MARK RILEY: Coalition must adopt cautious approach as it bids for relevance in new-look Parliament

If Jim Chalmers wants to see what real productivity looks like, he needs only wander into the basement at Parliament House and visit the name-plate makers.

Tucked away behind the wood shop and the paint shop, off the subterranean corridor known as “Bourke Street”, the plate makers are beavering away at an unprecedented mountain of work.

The unexpected enormity of the Albanese Government’s election win has created a plate-making boom.

When the 47th Parliament has its ceremonial opening on Tuesday, 49 new members of the House of Representatives and 17 new senators will assume their seats for the first time.

There have also been 17 ministerial and assistant ministerial changes to the Government team since the election.

All those new MPs and senators and ministers, and assistant ministers require name plates to hang outside their offices and display on their desks.

The plate-making team has been flat-strap keeping up with demand.

The change in the complexion of the Parliament will become unavoidably obvious on Wednesday when the houses sit for the first time to consider business. Tuesday is purely a ceremonial day.

There aren’t enough seats on the Government benches to accommodate all 94 Labor MPs. Many will have to relocate across the aisle to claim spots normally reserved for Opposition members.

And there will be so few Coalition MPs that those who haven’t snared a shadow ministry position will all huddle in a bunch behind the leader to fill her camera shot and create the illusion of numbers that don’t exist.

In between that huddle and the expanded crossbench will be a vast emptiness, an electoral crater blasted into the landscape by the conservative forces’ catastrophic defeat.

That void will serve as a constant reminder to Sussan Ley and her team that they are effectively powerless to stop any Government legislation passing through the House.

Their only opportunities will come during question time. But they should use them wisely.

The temptation will be to go hell for leather after everyone and everything that moves on the Government benches in a desperate quest for relevance.

But it is a temptation they should resist.

Those who have been around for a while will know what happens when impatient oppositions overplay their hands. Think Malcolm Turnbull and the ute-gate disaster.

Real opportunities will present themselves. Big governments can overplay their hands, too, just as John Howard did with WorkChoices when he controlled both houses between 2004 and 2007.

The main game, as always, will be the economy. The Opposition should concentrate on that.

The Budget presents them with rich pickings, like the heroic assumption that government spending will halve from a vertiginous 6 per cent last financial year to 3 per cent.

Independent observers know there is little chance of Treasurer Jim Chalmers achieving that without increasing tax revenues.

Some of those observers suspect the coming productivity roundtable has been designed to create cover for him to do that.

That should be easy to exploit for an Opposition that is already framing the second Albanese Government as a “typical tax-and-spend” Labor outfit.

And although a massive majority is a good problem for a government to have, it can still be a problem nonetheless.

Labor’s gains in the Senate mean it no longer has to negotiate with a fractious crossbench to pass its bills.

It only needs the Greens.

But that is as perilous as it sounds.

The Greens will routinely attempt to drag Labor’s legislation to the left as the price for its balance of power votes.

Over time, that will build the impression of a Labor Party shifting inexorably leftwards from its preferred position closer to the centre.

And that will present the Coalition with a critical choice. It can either allow Labor to make that drift and attempt to claim the vacant centre itself, or it can offer its own balance of power numbers on legislation and drag the Government in the other direction — towards the values of the conservative right.

The best approach? Make that choice on a case-by-case basis.

So, while the most visible theatre of the 48th Parliament might still be in House of Representatives question time, the big show will be in the Senate.

And how the Opposition performs there will largely determine how many of the name plates after the next election are made for Coalition MPs.