The 46th parliament is beginning to ease into itself. The Coalition’s collective shock at winning the election is transforming, bit by bit, into swagger. In the bear pit, the government hovered on the brink of braggadocio.

Labor’s leader, Anthony Albanese, has begun the task of telling colleagues and the party’s base that this will be the toughest term of opposition, and things need to change if Labor wants to avoid a fourth election loss. Given the result in May the guidance feels reasonably self-evident, but not everyone loves the message.

While this settling was happening, while the chambers were grinding through the parliamentary fortnight, the division bells ringing, harried staff and principals racing in and out of offices, I had a couple of discomfiting encounters with truth.

The first involved Facebook, and the death tax investigation we’ve pursued both during and after the federal election campaign. I’d been chasing the final bit of correspondence between the Labor campaign and the social media giant for weeks. When I finally sighted it, Facebook’s response to Labor’s repeated requests for intervention to halt the spread of misinformation during the election contest was even more depressing than I’d imagined.

Facebook told Labor the claims circulating on the platform about Bill Shorten’s alleged plan to introduce a death tax if he won the May election were false. The claims were found to be false by an independent fact-checker.

So just wrong. Fake news.

But in the same correspondence, Facebook executive Simon Milner then characterised the death tax material as something else – not fake news, but a contention that Labor didn’t care for.

Milner said he understood that Labor’s preference was the removal (as opposed to demotion in the News Feed) of all content “that you believe constitutes misinformation”. But “we do not agree that it is our role to remove content that one side of a political debate considers to be false.”

So let’s recap this. Two paragraphs earlier, in the same letter, the same content had been deemed by Facebook’s fact-checkers to be false. Actually false. Not arguably false. But now it was arguably false. That’s some hall of mirrors to enter, and it wasn’t clear from the correspondence that the senior executive understood these two concepts are distinctly different.

A bit later in the week I had a conversation with Paul Fletcher, the communications minister, about whether Facebook should exercise editorial responsibility for false material on its platform. He thought this idea was fraught, which, of course, it is.

I suspect Fletcher and I would agree that the only thing worse than the status quo is Facebook – already too dominant and too insufficiently regulated – appointing a truth commissar and setting itself up as the arbiter of reality. Also not desirable: a government appointed truth commission.

Solutions are going to be hard to find. But the fact is we have a serious problem when the primary place where citizens congregate can be a hub for misinformation, which is corrosive for the body politic, and nobody is ultimately responsible for making the environment better.

In the bear pit, the government hovered on the brink of braggadocio.

While I was wrestling with these conundrums – the truth and how to safeguard it – Labor trialled a question time session where it sought to hold various government figures, from the prime minister down, responsible for statements they had made previously that turned out to be ... how can I put this politely ... less than accurate.

The particular examples mattered less than the underlying ambition of the exercise, which felt strangely audacious in 2019. Watching from the press gallery in the chamber, I was transported back to a time when politicians were much more careful about what they said, both inside the chamber and outside it, because it felt like there were negative consequences for (as Albanese put it at one point) just “making stuff up”.

Over the last couple of decades, we’ve lived through a profound technological disruption that has upended politics and the media and, somewhere along the road, truth, and the practice of being accountable for telling it, started being discounted.

The most disconcerting thing about knowing this, and living it, and trying to document it, is it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where and how this happened. The slide away from fixed points really messes with your bearings.

The drift into “truthy” is so inexorable, so unavoidable, that it requires corrective experiences like sitting in the chamber in the nation’s parliament and experiencing a genuine sense of throwback to understand we are now in a different place; to understand that we’ve transited from a time where loose words had consequences to the contemporary world, where political figures say pretty much anything and don’t seem to suffer any profound consequences for it.

Over the last parliamentary fortnight, when Labor wasn’t conducting live action truth and accountability experiments, or chasing Angus Taylor about grasslands, government backbenchers were mouthing scripts about sides.

Backbenchers arrived on the question time conveyor belt like ventriloquists dummies, one after the other, asking questions inviting Scott Morrison and frontbenchers to elaborate on how and why they were on the side of Australians quietly wanting various things – Australians quietly choosing sound budget management, or wanting to buy their first home, or Australians choosing to keep more of what they earned. It seemed possible the prime minister could be invited to nominate himself as being on the side of people who wanted quietly to have a sausage roll for lunch, or put the bin out successfully before the garbage truck arrived, but fortunately there were limits.

The government’s purpose was twofold. To some degree this was narrative building: an articulation of Coalition values.

But predominantly, it was an exercise in trying to highlight what Labor might be against. The government wanted to shape an implicit question to frame the final Canberra session before the winter recess: whose side was Labor on?

Now this process isn’t a substantive interrogation of anything at all. It’s just drivel, frankly.

There’s another problem. If the Coalition is, as its own questions suggest, on the “side” of people who want tax cuts, or sound budget management, then at a fundamental level, it is failing its job as the government of Australia.

Call me old-fashioned, but being the government of Australia actually requires you to be on everyone’s side – on the side of the people who voted for you and the people who didn’t.

If the Coalition actually believes its own rhetoric, then we are watching a full-scale retreat from the fusion imperatives of representative democracy to pure partisanship, where politics is about no more than spectacle and tribalism.

We have entered the prime ministership of “Go Sharks”.

There’s another reason to worry about the politics of “sides”. Apart from the problem I’ve just flagged – the problem of permanent partisanship substituting for representation and governing – the impulse sitting behind that zero-sum framing fuels the rhetorical arms race in politics.

And that rhetorical arms race decouples us from truth.