While the parliament and its entourage rode the rollercoaster of Barnaby Joyce’s sex life, and the two men running Australia declared open warfare on one another, the bigger systemic issues lurking behind the whole saga sat more or less undisturbed.



Labor launched an inquisition about various alleged conflicts of interest, and alleged non-compliance with ministerial standards, but Malcolm Turnbull stood like the duty solicitor for legal aid at the dispatch box, parsing and objecting – everyone being entitled to a defence, even a colleague whom he would later characterise in visceral terms as morally flawed.

While Labor probed the issues you would probe in the parliament, and journalists probed outside, fast hitting the hard limits of free speech as lawyers’ letters hit their inboxes – and the Matt Drudge mini-me’s of the disrupted media universe launched predictable paint-stripping homilies about mainstream media failure and cover-up – a handful of government MPs stood up in the Coalition party room to oppose the creation of a new federal anti-corruption body.

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This tin-eared internal debate got a bit lost in the telenovela of the week. Tony Abbott told the Coalition party room on Tuesday that star chambers ruined the careers of good, honest politicians – in a little play-within-the-play drowned out by the ad-hoc star chamber in progress in the lower house bear pit, and on the front pages of the newspapers, and on the live blogs, and on the rolling news channels.

Abbott is by no means an outlier in opposing integrity commissions, or independent commissions against corruption. In fact, that has long been the major party default view in Canberra, at least before Bill Shorten called time on all the naysaying in January, pledging to create one if Labor wins the next federal election.

The former prime minister told his colleagues on Tuesday that Turnbull should not follow Shorten off the proverbial cliff, and he followed up his party-room contribution publicly later in the week with a radio interview, lest the insurrection be missed.

The Victorian Liberal Russell Broadbent thought otherwise. He told government colleagues they would get killed politically if they argued against the creation of such a body, given that a whole lot of sensible people out in the real world think the circus in Canberra is cooked.

Broadbent advised Turnbull to pick up the integrity commission issue because only the Coalition could create an integrity body that wasn’t the kangaroo court Abbott so evidently feared.

While the government folks talked out their night terrors, the Murray-Darling basin plan hovered on the brink of collapse, in part because of persistent allegations of impropriety with water allocations and a profound lack of faith in the governance of the scheme.

So the elephant was not only in the room, it was knocking over the furniture. But by week’s end, the prime minister was issuing sex bans rather than wading in to the other debates.

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Joyce was given his gritted-teeth black-letter defence. There had been no technical breaches of the ministerial code, ipso facto, there was nothing to see here, and then Turnbull provided a free character assessment about the “world of woe” Joyce had inflicted on the women in his life.

But the bigger questions of integrity, conflict of interest and ministerial accountability swirled like a low-hanging fog.

However the Joyce saga ultimately ends, the developments of the past week have shed some light on dim places. The week has proven, should that proof have been necessary, that the code governing the professional behaviour of some of the most powerful people in the country is entirely discretionary, both in the drafting and in the subsequent enforcement.

The week has revealed that Joyce felt no real pressure to disclose a favour from a friend – rent-free accommodation in Armidale during a time of personal crisis – even though that friend is a powerful local figure, who has been active on the fringes of politics for a very long time, and who has received a government benefit.

Joyce’s rationale for his less-than-complete pecuniary interest declaration – “I didn’t disclose it because I didn’t believe I had to make transparent what happens between old mates” – speaks volumes about the culture of compliance and transparency in Canberra, or the lack of it.

Q&A Why can't Malcolm Turnbull sack Barnaby Joyce? Show Hide Barnaby Joyce is not a member of Malcolm Turnbull's Liberal party, he is the leader of the National party, which governs in coalition with the Liberals. In the same way that the prime minister could not sack the leader of the Labor party, he has no power to force the Nationals to change their leader. There is a coalition agreement between the leaders about the terms of their political partnership. The agreement is secret, but one of its cornerstones is that the leader of the National party will be deputy prime minister when the Coalition is in government and therefore acting prime minister in the absence of the PM. Turnbull could remove Joyce from the position of deputy prime minister by ending the Coalition between Liberals and Nationals. However, because the two parties combined only have a one-seat majority over Labor in the House of Representatives, that would be risky. Photograph: Michael Masters/Getty Images AsiaPac

Labor’s former senator Sam Dastyari disclosed a similar financial favour from a politically influential friend and all hell broke loose. The yardsticks looked all a bit arbitrary.

There was also a deeply silly debate about whether Vikki Campion could be considered Joyce’s partner for the purposes of compliance with the ministerial code, because he already had a wife. Centrelink would probably consider Campion a partner, but apparently not the ministerial code.

Australia got a brief glimpse into the fact the Australian parliament operates as more fiefdom and principality than modern workplace when the timeline of Campion’s various staff movements became apparent.

She was moved out of Joyce’s office, self-evidently as a consequence of having an intimate relationship with him. But again, it was a relationship that wasn’t technically a “partnership” because Joyce’s wife, Natalie, was already in receipt of spousal benefits, and by the time it could be considered a partnership Campion was no longer employed by a member of the executive, so the rules about not employing partners no longer applied.

“Bullshit” echoed around the country.

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Also little noticed during the week, entirely unconnected to Joyce and his travails, but pertinent to the broader questions, was a report from the commonwealth auditor general into the register of lobbyists, a little-disturbed document that sits meekly on the website of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

To cut a long story short, the audit office was perturbed there had been breaches of procedure with the registration system for hired-gun lobbyists on a number of occasions, but apparently no action had been taken.

In the ensuing dialogue between the audit office and the bureaucrats at DPMC, the departmental folks pleaded in their defence that they were administering the lobbyists’ register with precisely the degree of attention that had been mandated by the governments that set it up.

Governments had envisaged the department as a postbox, not a regulator of backroom behaviour. It was “an administrative initiative, not a regulatory regime,” the officials told the auditor general.

And right there, in that glancing aside from the head of the prime minister’s department, is the problem at the heart of this story.

If the current system is to change, it must be politicians who change it, otherwise it will remain precisely as it is, with everyone pointing fingers at everyone else and taking the plea bargain.

This is the challenge staring the Australian parliament in the face: listen to the disaffection and increasing disillusionment of voters, act with swiftness and clarity to preserve the integrity and reputation of a venerable institution, and drain the damn swamp.