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You'd have to feel terribly sorry for Nola Marino. Marino is the Liberal Party's team manager. Her real title is chief whip and her job is to wrangle the badly-behaved and the self-interested, the members of the parliamentary Liberal Party. Her National Party counterpart is Michelle Landry. Together, their struggle is real. This current bunch of Coalition politicians is truly dreadful and it would be a dead heat for the dreadfulest. Not sure if a whip is the right person to blame for the wrong and the inappropriate but there doesn't seem to be anyone else on the team list in charge of ethics and good behaviour. First on the list of wrong is Barnaby Joyce. Clear winner. Someone who is on the national payroll, funded by taxpayers, should not be doing a paid interview. The sooner Gina Rinehart employs him the better off Australia will be, unless of course he sets in train some scheme whereby Hancock Prospecting benefits even more than it has from this government. And first place on another list? This one for the list of badly-behaved. Michaelia Cash. The Liberal Party's loudest voice speaking up in defence of all the wrong things, while taking zero responsibility for what happens in her office. Who could possibly forget the way she dragged the Leader of the Opposition's female staffers through the sleaze earlier this year? Now she's been subpoenaed to appear before the Federal Court, which is examining last year's raids on the Australian Workers' Union. She's been moaning that it's all a union plot while appearing to forget the Federal Court doesn't get bullied into doing anything. Seriously, she reminds me of the chaos of last year when Alan Tudge, Michael Sukkar and Greg Hunt were forced to apologise after describing terrorism sentencing in Victoria as weak in The Australian. Boy did they have to grovel to get off after the court said the ministers failed to respect the separation of powers and "breached the principle of sub judice". Naughty. Greg Hunt appears to need some practice at thinking before he acts. There have been all manner of excellent jokes and jibes about Cash and Joyce. Laura Tingle revealed Labor's view that Cash is in witness protection while James Jeffrey wondered whose politician was actually the worst. But the fact is, all these politicians would be a helluva lot better off if only they'd taken the 2006 advice of a young Labor Party whippersnapper, Tanya Plibersek, who'd been elected to the shadow ministry just two years earlier. At 36, she wrote on the launch of Why Accountability Must Be Renewed, a discussion paper on honest and accountable government: "Parliamentarians should hold themselves to a higher standard, not thinking of what we can get away with, but always taking the moral path." Sadly, it's not just Cash, Joyce, Tudge, Sukkar and Hunt who have demeaned and degraded what it means to be a politician in this country and let's not pretend that their behaviour is new. A brief survey of the following list of political embarrassments over the past five years (feels so much longer) should cause the Prime Minister some discomfort. It's certainly causing voters to mistrust politicians in general. My creepiest has got to be former trade minister Andrew Robb, on the national payroll at the same time he was on the payroll of Landridge, the Chinese-owned company which has a 99-year-lease on the Darwin port. Payment only overlapped by day but my god it looked mucky. And the government defended him. "People do need to work after they leave parliament, there are not parliamentary pensions in place, nor should they be for people elected after 2004," said the then Special Minister of State Scott Ryan. Bruce Billson certainly ensured he had something to do post-politics. When the Prime Minister dumped him from the front bench in 2015, Billson said he would retire at the next election in July 2016. In the meantime and while he was still in office, he accepted a payment of $6250 in April of that year from the Franchise Council of Australia and did not disclose the job or the payment on Parliament's register of interests. A bipartisan inquiry said it was the wrong thing to do but I'm not sure we ever got our money back. Or what of Sussan Ley, forced to pay back money for trips she'd made to check out real estate and then making a 'personal decision' to resign from the ministry. And then there are all those who have just made appalling misjudgments. Like the much lamented Ann Sudmalis who said that cuts in penalty rates would be a gift to young people. Then there are a whole bunch where there are real questions over whether it was utterly clear and transparent, the moral thing to do: Stuart Robert's dad, Steve Irons's golf, Sarah Henderson's shares. Plus Julie Bishop, who seems to have the partner you have when you are not having a partner. Of course, none of these people have broken the law. But you have to wonder about the internal discipline of an organisation where so many of its members have come unstuck for behaviour which is clearly not in the national interest. Might need more than a whip to whip them into shape. Jenna Price is an academic at the University of Technology Sydney and a Fairfax columnist.

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