It is a sad reflection on our politics and governments that it takes some pretty hostile circumstances to get leaders to come clean, admit fault, and, yes, even to tell the truth. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

Self evidently, that was the calculation Tony Abbott and his coterie weighed up before breaking the glass and pulling the tell-all press conference lever on the first morning of the last parliamentary week.

But after a week from hell headlined by the ABC funding fudge where the PM had been skewered on his own words, and bookended by the voters' cool dispatch of a first-term coalition government in Victoria – at least partly on federal grievances – the emergency was undeniable.