Barnaby Joyce (far left) in June last year with media adviser Vikki Campion (far right). Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Two, when a politician brings his private life to the office, he or she has surrendered any right to privacy. Why? Voters need to know if a parliamentarian has breached their expectations. Having sex with an employee is an abuse of power; there should be repercussions. Perhaps the repercussions are yet to come but we wouldn't expect the AFL to have a better grasp of ethics and more appropriate responses than the federal government. But here it is: the AFL ditched senior men who were having inappropriate relationships with junior staff while the government did not – or not so far. Australians could get lucky in the next day or so and find Joyce on the backbench, taking a year's parental leave after the birth of his baby. I'd guess that would also mean he would be spending more time with his own offspring than ever before. Or perhaps he could get a flexible job with Gina Rinehart. I hear mining's becoming more family-friendly these days. The director of the Australian National University's Crawford school of public policy, Professor Helen Sullivan, puts it succinctly. "There should be clearer codes of conduct than there are ... If we are going to have a debate, what do we need to know as citizens and when do we need to know it? It should be a conversation about governance, ethics and the integrity of government." And that's another reason, right there, why we should know about their private lives: when the private life in question leads to a failure of governance. I don't mean the "having sex with a staffer" kind of breach, I mean the kind of governance that leads to our money being spent in ways or for purposes that are not entirely transparent.

Which brings me to political advisers, staffers or whatever you want to call them. You'll have read by now a million stories explaining that Vikki Campion (poor bloody woman, I'm sure she didn't ask for this) was relocated to the office of Matt Canavan, a move on which Malcolm Turnbull needed to sign off. The fact is, Canavan can hire whoever the hell he likes without advertising the position, without interviewing candidates and without consulting a single other person except, in this case, Joyce. The Members of Parliament (Staff) Act says parliamentarians can employ whoever they wish so long as it's done in accordance with arrangements approved by the prime minister. The only good news for voters is in the code of conduct: "Ministers' close relatives and partners are not to be appointed to positions in their ministerial or electoral offices ... without the prime minister's express approval." Maybe the ministerial code of conduct needs to be clearer. Don't just mention "close relatives and partners". Include the words "latest shag". The is much worse than a case of "oopsy". These folks stroll from office to office without ever having needed to apply for a job. The excuse provided by Turnbull's office – that Campion was not Joyce's partner at the time – is a giant weasel. Under the "latest shag" amendment, it would have attracted closer attention. I don't think I properly understood before that the hiring of political staffers is arbitrary and without scrutiny. One of Australia's leading researchers in this area, Maria Maley, also at the ANU, has comprehensively reviewed federal political advisers in Australia. The news isn't good. She describes advisers as "a cadre separate from the public service ... partisan". Under the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act, they are employed personally by ministers but their salaries are paid by the taxpayer. Maley says one of the negative features of Australia's arrangements is the secrecy surrounding the identity of ministerial staff. We don't really know who they are, how they got there and why they were chosen. It's awful.

Maley says the Coalition, under former prime minister John Howard, ditched the practice of naming advisers; and their identities are not readily publicly available. Everyone in Parliament House knows but not us. We pay the bills but we don't know who they are. "The names of the government's ministerial staff are now only listed in internal party directories, which are not allowed to be distributed outside the party. The number of ministerial staff is only known because of questioning by Senate committees," she says. I'm so looking forward to the outcome of her Australian Research Council project about this very problem. These staffers have never needed to apply for a job. It's an awful example of "who you know" instead of "what you know". Little wonder we see poor political outcomes. Are these the best people politicians can find? Where does this happen in the real world? And wouldn't you love to see the memo from Joyce to Canavan and onwards to Damian Drum? No memo? How about a transcript of the chat? How was it couched? Was it explicit in describing the relationship between Joyce and Campion? How explicit?

Wouldn't you love to know? Jenna Price is a Fairfax columnist and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney. Loading Facebook: JennaPriceJournalist Twitter: @jennaprice