Auberon Waugh is credited with coining the term "the chattering classes", which Wikipedia notes is a "generally derogatory term often used by pundits and political commentators to refer to a politically active, socially concerned and highly educated section of the 'metropolitan middle class', especially those with political, media, and academic connections".

It migrated to Australian commentary in the mid-1990s — about the same time John Howard started fighting "political correctness" — at a time when conservative think tanks were emerging that argued our public policy discussions were captured by the "chattering classes" — by which they meant people like welfare lobbyists, Indigenous leaders and arty types.

The chattering classes don't seem to have quite as much sway as they once did, according to this definition, though it is interesting it doesn't seem to ever be applied in quite the same derogatory way to commentators of a conservative bent.

But if indeed the original chatterers had captured the public debate back then, their replacements haven't so much captured but have become the great disruptors of public debate.

Scott Morrison discovered this week — as Malcolm Turnbull did before him — that trying to start a calm, rational debate about constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians is quite hard when it steers wildly off course before it has even begun.

Between trying to keep that discussion in some place that might actually work for the cause and the course the Prime Minister says he is set upon (let alone his political interests, and the equally thorny and vulnerable issue of religious freedom), Mr Morrison has some job on his hands.

These are of course issues that he himself has chosen to prosecute. So hopefully he has a plan.

Mr Morrison, pictured with newly appointed Indigenous Australians Minister Ken Wyatt, is in a stronger position than many of his predecessors. ( ABC News: Andy Kennedy )

The weeks since election night and the return of Parliament have been full of talk of a Prime Minister in charge of his destiny in a way his predecessor was not, thanks to his unexpected election win and an improved number of seats in the House of Representatives.

But it was striking when politicians returned to Canberra last week that many in the Coalition were not exactly gung-ho about how much room the Government has to manoeuvre in the new term.

The Coalition, after all, only has one more seat in the House than it did after the last election.

And if the last Parliament demonstrated anything, it was that MPs' right to sit, as much as Prime Minister's right to feel safe, now seems to be fair game for challenge.

Section 44 of the Constitution was the nightmare of the last Parliament.

What will it be this time? There was a flurry of talk earlier in the week about a new form of constitutional challenge relating to the "right of abode".

Constitutional experts seem to think such a challenge is unlikely.

But there is a great irony in all of the discussions here.

The object of section 44 is to protect the parliamentary system from people who might be affected by conflicts of loyalty.

Nobody seriously believed that the people whose election was under a cloud in the last Parliament were really going to be affected by conflicts of loyalty stemming from (sometimes unknown) parents or grandparents being born in another country.

But while there was so much fuss being made about section 44, there is virtually no discussion about the very different status politicians hold in the national security universe to almost everybody else.

That is, politicians aren't forced to go through the various levels of security screening processes to which ministerial staff, public servants or employees of Parliament House are subjected.

Parliament House employees are subjected to security checks before they can work for the Government. ( ABC News )

The Herald Sun reported this week that two staffers wanting to work for federal ministers failed high-level security checks and that more than 90 people looking for jobs in the Australian Public Service had been denied security clearances in the past four years.

"The vetting process, aimed at catching foreign spies and people vulnerable to blackmail and coercion, has been criticised over a backlog of cases, delays of more than a year and the use of private contractors," the paper reported.

Yet if one of those people then decided to run for Parliament, there would be no formal process that stopped them, other than perhaps a quiet word from security agencies to political parties that their candidates might pose exactly the sort of risk section 44 is supposed to deal with.

And the rules apply differently to politicians when it comes to leaking things, too.

There has been an unspoken rule in federal politics, at least for all the time that I've worked in Canberra, that there are some leaks of sensitive documents which are never investigated because, well, everyone essentially knows they were leaked by a politician.

When a posse of Australian Federal Police officers raided journalist Annika Smethurst's apartment, there was one officer assigned to identify messages from politicians as they went through her phone, so that those messages wouldn't be scrutinised.

Similarly, you could speculate that the raid on Smethurst was conducted on her home, rather than her office, because she works in the Press Gallery of Parliament House and there is a great sensitivity to police moving in on the parliament itself.

There is a very powerful argument that this is just as it should be: that politicians should not be subjected to such vetting or scrutiny, in the same way they should be allowed to speak free of the restrictions of defamation laws under parliamentary privilege.

But when politicians start trying to crack down on others in public debates, they should expect some questioning of their own exemptions from some of these rules, and more scrutiny of their potential conflicts of interest. And not just financial conflicts of interest.

This crossover between political and other leaks was on clear display earlier this year when classified briefings were leaked about asylum-seeker medical transfers that attributed views to ASIO about legislation being proposed by crossbench MP Kerryn Phelps.

Ms Phelps (right) and Julia Banks watched the medical evacuations bill pass in the Senate in February. ( ABC News: Nick Haggarty )

The leak, which was highly politically useful to the government, provoked the ire of ASIO head Duncan Lewis, who said the leak had been highly damaging and unhelpful to his organisation.

Miraculously, the investigation into that leak was quietly dropped by the Australian Federal Police last month.

Yet Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton — who heads the bureaucracy from which the Medevac documents were leaked — was still at it on Friday, rejecting calls for assurances that journalists subject to AFP raids at the same time would not be charged.

While it's not clear that it is Mr Dutton's call to make about charges, he opined that "nobody is above the law and the police have a job to do under the law".

"I think it is up to the police to investigate, to do it independently and make a decision about whether or not they prosecute."

Maybe journalists in future should consider running for Parliament before they publish leaked documents.