Where is a federal anti-corruption agency when you need one? We now have a federal minister, Angus Taylor, whose office is implicated in a possible criminal offence – which Labor today referred to NSW Police – and who may well have misled parliament about it. A minister who held a meeting with environment officials over an endangered grasslands listing and a compliance action affecting farmland he has a financial stake in. A minister who has been linked to a company in the Cayman Islands that appears to have hoovered up $80 million in public money in a dubious water buyback. A minister who deliberately and repeatedly misleads the public. There needs to be another word for a minister like Taylor – let’s call him a spinister. Taylor is so bad at his job he is actually an asset for Labor; his office is an engine room of debacle and disgrace. Unfortunately, while he continues to hold high public office, Taylor is a disaster for the rest of us.

Equally unfortunately, expectations that there will be any accountability for Taylor’s latest apparent misdemeanour are zero. After Labor yesterday gave the government a deadline of 24 hours to refer to police allegations that Taylor’s office had supplied a forged document to The Daily Telegraph so it could do a hit-job on Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced today that he would not call the police in on the matter. Labor followed through, with shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus penning a two-page letter asking NSW Police Commissioner Michael Fuller to consider investigating “this highly concerning matter”. Expectations of criminal charges being laid are not especially high on the Labor side. There is a feeling that Taylor may not have been able to survive another day of tough questions in parliament – and would have thrown a staffer under the bus, for example – but the moment has passed and the four-week recess does not help the cause of ministerial accountability.

However, Taylor did the one thing yesterday that nobody expected: he dug a deeper hole, by continuing to assert the impossible – that the false document was downloaded from the Sydney council website. This makes no sense. Taylor’s office did not respond to questions from me today. Given that his office could clear this up in a nanosecond by releasing the falsified document, including its metadata that would show when it was created and altered, the continuing silence is deafening. Taylor, as a minister of the Crown, is not even paying lip-service to accountability. He continues in his job with the full support of the PM. Shadow climate minister Mark Butler said at an Adelaide press conference today, “Instead of the prime minister actually putting his words into action and putting this into the hands of the New South Wales police, he has shown that there is one rule for one group of Australians – cabinet ministers in the Morrison government – and another rule for everyone else, including the journalists who are currently under threat of prosecution for doing their jobs.”

Politics just continues to hit new lows, and Taylor’s latest scandal illustrates perfectly the failings of the Coalition’s model for a toothless integrity commission, which will only investigate matters referred by the government, will not be able to investigate matters occurring before it was established, will not hold public hearings and will not be able to make corruption findings against a minister. On all counts, Taylor’s office would continue to escape investigation.

Public governance expert Howard Whitton says that given the gravity of the accusations against Taylor, “it would be appropriate to consider whether a criminal offence of this kind, if proved, amounts to corruption or misconduct in public office”. It is not impossible, in fact, that the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption may investigate the scandal, given that it involves an attempt to influence a local politician, Clover Moore. We might expect a referral forthwith.