A similar rule of thumb could be applied to any documents produced by Taylor’s office regarding the travel bills of his political foes. Does it worry anyone that he is Minister for Emissions Reduction – on which Australia is accused of doing some dodgy accounting – at a time when bushfires, most probably worsened by climate change, are engulfing the country? It should. But for anyone seeking Christmas cheer as the ash blankets the tinsel, I urge you to go online and listen in full to the conversation between Wolf and the nameless staffer, a young-sounding man who wants desperately to get off the phone, not least because it’s very late and, as he explains to Wolf, is only in the office because it is the Christmas party. This is an unfortunate irony given the reason for Wolf’s phone call is to set the record straight over claims Taylor appears to make in his maiden speech to Parliament about Wolf’s politically correct objections to Christmas. Here she is again, ruining Christmas – again – this time with her ceaseless demands for “accountability”.

The dispute originates from Taylor’s claim in his first speech that when he attended Oxford University in 1991, “a young Naomi Wolf lived a couple of doors down the corridor”. He went on to imply that she was part of, at least adjacent to, a group of graduate students “from the north-east of the US” – a wink I guess we can take to mean New York, that hotbed of bagels and liberalism – who “decided we should abandon the Christmas tree in the common room because some people might be offended”. Later, the Australian Financial Review published a profile of Taylor where the story was rehashed, and embellished to include Wolf leading the anti-Christmas charge. Loading Wolf, fresh from her own fact-checking scandal over her recent book, in which she wrongly claimed gay men in Victorian London were executed by the state, has pointed out that she was not at Oxford in 1991, having already graduated. She further contends that she loves Christmas, and that Taylor’s peddling of this anecdote is anti-Semitic. Taylor has now demanded an apology for that, and so, Merry Christmas, Australia (or should that be Happy Holidays?), this is what our politics has become.

I am always attuned to the arrival of the “political correctness kills Christmas” stories in the news cycle, because, funnily enough, such yarns announce the beginning of the festive season more reliably than the arrival of Santa suits in the supermarket. I just didn’t expect this year’s to come wrapped in a Taylor-shaped bow. But back to our staffer, and his plight, for it is all of our plights. Loading The weariness of his tone during the phone call is unmistakable. He is tired and he wants to go home. He seems, at times, incredulous that it is really Naomi Wolf on the phone, that it has indeed come to this. He is possibly drunk. He tries to blame the journalist who wrote the AFR article. Again and again he implores the famous feminist to send an email detailing her complaint.

This is something journalists get a lot when they ring politicians’ offices, government departments and companies. “Can you put that in an email?” they say. It is code for: please put your irritating query in a form of writing that is forwardable via the internet, so I can pass this problem onto someone else. Put it in an email: What greater catchphrase is there for our times, when weariness over the world’s problems is trumped only by a lack of accountability from those with the power to fix them? Again and again Wolf refuses to get off the phone, and chastises the staffer for talking over her, while neglecting to mention she is recording the whole conversation, for global publication on YouTube within a few hours. For what is the point of claiming a victory against your ideological opponents if it happens in private?

So, here we have it, at year’s end: the greatest, weirdest and the saddest encapsulation of the tribalism that seems increasingly to define our politics: two people at odds, one from the left, one from the right, both with reputations for playing loose with the facts to make ideological points. Both of them Rhodes scholars who should know better. Both accusing each other of various things – political correctness, anti-Semitism, a lack of integrity – and both using the other to self-aggrandise. All of this, while never actually talking to each other. Twitter: @JacquelineMaley