They managed just over a week, give or take.  Ignoring Wilson Tuckey’s little outburst about Tamil suicide boats wreaking havoc on the North-West Shelf, the Federal Opposition managed to nearly get through an entire sitting week last week without making themselves the issue.  Add on the previous weekend and a few days prior to that and heck, if they’d held their nerve they would have been looking at an entire fortnight of allowing the Government to stay in the spotlight.

But nope, Nick Minchin and Barnaby Joyce had other ideas.

Barnaby Joyce was first cab off the rank last Thursday, claiming it was Bill Heffernan’s and the Liberals’ fault the vast cancer that is Cubbie Station had gone into administration. Subsequent events reveal that Joyce was just itching to have a go at the Liberals, so the actual issue, in retrospect, was not so important, particularly given Nick Xenophon had said precisely the same thing about Cubbie as Heffernan.

Then on Friday Nick Minchin was careful to make a point of explaining that even if the Government agreed with every single ETS amendment, the Coalition might still reject it.

Minchin’s statement was one of the obvious – except for his emphasis.  Whenever Ian Macfarlane says much the same thing, he makes a point of saying that if the Government agreed to the Coalition amendments, he – and in effect shadow Cabinet – would recommend to the Coalition backbench that they support it.  The words had barely left Minchin’s mouth when the Governmetn started accusing the Coalition of bad faith in negotiating over the CPRS.

And, really, the Coalition is going to be in a terrible pickle if the Government agrees to most of their amendments and the backbench decides that that’s not good enough.  It effectively neuters the Coalition line on the CPRS – that it will be a job destroyer.  The Government can note that it offered to change the CPRS to meet the Coalition’s concerns and still got rebuffed.

The broader point, though, was that Minchin only needed to parrot Ian Macfarlane’s line on the issue and there would have been no opportunity for the Government to redirect attention back to its opponents.

Today it got worse.  Glenn Milne apparently wasn’t too busy trawling through Canberra’s gutters and rubbish bins looking for salacious gossip to interview Barnaby Joyce on the future of the Coalition, or lack thereof, with Joyce issuing an extraordinary set of demands that even John Howard could and would never have been able to agree to – in effect silencing any Liberal who criticised the Nationals.

Yet again, the Coalition is refocussing attention on itself, at a point when the Government is rattled and deeply worried about the asylum seeker issue.

There’s a Newspoll out this week and it must surely show some increase in the Coalition’s support, given the Prime Minister’s stumbling on asylum seekers over the last fortnight.  If it doesn’t, the end might come for Malcolm Turnbull sooner rather than later.  Many senior Liberals, some of them former strong supporters, have given up on him.  There’s a growing perception that he is “damaging the brand”.  Everyone knows Joe Hockey doesn’t want the job, but he may not be given the choice if the Liberals decide that emergency amputation is needed to save the party.

Will that fix Barnaby Joyce or the ETS issue?  Nope. But things couldn’t be any worse.