“Another day, another rort,” said shadow sports minister Don Farrell today, in response to a report in Guardian Australia that the Coalition spent almost $150 million of taxpayers’ money ahead of last year’s election campaign, in a federal program that was never opened to public applications. This news about the Female Facilities and Water Safety Stream program follows this week’s revelations about the Stronger Communities Programme, and the saga over the Community Sport Infrastructure Grants Program, which cost the job of former Nationals cabinet minister Bridget McKenzie. There are now so many rorting controversies, they are combining to form one big mega-rort – a rort so big it is creating its own political weather. Remarkably, the response of the Morrison government to the emergence of these scandals, from the prime minister down, has been to assert the right to rort, on the basis that MPs know better than unelected bureaucrats what’s needed in their electorates. If they get away with that, then checks and balances are no more, and the Opposition and media may as well pack up and go home.

There were no rules at all in the Female Facilities and Water Safety Stream program, as the ABC points out: “No guidelines. No tender process. No application form. Some recipients didn’t know they’d even been given money until they read about it in the local paper.” ABC’s 7.30 last night aired standing concerns about the administration of the Regional Jobs and Investment Packages, the Drought Communities Programme and the Building Better Regions Fund, under which 94 per cent of grants went to electorates held by or targeted by the Coalition at the last election. As the ABC’s political editor, Laura Tingle, said last night, while the individual grants involved in some of these programs are small, the collective amounts of money are significant. Other government grant programs have also attracted controversy, such as the Safer Communities Fund, the Commuter Car Park Fund, the Mutual Understanding, Support, Tolerance, Engagement and Respect initiative, and the Communities Environment Program.

The overlapping nature of the scandals makes it harder to expose each individual one; it paradoxically protects them. Consequently, the government is not even pretending to hold itself accountable. The prime minister and the deputy prime minister, Michael McCormack, are so keen to move on from the sports rorts affair there is already discussion of when, not if, Bridget McKenzie might be returned to cabinet. A Senate inquiry will be starved of key witnesses and documents. Freedom of information requests will be denied or delayed indefinitely. There has to be a circuit-breaker on this downwards spiral to ever-lower standards of accountability. A federal ICAC with real teeth is a minimum.

But wait, there’s more, because the apparent rorting of grants programs for party-political purposes is only part of the story. There is also the failure of the federal police to investigate what, on its face, seems an open-and-shut case of falsifying documents by the office of Angus Taylor, minister for energy and emissions reductions. Someone faked the City of Sydney annual report in question, provided by the minister’s office to The Daily Telegraph. Who? Is it beyond the wit of the federal police, so adept at investigating journalists, whistleblowers and members of the Opposition?

Don’t even mention the perpetration of the vindictive robodebt scheme on hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients, including raising a billion dollars of fake debts – which may have tipped vulnerable people into suicide, according to evidence before a Senate inquiry, and which turns out to be illegal, according to secret advice the government kept from the public.

Once it seemed that, for all its faults, Australian politics had avoided the post-truth, hyper-partisan excesses of Trump and Brexit in the US and UK. No longer. We’ve got the disease, and we’ve got it bad.