He didn't try to talk Joyce into tendering his resignation, no doubt aware that he'd be rebuffed. Instead, he put on a public show. He tried to salvage some public political capital from his government's quandary. After an entire week of powerlessness and mounting embarrassment, Turnbull on Thursday afternoon finally gave the elephant an angry public lecture. Joyce had committed "a shocking error of judgment", said Turnbull, and needed to take a week's leave to "consider his position". He should not have had a sexual relationship with a young woman on his staff, Turnbull told the media. And he had rewritten the ministerial standards so that sex between ministers and their staff memebers would be prohibited "from today". Critically, Turnbull did not give Joyce any advance word that he was about to deliver this public moral judgment on his deputy. Or that he was changing the ministerial standards.

Turnbull demolished Joyce's scant remaining protection - his claim to a right to privacy. Consensual behaviour between adults had long been considered a private matter, Turnbull told the media, but no more. And the elephant? Irritated by all the bluster, it walked under a low branch on Friday to give the rider a bit of a scare, reminding him of its independence, as it makes its way back towards the path at its own pace. Loading The Prime Minister's remarks had been "inept" and "unnecessary". And the intrusion into his private affairs been hurtful. All he'd done was "pull the scab off for everybody to have a look at". Joyce told the press that he had no intention of considering his position. He was the leader of the Nationals, "an independent political unit". If anything, Turnbull's intervention had "locked in" Joyce's supporters in the Nationals. Joyce at least did the Prime Minister the courtesy of letting him know he was planning a press conference.

Turnbull is still cross but he can't do anything about it but hang on. His impotence has been exposed. He has tried to assert leadership but he's been humiliated.

Remember the last time he was on top? It was Barnaby who refused to follow Turnbull's lead on climate change. He led the Coalition in a revolt, and Tony Abbott took the opportunity to lead the Liberals in joining the revolt. On that occasion, the elephant threw the rider off and trampled him underfoot. The elephant that the Prime Minister rides has different moods, different personas. Sometimes it's Barnaby and the National party. Sometimes it's his conservative Liberal colleagues who take him off in unwanted directions. His most passionate beliefs, the causes he fought for all through his public life, whether the republic, climate change or same sex marriage, he had to shelve as the price of his accession to the leader's job. Sometimes it's a strong and determined minister. Peter Dutton almost invariably gets his way in the Turnbull cabinet, for instance. Congratulations on rearranging the government to create your new super-ministry, Home Affairs Minister.

Kevin Rudd laughs as he speaks with an elderly man after giving a speech at a breakfast in the NSW State Parliament ahead of the 10th anniversary of the National Apology to indigenous people. Credit:AAP Kevin Rudd returned to Australia for a few days this week. It's fair to say that he was not impressed with Turnbull's leadership skills. "Turnbull has demonstrated himself to be a leader's arse," the former prime minister told me. "A guy who always wanted to be Caesar, but not the faintest idea about advancing Australia into the future. That is the tragedy of his political leadership for us." As for the Prime Minister's assertion of moral leadership and his ban on sex between ministers and staff, Rudd's acid suggestion: "He should contract it out to the Saudi Religious Police."

Rudd is no admirer of Barnaby Joyce yet on this matter he sympathises. He laments the disappearance of any rights to privacy: "I'm no defender of Barnaby on public policy matters. I regard him as the worst Australian populist. But his family deserves privacy. "The benchmark for evaluating all of us engaged in public life continues to be raised to the extent that there is no longer any public-private divide." He reserves his toughest criticism for Turnbull: "The bottom line is that the core debates about our country's future continue to fall by the wayside. The essence of political leadership is to lead and not to follow. Turnbull's failure to lead on Aboriginal reconciliation, on climate change, on same-sex marriage, and let them all simply slide away is not inevitable.

"He should dare his party to remove him, given their parliamentary circumstance" of a one-seat majority. Turnbull has said that, if he were no longer leader, he would retire from Parliament. So his party dare not move against him for fear that it would lose government. "He should dare them on the back of having courageous positions on Indigenous reconciliation or climate change action. "Instead, we see him behaving as a slightly more elegant version of Barnaby Joyce in sliding down the populist road." Turnbull's overarching achievement is to survive, hanging on at any cost. Of course, Rudd, too, was thrown and trampled by his own party before remounting as leader years later. It's no easy feat to manage an elephant. True, he concedes, but he draws this contrast: "People may have loved me or loathed me in 2007, but I advanced debate. Whether it was our future beyond being China's quarry, infrastructure for the 21st century, climate change or Indigenous reconciliation.

"It seems that all these serious debates disappear into the sand when the latest piece of titillation arrives. It's no surprise that the people feel a deep alienation from the political system - we've been through nine months of politicians talking about themselves, whether it's citizenship or Barnaby Joyce." He blames Turnbull for failing to sustain the big debates, but Labor is hardly blameless here.

"Australians want us to stop taking about ourselves and start talking about them," Bill Shorten intoned to reporters on Thursday morning, pretending to take the high road even as his party prepared to take the low road of a stunt on the floor of the House to keep everyone talking about Joyce. The opposition confected outrage at every opportunity over even the smallest, most trivial detail of Joyce's situation while pretending that its only concern was for public administration. One example - Chris Bowen asked Joyce in question time whether he'd seen a real estate agent's video advertising the Armidale house that Joyce was living in. Irrelevant drivel, but any excuse to keep the story running. In truth, Labor was thrilling in the bloodsport of trying to bring down a member of the opposing tribe. And of course it couldn't have done this without the excited help of a very enthusiastic media. The whole episode was launched by The Daily Telegraph's new low for Australian media standards - the paper took paparazzi-style photos of Joyce's new partner, pregnant, as she crossed a road, and plastered her picture across its front page, knowing full well the pain that the intrusion was about to inflict on her, on Joyce's wife Natalie and their family.

And, once the Tele broke the story, it was picked up energetically by all the rest. Big matters, big debates, big stories fell by the wayside. For instance, the national effort to try to recover from the early colonial slow genocide waged on Australia's first peoples. This was the week of the annual Closing the Gap report into policies to bring Indigenous Australians out of the Third World-living conditions they've endured. And the 10th anniversary of the apology to the stolen generation. The grim news was that only three of the seven key metrics were on track to meet the bipartisan national goals. And there was much more besides. But this debate, these stories were soon overwhelmed and eventually buried by the pseudo-debate over Barnaby Joyce's marital woes.

It might sound like a pretty solid performance that there were 4226 mentions of Aboriginal affairs across all TV and radio stations this week, plus 213 references in print and another 2254 in online media, based on data from media monitoring firm Isentia. But this was dwarfed by 43,969 TV and radio references to the Joyce affair, more than 10 times the number, plus 964 print mentions and another 8017 in online media.

Under the blare of coverage of Joyce, a series of troubling Indigenous policy developments were lost. One was the fact that the longstanding and admirable bipartisan approach to Aboriginal reconciliation was lost. Labor asked that the government persist with the proposal for an "Indigenous voice", a council or committee of Aboriginal representatives to make recommendations to the federal government on indigenous matters. But Turnbull refused, ruling it out as an exclusionary "third chamber" of Parliament. It would have no power of lawmaking, so this is misleading. Yet rather than the leaders seeking a quiet compromise, Shorten demanded. Turnbull then escalated, promising to make it an election issue if Labor persisted. Progress to Indigenous reconciliation died on the floor of the Parliament this week, largely unnoticed and unmourned in the frenzy over Joyce. Another vital national matter came perilously close to the same fate this week - water supply to Australia's food bowl. When the Senate voted down the government's latest plan for water allocations in the Murray-Darling river system, some of the states threatened to abandon the scheme. Can Australia sustain an equitable water sharing plan, allowing enough water to be pumped out for agriculture and also enough to remain to sustain the river's many ecosystems? This remains in perilous balance. Again, it got scant interest and scant coverage in the all-consuming excitment over Joyce.