While all eyes were on Bill Shorten at the trade union royal commission, Europe fretted and the Chinese market wobbled and Tony Abbott and his increasingly fractious government had a very odd week.

Before Shorten met Dyson Heydon and Jeremy Stoljar on Wednesday and Thursday, Abbott had been in a supermarket suggesting to reporters that his grocery code of conduct would have prevented the various global market uncertainties.

Yes, I’m afraid he did. He obviously didn’t mean it because what he said was entirely ridiculous. But strange persisted. By week’s end the prime minister was telling the ABC, a broadcaster independent of government, that it needed to move the Q&A program to the news and current affairs division or his ministers would continue to boycott the program.

Tony Abbott: Q&A ministerial ban could be lifted if ABC imposes strict guidelines Read more

The prime minister choosing to micromanage a public broadcaster late on a Friday afternoon wasn’t quite as strange as the grocery code saving Greece but it was pretty darned strange behaviour, monstering the ABC like it’s one of your junior ministers or an arm of the state, digging yourself deeper in a fight which makes no sense and is only sucking up oxygen and hurting you.

It might make sense if you were launching your directives from a position of political strength but the various polls published this week only confirmed the Coalition is fighting from a position of seemingly entrenched weakness.

Abbott this week was a plane flying at hurtling speed with a couple of wings falling off. Apart from the spiralling pointlessness of indulging the epic Q&A battle about nothing, a couple of big things shifted in Tony’s world.

The first shift involves Barnaby Joyce. The Nationals’ strongest brand in the bush went to war with the prime minister after manfully trying to suck up a couple of humiliations.

Indignity one involved the agricultural competitiveness white paper. The white paper had been delayed because it was bogged down internally for months. Some helpful anonymous soul was quoted at some juncture saying part of the reason for the delay was Joyce was intent on pursuing every “crackpot” scheme from the last quarter century.

When the paper eventually clambered out of the crack pot and the expenditure review committee and limped, bruised, to the printers, what was being badged rather lamely by the prime minister’s office as a $4bn spend for the bush was actually a $1bn spend. The white paper wasn’t terrible, but it was a bit thin as white papers go.

To compound indignity one, the prime minister then declined to let Joyce go on Q&A to sell it. (Nobody watches Aunty in the bush, right? Why would it be sensible to flog your wares there?)

Barnaby Joyce says he opposes Shenhua mine 'as minister', contradicting Abbott Read more

Joyce could be observed grinding his teeth, but he tried to be a good soldier, and defer to the incomprehensible whims of the field marshall.

But then came Shenhua. The approval of a $1.2bn coalmine in his electorate transformed gritted teeth diplomacy into open warfare. Joyce has made it clear he didn’t see that (highly objectionable) decision coming, and he didn’t intend to pretend he was in favour of it.

Abbott, for his part, tried to pretend Joyce’s objections were simply the protestations of an assiduous local member, but Joyce was having none of the fudge. Nope, nope, nope, said Joyce. I object to this decision in my ministerial capacity. I am standing up for farmers.

Given the government’s Senate leader, Eric Abetz, was only last week telling ministers (on another issue) to suck up the government position or resign, Joyce’s insurrection was a bit like the man: rather technicolour, rather memorable.

This shift in Abbott and Joyce’s relationship might have been coming in increments for quite a long time, but to understand its significance we have to walk back a few steps.

When Joyce first showed up in the Senate in Canberra, he made it known he would be a maverick. He was of the view that coalitionism with the Liberals was slowly killing the Nationals – what the voters wanted was someone who would stand up to the Liberals and defend the bush.

Joyce in the early days used to drive the Nationals leadership and the Liberals nearly bonkers, and Peta Credlin was dispatched to help manage the Senate dynamics behind the scenes.

But Abbott took a more sympathetic approach. Barnaby was a brilliant retail politician, Abbott said. Barnaby needed to be Barnaby.

Both as opposition leader and over the opening stanza of his government, Abbott made institutionalising Barnaby a priority.

The wild brumby was backed gently into the stable through a combination of personal validation and policy incentives, like the silly restrictions on foreign investment that made pro-market Liberals grind their teeth.

So let’s cut to the chase here. If Barnaby Joyce is now, in July 2015, somehow an inconvenience to the government, tough luck, because it was Tony Abbott who mentored and nurtured and validated Joyce as a political figure: the man most likely to next lead the Nationals.

The Shenhua decision – given the pitched battles between mining and farming at the local level – exposes Joyce to the risk of losing his seat, which helps contextualise the agriculture minister’s current fury, which rings with an edge of personal betrayal. The treatment of Joyce has been brutal.

So in this past week, Joyce rampaged down one end, and meanwhile, down the small “l” liberal end of the government, the “let’s talk about ideas” and “reason trumps reactionary populism” end – Malcolm Turnbull loomed serenely midweek like the prime minister’s externalised conscience.

Turnbull’s intervention on national security at the Sydney Institute on Tuesday night could not have been more elegant, more reasonable, more forensic, or more devastating.

We can view Turnbull’s intervention through the prism of leadership if we want to go all lowest common denominator, but if we do that we’ll miss the actual point.

Turnbull sailing forth on national security won’t win him numbers or even many friends on the government backbench – that speech is something you contribute because you actually believe in what you are saying.

Turnbull’s speech was a ringing endorsement of the values of classic liberalism, which had endured through centuries, through times of war and adversity: principles like the rule of law, and individual freedom.

The implied question in the outing was obvious. Are we sticking to these principles with our current decisions and statements, or are we descending into a state of near-permanent reaction and fudginess that betrays our core values?

Are we folks in Canberra in the truth and reason and proportionality business or are we in the amplification of wickedness business?

If you are in politics to serve the public, these are very good questions to wonder about.

So to cut our longish story short? It’s pretty whacky times inside the government right now. Every intelligent minister faces a choice. You can either be carried along by the convection current of Abbott’s over-egged and unconvincing pitch to the voters, and his petty vindictive arguments, or when the moment presents, you can say enough is enough.

Two ministers, in separate ways, did that this week.

They stood up.

And there was Abbott, in the middle, with his grocery code, and his silly finger jab at the ABC, while the world around us wobbles.