SO let’s get this straight. The biggest scandal in Australia is that trade unions royal commissioner Dyson Heydon, AC, QC, did not speak at a function that was not a Liberal fundraiser.

This beat-up consumed Question Time yesterday, and has filled front pages for days.

Labor and the unions want to destroy the royal commission because it is forensically exposing their criminal extortion racket. And, with Bill Shorten due to be recalled over allegations of hundreds of thousands of dollars of employer donations and kickbacks when he was AWU leader, they face an existential emergency.

Heydon could have picked his nose and they would have turned it into an outrage. His real crime is that he’s doing his job too well.

Less straightforward is the motivation of the media salivating over Heydon’s minor transgression of not immediately reading an email attachment which advertised the $80-a-head Sir Garfield Barwick legal lecture with a Liberal party logo.

Realising the potential appearance of bias, Heydon pulled out of the lecture before the story broke, anyway. But listening to the hysteria, you’d think the Liberal Party was the Ku Klux Klan.

media_camera Illustration by Terry Pontikos

Every royal commissioner has personal views. What counts is that they conduct themselves with scrupulous fairness when carrying out their professional duties. Heydon, a black letter lawyer and former High Court judge, is universally regarded as impeccable on that score, and his management of the TURC has been boringly proper. Let the ACTU test their febrile allegations in the High Court and see how far they get.

No, this confected scandal is not about Heydon accepting an invitation to deliver a prestigious law lecture. It is a proxy for bringing down the Prime Minister.

Six months since the February leadership spill that wasn’t, various media grandees and Coalition strivers have hit the reset button, making up the excuse of opinion poll jitters within the margin of error and an entitlements scandal which cost Abbott loyalist Bronwyn Bishop her job, but let off worse offenders in Labor scot free.

Heydon, frankly, is a victim of the weakness of the Abbott government.

The PM talks about loyalty — to Treasurer Joe Hockey, to chief of staff Peta Credlin and the utterly graceless former Speaker. But his greater loyalty should be to the Australian people and those, like Heydon, he has called to serve.

Passivity and inaction are no longer tolerable. Abbott can’t keep being the dope on the ropes, turning the other cheek over and over, waiting for the killer blow that will finally finish him off.

His best defence is offence. It’s time to pull the circuit breaker and call a double dissolution election on industrial relations issues. With any luck, the Canning by election in WA might even be able to be postponed until then.

This week provided the perfect trigger, with Labor’s attempts to close down the trade union royal commission coinciding with the Senate’s rejection of legislation to make unions abide by the same rules as companies.

Why should unions have immunity from accountability? Why should union officials get away with trading off workers’ wages for kickbacks?

Australia has the highest construction costs in the world, thanks to our lawless construction unions. Yet the Senate has blocked legislation to re-establish the “tough cop one the beat”, the Australian Building and Construction Commission which would re establish the rule of law on construction sites.

Union corruption and featherbedding are stunting Australia’s growth, fuelling unemployment, and threatening free trade agreements that are crucial to future prosperity. The dinosaurs dragging Australia backwards are not the Abbott government but Shorten and his union cronies, along with the Greens and other economic naifs who block everything in the Senate.

Seizing the initiative will save Heydon, and show up Shorten for the lightweight phoney he is. It gives the PM the opportunity for a quick image makeover and a ruthless battle-ready reshuffle that elevates his best and dumps disloyal underperformers.

After all, Abbott unleashed is a formidable warrior — as he showed yesterday when he read the riot act to leakers in his party room and then launched a stinging attack on Labor in Question Time.

“Stop running a protection racket on a protection racket, stop smearing a High Court judge and … give the honest workers and honest unionists of this country a fair go.”

That’s an election winning platform with a clear economic narrative. It fits nicely with the Coalition’s jobs and growth mantra that has been buried under the cacophony of such Labor distractions as gay marriage and Dyson Heydon’s nocturnal disquisitions.

Clear out the blockages, go for broke. Abbott could win the election and reset the whole rancid political landscape. He has nothing to lose and Australia has everything to gain.

Bring it on.