At Hogwarts, there are charms, spells and then there are unforgivable curses. There are gradations in the dark arts in the House of Reprehensibles, too.

Hypocrisy and politics go hand in glove, that’s axiomatic. But there are degrees of hypocrisy, as the first actual day of business of the 44th Parliament showed.

Let’s start from the least of examples and work up, shall we?

And the least of it was name-calling. Our example here actually starts on the previous day, Tuesday, when the new manager of Opposition business in the house, Tony Burke, zinged one off the new Speaker, Bronwyn Bishop.

He compared the ascension of the highly partisan Bishop to the supposedly neutral position of Speaker to one of the plot twists in the Harry Potter story:

“When they all return to Hogwarts, Dumbledore is gone and Dolores Umbridge is now in charge of the school.”

For those few of you unfamiliar with the Potter story, let me explain that Umbridge was an overdressed, smiling but humourless and cruel woman appointed by the forces of darkness to be headmistress and grand inquisitor of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

That is to say, Burke was not making a kind comparison.

Fast forward to Wednesday morning in the chamber, and the Government’s Christopher Pyne referred to Opposition Leader Bill Shorten as “Electricity Bill”.

Now, this is a clear breach of the standing orders, which hold that members should be referred to strictly by their titles, i.e., the “Member for X” electorate, or the “Minister for Y” portfolio.

And the same Tony Burke immediately jumped up to complain that name calling, such as "Electricity Bill", was un-parliamentary.

When Bishop ruled against him, he moved dissent, which meant there was a vote on the Speaker’s ruling, which the Labor Opposition predictably lost.

Now, technically, Bishop’s ruling was wrong, as was rather forcefully pointed out in a quick comment piece by Michael Gordon, in the Fairfax media.

On the other hand, given what Burke said about her the previous day, one could understand if she wanted to show him who’s boss.

In any case, it seems pretty hypocritical for Burke to have taken umbrage.

Now, let’s move on to some mid-range hypocrisy. And the example here would be Government leader in the house Chris Pyne, who introduced changes to the standing orders, which will serve to make the government a little less accountable to the Parliament.

The aforementioned Tony Burke was rather more justified in laying into the government for this one.

“The culture of secrecy that has been there from day one has now reached the floor of the House of Representatives,” he thundered.

And Bob Katter, the veteran ex-National-now-leader-of-his-own-party, joined the attack, comparing the new Abbott regime to the corrupt National Party government which used to hold sway in Queensland.

“I thought our Bjelke-Petersen government was good at muzzling, but they have nothing on the Liberal National Party,” he said.

I guess he would be in a position to know, having once been a minister in the Bjelke-Petersen government.

But it’s not Katter’s hypocrisy I refer to; it’s Pyne’s.

See, as recently as January this year, he went on ABC radio promising parliamentary reform to make the government more accountable.

He advocated a number of changes he would make, notably this one: “I think that we do need a little ‘i’ independent speaker, one that stays outside the party room in the way that [Labor’s] Harry Jenkins did and tries to exercise a genuine independence,” he said.

Well, guess what? Dolores – I mean Bronwyn – has not been required to do that. She will continue to attend the Government party room.

Pyne had other ideas in January, too. All now dumped. You can read the whole transcript of that interview here.

Of course politicians regularly advocate greater transparency when they are in opposition, and almost as regularly break their promises when they achieve government.

This government, however, appears to be more flagrant than most. So we’ll call this mid-range hypocrisy. Maybe even high-mid-range.

But now let’s go to really gob-smacking hypocrisy. And for that we need to look at the egregious Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Scott Morrison.

The background to our example is this: as The Global Mail’s Nick Olle reported, a boatload of asylum seekers this week made it almost all the way to Darwin, an embarrasing development for Morrison’s heavily militarised Operation Sovereign Borders.

As best we know – without confirmation from Morrison’s department, for the government certainly is not being helpful to inquiring media – the boat carried mostly Somalis, with a smattering of Pakistanis. Numbers are unknown. It is believed they were taken to Blaydin Point detention centre, from where they will be moved (or are being moved, or have already been moved, we can’t be sure about timing), to Christmas Island, and thence to Nauru or Manus Island.

So, in Question Time, the Labor immigration spokesman, Richard Marles, asked Morrison the most basic of questions: what more could he tell us about a boatload of Somalis who arrived on Monday in Darwin.

The answer was – nothing.

Morrison repeated the same line he regularly gives when asked for any sort of detail: “We are not running a shipping news service.”

And the reason for that, he said, was that any specific information helps the people smugglers. And in turn causes more asylum seekers to die at sea.

Leaving aside that its hard to know what benefit people smugglers might gain from Morrison telling the parliament a little about the group of people who had, after all, been detained, this last statement just shows the hypocrisy of the man.

For almost four years preceding the election, no individual in Australia revealed more specific information about the numbers, movements, origins, methods, et cetera, of asylum seekers and people smugglers, than Scott Morrison.

No one so constantly suggested that the Australian government was a soft touch for unauthorised entrants.

So on the basis of his current argument that any specific information only encourages them, no one was as encouraging to people smugglers as Scott Morrison.

The monumental dissonance between his behaviour before the election and his behaviour now seems to admit of only a couple of explanations.

Either he put politics ahead of Australia’s sovereignty and the lives of asylum seekers before the election, or he’s prevaricating now.

In either case he’s a hypocrite of the first order.

Wizards Of Hypocrisy