This week brings what will almost certainly be the last full sitting fortnight of the 45th Parliament.

Consider it, in fact, the 45th Parliament's leaving do. Expect swarms of lobbyists, doomed as bogong moths, making the tragically-too-late trek to influence a representative body whose own influence is nearly spent.

It's been a ropey old Parliament, this one. It's had two prime ministers, which 15 years ago would have sounded distinctly on the high side, but is in fact now firming as our national average per parliamentary term.

The most arresting element of the 45th, though, is the full-body transformation it's undergone over its two-and-a-half years of life. The House of Representatives started out in 2016 under the reasonably confident control of Malcolm Turnbull (Coalition 76 seats, Labor 69) and has wound up as a Mexican standoff with such an hysterical hair-trigger that the Government has taken the expedient, if — for a registered democracy — rather bold decision to hardly have it convene at all for the first three months of the year.

The 30th Prime Minister, since taking office, has embraced the national madness for Marie Kondo and decluttered his parliamentary ranks, thanking and bidding farewell to a number of ministers and backbenchers who no longer spark joy and who at any rate are keen to spend more time with their families/spear guns/panickedly overthumbed Rolodexes before everything officially goes to custard in May.

The Senate, meanwhile, is so arrestingly changed from what it was in 2016 that it would qualify for a before-and-after photo spread in a supermarket checkout magazine. ("I shed SEVENTEEN senators in three years! Including TEN from my crossbench! Stunning Pix!")

But sometimes from chaos comes action

It is, naturally, fashionable to disparage the 45th Parliament on account of its fecklessness, its shoutiness and the regularity with which it's obliged to call in the constitutional lawyers.

But here's a thought.

If the numbers in the House of Representatives hadn't been so finely balanced and the Senate hadn't been such a wilful soup of unusual alliances, we'd never have got the royal commission into the banks.

The Labor Party announced three years ago that it backed a royal commission, but this would have remained a twinkle in Chris Bowen's eye had a handful of National Party agitators not decided to team up with the Greens and various independents to convert the royal commission from an Opposition press release into the avenging regulatory angel of death that is Rowena Orr.

That the Government would otherwise have kept stolidly denying that there was a very big problem and saying things like "the problem with a royal commission is that it will take forever and achieve nothing … except for the bevy of lawyers who will be able to afford new beach houses on the strength of all the fees that they will charge"* is absolutely beyond doubt.

The neck-snapping pivot from "Everything's fine, what are these people going on about" to "Christ on a bike, let's sack everyone" is not a phenomenon exclusive to the banking sector, whose Hayne-Drain last week collected NAB's Ken Henry and Andrew Thorburn; it is, in political terms, ENTIRELY attributable to the fact that Barry O'Sullivan, Wacka Williams and a fellow handful of National Party MPs decided to make a nuisance of themselves given that the numbers in Parliament gave them that opportunity.

Do keep that in mind the next time you hear the Prime Minister claiming, as he did last week: "I initiated the Royal Commission."

Those familiar with the internal workings of the decision recall — for what it's worth — that Mr Morrison (then the treasurer) fought against the royal commission the hardest.

"He was the last — the absolute last — to come on board because 'it would be devastating for my reputation' to backflip. It was all about him," remembers one witness.

"He was very, very opposed to it," confirms another.

In effect, Mr Morrison "initiated" the royal commission in the same way Theresa May "initiated" Brexit or Bill Clinton "initiated" the modern understanding of what counts as "sexual relations"; you can't really claim credit for something you've only done to escape the more hideous fate that would have awaited you had you not done it.

Governments can't muster moral heft

What is genuinely frightening about all this is that the truth about the banks would have remained buried had the 45th Parliament not been so ropey.

We've finally heard the truth, but it's not attributable to the smooth functioning of a watchful government; exactly the opposite, in fact.

And that's a worry; almost as much of a worry as the fact that royal commissions have now eclipsed the parliament itself as a source of moral and deliberative authority. The banking royal commission now concluded, we now await what will almost certainly be even more upsetting: the royal commission into aged care, another whole sector in which Government regulation is feared not to have done its ONE JOB.

Why do royal commissions carry the moral heft that governments can no longer muster?

When considered in the cold light of day, the answer's chillingly obvious: the judiciary is one of the few Australian institutions yet to be disgraced. Probably because so few of them have worked out how to get on social media.

That awkward politico-judicial vibe

The relationship between governments and the judiciary has always been a bit fraught. Judges get grumpy because they're the ones who wind up having to interpret the laws that are hammered into place at 2:00am by a sleep-deprived gaggle of senators covered with Post-it notes and corn chip crumbs.

Governments annoy judges by making absurd laws, leaping aboard tougher sentencing bandwagons, cutting funding to Legal Aid and merging legal jurisdictions (see the current effort to combine the Family and Federal courts, which has judicial robes in a bunch).

Judges periodically upend whole sections of government policy by ruling that they're unconstitutional, and during the 45th Parliament, of course, it was the High Court's interpretation of section 44 that marched 17 elected representatives back to the pavilion.

For an utterly spellbinding visual demonstration of the awkward politico-judicial vibe, you can do no better than the moment at which banking royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne handed his final report to the Treasurer.

Sorry, this video has expired Josh Frydenberg's awkward encounter with Ken Hayne

Correction: the moment at which Kenneth Hayne stared balefully at a distant corner of the room while the Treasurer sweatily dialled the warmth of his own grin up to "Surface Of The Sun" settings in a doomed attempt to defrost his commissioner, the volumes of the report lying untouched between them like a poo on a picnic blanket.

"Can we get a … handshake or something … between …?" suggested one of the photographers, after what seemed like a century of sustained awkwardness.

"Nope," was the judge's immediate, subzero ruling.

A more scorching photo-opp has not been registered since 2010, when campaigning PM Kevin Rudd posed for a supposedly conciliatory snap examining an electorate map with Julia Gillard, from the body language of which encounter one swiftly inferred that the participants would both rather have been nailed into separate barrels full of tarantulas.

Awkward: This was the first time Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd had spoken face-to-face since Ms Gillard deposed Mr Rudd as PM in 2010. ( ABC )

So: enjoy this sitting fortnight, with its spectacle of the Opposition trying to re-engineer the very fate that Mr Morrison and his colleagues were trying to avoid when they called the banking royal commission; a defeat on the floor of the House.

It's messy, and it's not very confidence-inspiring.

But sometimes, chaos can accidentally uncover truth.

*This quote is from former Senate leader and attorney-general George Brandis, now exiled in penury to London. The only beach house mentioned so far is the one included in nearly $8 million of assets owned by Rosemary Rogers, chief of staff to NAB boss Andrew Thorburn, as part of a police fraud investigation.