Full credit to Sky News' David Speers who didn't let Brandis brush the questions aside and forced him to clarify the metadata issue, making it clear in the process that Brandis didn't actually understand the policy he was championing. It's easy to see why civil libertarians are concerned about data retention when the politicians don't even comprehend the powers that they're granting intelligence agencies who want to spy on their own people.

Actually, watching those clips again, Hewson's GST explanation was far more coherent than Brandis' cumbersome and contradictory effort to explain metadata. Hewson's reputation was left in tatters after that interview – it possibly cost him the election – and Brandis' reputation is equally damaged in some people's eyes. Right now you wouldn't trust the Attorney-General to program your VCR let alone oversee a high-tech nation-wide surveillance program. The Sky News interview verged on satire to the point where it doesn't seem out of place when dubbed over a Clarke and Dawe skit.

There are actually two possible explanations for Brandis' appalling attempt to explain metadata on Sky News, and for Abbott's contradictory statements. One is that they didn't understand what they were talking about. The other is that they did understand what they were talking about but were deliberately trying to mislead us. So they're either incompetent or dishonest – a disturbing state of affairs similar to the internet filtering debacle on the eve of the federal election.

After the Brandis interview on Sky News I was leaning towards dishonest, because it seemed like he was tripping on his words as he played semantics to obscure the fact that the government does intend to spy on our browsing history. Then I heard Communications Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, speaking on ABC radio on Friday morning, trying to clean up the mess that Abbott and Brandis had created. He was more articulate than Abbott or Brandis could ever hope to be on technology issues and maybe they'll think twice before freezing him out of these matters in the future.

Turnbull made it clear that the government does not intend to keep our full browsing history or even a simple list of the sites we've visited. Instead the government only wants Internet Service Providers to keep track of the IP addresses issued to their customers, because those addresses regularly change and the government wants the ability to trace suspicious activity back to specific people. In Turnbull's words;