Peter Dutton should have sounded like a winner this week when he walked into question time after the latest opinion polls confirmed his gains against Anthony Albanese. The opposition leader trails the prime minister on most key measures, but he is no longer the pitiful laggard he was a year ago. The numbers highlighted the way he has steadily climbed into contention.

Yet he sounded like a sore loser. Once in his chair, across from Albanese, he mouthed off against cabinet ministers and even started yelling at the Speaker, Milton Dick, about the prime minister’s answers. Dick took the unusual step of halting everything to pull Dutton into line. “Continually yelling at me has never happened before from the role of the leader of the opposition,” he said. “It’s got to stop.”

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That was Monday. By the next day, Dutton and others were on the attack over power prices and nuclear energy, giving Albanese a chance for a rejoinder: “If the leader of the opposition wants us to go down the nuclear road, he should stop having meltdowns.”

Yes, the question time clash followed the usual formula. Dutton calls Albanese weak. Albanese calls Dutton angry. Each is trying to pin a label on the other. But the strange thing is that Dutton makes it so easy for his label to stick.

Some of his Coalition colleagues know it’s a problem. They think the leader needs an attack dog by his side to do the ugly work of tearing down an enemy. The trouble is that none of the Liberals seem to want to do the job.

And the big Labor move this week, to reveal a sudden change to migration law, only made the opposition angrier. The government told Dutton about the law on Monday night but did not reveal the bill until Tuesday morning. The Coalition immigration spokesman, Dan Tehan, mobilised quickly by calling a press conference shortly before 9am that day to denounce the surprise plan.

This meant the first news of the government proposal came from Tehan, who framed the argument around Labor chaos and breach of process. Labor won the vote in the lower house later that day, but lost the tactics from that point on. When the bill reached the Senate, the government could not get anyone to agree to its demand for swift passage.

Labor deserved to lose the Senate vote. It takes extraordinary arrogance to unite the Greens, Liberals, Nationals, One Nation, the United Australia Party and independents such as David Pocock and Jacqui Lambie against a Labor bill. No government should be rewarded for asking parliament to decide a new law within 48 hours without proof of an emergency.