Illustration: Dionne Gain "I can no longer tolerate the lack of party support for my positive initiatives, including the recent abandonment of PHON's pre-election commitment to a banking royal commission." And while it's disappointing that Culleton's resignation doesn't contain much of the lunatic poetry he'd brought to so many of his other public statements (where are the accusations that the Constitution was hidden in 1975 and everyone's been covering up its absence since?), at least he's set what would appear to be a new record. After all, Jacqui Lambie remained with PUP for over a year between her election and her furious resignation. You might recall that PUP elected four parliamentary representatives in 2013 before scoring their triumphant result of zero in 2016, which might look eerily like foreshadowing if the situation here wasn't so completely different. After all, PUP was a populist Queensland-based right wing minor party named after its colourful, ego-driven founder who continually claimed to be fighting shadowy elites, and whose senators were known solely for saying provocatively silly things in public and then huffily resigning from the party. By contrast, One Nation is… um…

Pauline Hanson spent 11 weeks in prison in 2003 before her conviction for electoral fraud was quashed. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Now, it's important to remember that Culleton may well be about to be sent packing by the High Court over whether or not he was eligible to run for the senate at all. If it is determined that his election was illegal then there'll be a recount of the WA senate ballot and a new 11th senator for the state. That will probably be another One Nation candidate, assuming that someone at One Nation actually checked that there weren't any upcoming court appearances over missing car keys. Might be worth getting someone to double check that, actually. Senator Rod Culleton returns to his office after meeting with Senator Hanson in November. Credit:Andrew Meares If Culleton stays, that's yet another nightmarish difficulty for Malcolm Turnbull - the Prime Minister whose playful decision to take the country to a double dissolution election led to Culleton getting into the Senate in the first place, along with 10 other crossbenchers, all but guaranteeing that his epoch as PM will be characterised as "the era that made Billy McMahon look like a decisive political go-getter".