Those of my readers who do not reside in Melbourne may not be aware of the significant event underway in our fair city, namely the renowned annual conference of the International Magicians’ Association. As you would expect, this event is the pre-eminent annual get-together of the crème de la crème of the international brotherhood of magicians, although it also includes a fair smattering of the sisterhood of that distinguished profession, including some notable witches attending under an exchange program with Transylvania. Thus, the conference city has become the home for the most impressive line-up of magicians, illusionists, clairvoyants, prestidigitators, contortionists, necromancers and, I regret to say, casino cheats, charlatans, river-boat gamblers and card sharpes that you are likely to find in one place at the same time. And, as magicians are as shy and retiring as Meghan Markle and are never satisfied unless showing off their skills, the conference program is taken up by pulling silk scarves from top hats, amazing sleights of hand, sword-swallowing, fire-eating, conjuring, letting loose a thousand pigeons in the conference hall, correctly guessing the seat numbers of attendees, ladies being sawn in half, and similar feats of legerdemain. But, as a special attraction at each conference, the organisers select a major and hitherto unsolved magical mystery and set the delegates to work on solving it with the objective, if you will excuse the tortured analogy, of pulling a rabbit out of the hat by the conference dinner. The puzzles that are set for this event, of course, are not just your run-of-the-mill feats of magic like the thimble and pea trick, but the big league – what you might call the Rosetta Stone, the Bermuda Triangle or the Grand Prix of magic.

Thus it was that the puzzle set for this year’s conference was one that had gripped the attention of the magic community for several years and had admitted, until now, of no rational explanation: where had Malcolm Turnbull’s third chamber of parliament gone? It had clearly vanished, but where to? As you know, when the proposal first emerged for a Voice to parliament for the aboriginals, Mr Turnbull, being the respected statesman that he was, had vigorously and rightly opposed that bizarre proposal. This he did on the eminently sensible ground that the Voice would become a third chamber of parliament to rival the House of Representatives and the Senate and that it would destroy our system of parliamentary democracy and give rise to division and chaos. As he explained persuasively, parliament represented all the people, without regard to their race, but if you also had another body exclusively for one race, even if it had a harmless and benign name like the Voice, which inspires notions of love and togetherness, it would inevitably split the country along the seismic lines of race. And Turnbull’s view carried great weight as he had, after all, invented the internet, the electric car, leather jackets and republicanism and had even made the Snowy River flow uphill and organised the launch of the Guardian in Australia. But now, two years later, he had ended his opposition faster than you could say ‘abracadabra’, apologised for his heresy and become the most passionate supporter of the Voice, vigorously denying that it was a third chamber of parliament or any other sort of chamber.

Turnbull elaborated that anyone who asserted that the Voice was a third chamber was either a knave or a fool. Indeed, he was now like the alcoholic who has found abstinence and the sinner who has found religion and had become the most zealous advocate for his new cause. But where had the third chamber gone to?

Teams of magicians threw themselves into the search to win the laurel wreath of solving the Turnbull Conundrum. Where was the third chamber of parliament? It must be somewhere. But where? It may as well have been in the Gobi Desert. Most of the possible explanations like hallucination, trapdoors, secret mirrors, spells, hidden compartments, black magic, and smoke screens were all offered up, being skills in which Mr Turnbull was known to be proficient, but all were rejected in turn. They just could not explain the inexplicable. A third chamber of parliament cannot simply disappear. Two chambers of parliament might conceivably vanish, but to lose a third chamber looked like carelessness. It seemed that, like Churchill’s assessment of Russia, it was a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

Then the theory was proposed that the solution lay not with the song, but the singer, that it was not really the third chamber that had disappeared but Turnbull himself, as he was really a chameleon or shape-shifter who took his chambers with him as the whim and mood dictated and as he blended into the protective colouration of his surroundings. Then the Melbourne Age, together with several of its unindicted co-conspirators, suggested that when Turnbull had opposed the Voice, he had done so analytically and scientifically, but that now he had reflected further on the issue, he genuinely opposed it after the same rigorous analysis. It concluded, of course, in the way that only the Age could express it, that ‘This masthead says Turnbull’s considered view is correct’.

But then, out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, the problem was solved. A young delegate from the Hogwarts branch of the Young Greens named Mandrake discovered the real  explanation; the disappearance of the Voice had been caused,  like everything, by climate change! When Turnbull had opposed the Voice, the climate was one of opposition; the winds were blowing against the Voice. But now, under the relentless onslaught of emotion, guilt, stomping in the dust, wearing Akubra hats, face painting and smoking ceremonies, the climate had changed, the wind had changed; reason, tradition and common sense had been left behind and were now on the wrong side of history and been replaced by the Voice. It was now approved by the intelligentsia and it was official.