Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen At first she insisted that she just so happened to be on the Gold Coast for official reasons when an auction for a nice investment property just so happened to be occurring and she figured she might pop by just for funsies. Then it was revealed that the vendor was well known Liberal donor Martin Corkery, and that Ley had been sorting out financing for such a purchase months in advance, suggesting that the timing wasn't quite as coincidental as she had implied. The new attention being paid to Ley hasn't exactly been to her benefit either. Sure, her decision to add that extra S to her name for reasons of numerology is downright goofy, but being reminded that she's a qualified pilot who needs to log a certain amount of flight time to maintain her licence throws an unflattering cast on her otherwise inexplicable decision to use public money to hire chartered flights to capital cities easily serviced by far cheaper commercial providers – especially when she had merrily tweeted photos of herself at the controls.

Ley's humiliation has been given extra spice by a fun conspiracy theory positing that the reason that a reliably pro-Liberal news source broke the story of her housing spree was to use it as leverage to force Turnbull to return deposed Prime Minister Tony Abbott to the ministry. Abbott, you might recall, was health minister under John Howard and Turnbull is currently presiding over an increasingly shallow pool of plausible alternatives should Ley not be able to return. That's not least because Malc's already lost a bunch of supporters through scandal (ministers Mal Brough and Stuart Robert), being turfed out at the election (Wyatt Roy, Peter Hendy), or both (Jamie Briggs). And Turnbull is reticent to reward his vanquished foe, since he knows well that handing one's rival a ministry provides them with a great position from which to stage a successful coup. For example, in the case of Tony Abbott's Communication Minister Malcolm Turnbull. The sheer effrontery of a minister seemingly getting the public to pay for a trip on which she bought an investment property seemed somewhat at odds with a government simultaneously obsessed with recovering spurious-seeming debts from the unemployed based on laughably false premises such as that the amount that one earns in a fortnight (which is how Centrelink determine eligibly for benefits) is identical to the amount one earned over the entire year divided by 26 (which is how the debt collection process appears to be working off Australian Taxation Office data), to the point where the commonwealth ombudsman has called for its suspension pending an enquiry. Thankfully, there's nothing else humiliating the government right now. Except for that Brandis inquiry to come.