It’s becoming all too familiar. Government policy made up on the fly, ministers shooting from the lip, the public being taken for fools. Welcome to data retention 2014 style.

When the Government’s hand-picked analyst released his critique of Labor’s NBN earlier this week, his most telling criticism was that the planning process was “rushed, chaotic or inadequate.”

How about the development of the current Government’s data retention plans?

Attorney-General George Brandis is looking increasingly incompetent. He is becoming serious liability in a Government full of smaller liabilities. His “It’s okay to be a bigot” remarks were the main factor in the Government’s ignominious retreat this week from its plans to water down the race hate laws. His arrogance knows no bounds.

That great saying of Winston Churchill’s, which has been trotted out recently to describe Clive Palmer, is looking increasingly apt. Brandis is a ‘bull who carries around his own china shop’. His bumbling and embarrassing interview on Sky News this week, in which he fumbled and backtracked on what data would be retained, showed him up for the technically illiterate bully he is. He can’t tell a web address from his own arse.

Tony Abbott has been his usual vindictive and obfuscating self. He justifies the plans by saying all the data security agencies – the very empire builders who benefit from increased surveillance – say it is necessary, while the legion of critics are dismissed as ‘the civil liberties brigade’.

Even Malcolm Turnbull is thrashing about. His interview on Bloomberg, in which he basically admitted the Government was making up the policy as it went along, just made him look silly, which is not easy.

Not to put too fine a point on it, the Government’s performance on data retention is pathetic. Individually and collectively, the impression is one of gross incompetence and blatant deceit. That’s the impression, because that’s what it is.

No-one likes to be taken for a fool. That’s how the Government is treating us, but it is they who are being exposed as the fools. It’s the Three Stooges. If this is considered policy development, if this is ‘Government by grownups’, God help us all.

I’ve got a solution. Put Scott Morrison in charge of it all. Oh, hang on …