. It's been a daily drip: industry after industry will close, businesses are on notice, the economy will be crippled. The message is constant and unflinching, cobra to python transitions aside.

We've been here before ...

It was 20 years ago that the nation faced a similar heated debate, a debate that centred on another piece of mooted legislation, but a debate that was also grounded somewhere deeper in the political psyche.

Just as acceptance of climate change and carbon pricing represents some manifest socialist evil to their opponents, so too did the Mabo decision trigger a response that whistled to something deeper than simple anxiety over the security of pastoral leaseholds and suburban backyards.

The discussion that followed the High Court's 1992 decision and the determination of prime minister Paul Keating to see the principles of the judgment confirmed in legislation were the heated tabloid talking points of their time ... a doomsday issue, a change that threatened the accustomed fabric of all Australian lives. Or so they said then.

In 1992, Victorian premier Jeff Kennett claimed that no backyard was safe. Perhaps not even the MCG.

Nationals leader Tim Fischer went out hard in the immediate wake of the High Court's judgment:

I'm not going to apologise for the 200 years of white progress in this country. I will take on and fight the guilt industry all the way.

The ramifications of Mabo may place in jeopardy so many mining projects across the Northern Territory and Western Australia … the Coalition will seek to negotiate a solution. At the end of the day, if no solution is forthcoming, we will legislate to provide the required certainty.

Paul Keating's legislation would eventually pass through the Parliament, but not without a parting shot from opposition leader John Hewson:

This is a day of shame for Australia, a day of shame for Australia, and it's a day of shame that's going to haunt you and your government every hour of every day between now and the next election.

West Australian Liberal Party president Bill Hassell detected the broader agenda:

It is beyond my comprehension to work out why the High Court should, wittingly or unwittingly, have become a party to the fulfilment of that agenda. Being generous, one must respectfully assume that the High Court was simply misguided that the majority of judges confused their responsibilities as judicial officers with their personal ideologies, that they were not part of the wider long-term agenda which will inevitably lead, if followed, to a divided and damaged, and some would say destroyed, Australian society.

Put very simply, the wider agenda is to create an Aboriginal, separate, sovereign state geographically within Australia, but not part of, or tenuously only a part of, the Australian nation.

Tim Fischer refined his position:

Rightly or wrongly, dispossession of Aboriginal civilisation was always going to happen. Those in the guilt industry have to consider that developing cultures and peoples will always overtake relatively stationary cultures. We have to be honest and acknowledge that Aboriginal sense of nationhood or even infrastructure was not highly developed. At no stage did Aboriginal civilisation develop substantial buildings, roadways, a wheeled cart as part of their different priorities or approach.

Mabo has the capacity to put a brake on Australian investment, break the economy and break up Australia - a break, a break and a break-up we can well do without.

And on it played through the papers and airwaves, till Koori activist Gary Foley wrote, in exasperation in 1993:

I suspect, listening to and watching the Mabo 'debate', that assimilation also is considered the 'final solution' in the minds of vast numbers of non-Koori ocker Aussies. After all, one of the most common bleats on talkback radio during the Mabo Debate (Debacle), has been 'Oh, why can't they be treated like the rest of us? Why shouldn't they be like all other Aussies'.

You might wonder how we all managed to pull ourselves together after that, how we ultimately forged a path together as a nation of disparate peoples, and I guess the answer is that it was a future that remains troubled and a project that stays naggingly, shamefully, incomplete.

But even so, in the past fortnight we have seen a universal salute to the High Court's work in 1992, and a recognition that if the Mabo decision was only a step, at least it was in the right direction. As Tony Abbott put it last week:

I rise to join the Prime Minister in acknowledging the 20th anniversary of the Mabo decision, which really created native title in Australia. I also acknowledge that it was not universally welcomed at the time, but it is now seen by everyone, including former critics, as a very important milestone in the recognition of the first Australians. The challenge for us now is to ensure that land is not just a spiritual asset for Aboriginal people but an economic asset too.

There is a lesson here about the political tendency to live in and exploit the moment. A lesson that leaves you wondering whether today's impassioned carbon rhetoric will eventually be swallowed, not by snakes, but by the steady unfolding of reality.