It doesn’t really matter which events came in which particular order, because linearity really wasn’t important on Tuesday in Parliament House.



All you needed to understand was the raging #auspol fever had descended – the desperate, wild-eyed fever of jockeying and deliberate distraction – thrusting Australian politics into a new level of unhinging.

But to comprehend Tuesday, we first need to recap Monday.

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The prime minister’s first resort on Monday was reassurance when it became clear that the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, would go off to the high court after New Zealand had stretched out its welcoming arms to claim the long lost son of James of Dunedin. (Barnaby’s father would be James Joyce, of course. How on earth could it be otherwise?)

Despite the manifest inconvenience of New Zealand claiming Australia’s deputy prime minister, Turnbull’s line on Joyce was that of calmer-in-chief.

This was just a small thing, a bit of housekeeping, an opportunity to pop down to the high court and have the justices clear up a messy and unworkable provision, as one would clear out a pantry stuffed with goods past their use-by date.

The prime minister was so confident that Joyce being a dual citizen by descent was all nothing he declared that the high court would find Joyce was eligible to sit in the parliament – no ifs, buts or maybes – nothing to see here, apart from a brief rhetorical insult to the separation of powers.

Sadly for the prime minister, reassurance tinged with hubris didn’t exactly catch on. It foundered before the day was done.

So, given the first parable didn’t catch, by Tuesday we were thrust into a completely new unreality. Nothing transformed into something. Canberra woke up, suddenly, in a potboiler.

Overnight, we had entered a full-blown political crisis – an unseemly international conspiracy.

By the AM program on the ABC at 8am, the Labor party was in cahoots with colleagues across the Tasman to bring down the Australian government. The manager of government business, Christopher Pyne, came out first with the treachery line.

The prime minister sounded the same dastardly trumpet in the Coalition party room. Bill Shorten wanted to steal government by entering into a conspiracy with a foreign power, Turnbull told colleagues.

Just in case we missed the first two foghorns honking away in a mist of swirling incomprehension, the foreign minister, Julie Bishop, presented herself to journalists in the mural hall to suggest she would struggle to trust a Labour government in New Zealand, or at least members of a Labour government prepared to look into the dual citizenship processes of their own country, at the behest of colleagues in Australia.

Before we could all absorb that uncharacteristic burst of partisan impetuousness from Australia’s normally highly professional foreign minister, we were in question time and, evidently, the government’s brains trust had required backbenchers to double down by asking questions about foreign state interference in Australian political matters.

With a straight face.

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As the faux gravitas came in the flurry of cartoonish Dorothy Dixers, Australians were invited to believe a cold war had erupted across the Tasman and New Zealand was now some axis of evil.

Question time was beyond excruciating as otherwise intelligent people, members of the elected government of Australia, painted ever more florid pictures of conspiracy – an offensive which achieved precisely nothing, beyond inserting a massive question mark over the government’s collective judgment and fitness for office.

On Tuesday the Turnbull government succeeded in one thing, and one thing only: hanging a lantern over its own desperation, its own lack of an organising idea, and its own terrible panic and recklessness.

Could we really be watching the Australian government completely lose the plot, right before our eyes?

As it turned out, yes, we could.