For weeks, as the Liberals have fought among themselves over marriage equality, Barnaby Joyce and the Nationals have adopted the patient, grumpy air of the only adults in a room full of squabbling children. But as it turns out, Joyce was preparing a monumental stuff-up of his own all along.

Joyce has always been a flake. The Bjelke-Petersen-style inarticulacy and eccentricity has always been a cover for a lazy policy mind devoted exclusively to working out how to channel more pork into rural communities and preserve agriculture as a heterosexual family enclave against the modern economy. This is, after all, the main who insisted, in his fortunately brief stint as shadow finance minister, that Australia was on the verge of defaulting. It turns out his flakiness extends to non-policy matters, as well. Like the simple act of accurately filling out a nomination form to stand for Parliament.

Joyce isn’t any MP or senator. He’s not a backbencher or minor party senator like Scott Ludlam, Larissa Waters and Malcolm Roberts. He’s his party leader. He’s the Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, a senior member of the leadership team that governs Australia. And, it turns out, a Kiwi. For all his protestations about how surprised he was (you knew your dad was a Kiwi, Barnaby — just how surprised could you be?), he’s badly let his Prime Minister, and his party — and, of course, the government — down. This is the last thing Turnbull needs right now. He’s entitled to be bitterly disappointed in his Deputy PM, especially after all the grief he’s copped for sticking by the terms of his agreement with the Nationals. Joyce has repaid that loyalty with chaos.

But if Joyce’s flakiness on his citizenship was beyond Turnbull’s control, the handling of it wasn’t, and after earlier this year suggesting this brittle, crisis-prone government was getting better at handling emergencies, yesterday it was back to its hapless old ways.

[Rampaging s.44 drags another victim under — and it’s a big one]

The first rule of crisis management is work out your line, work out how that will be attacked, and formulate a response. It’s not especially hard. An obvious question — the obvious question — was why Matt Canavan had stood down after discovering his accidental Italian citizenship but why Joyce remained in situ. After all, Canavan’s approach was itself a compromise on the honest approach of Ludlam and Waters — they immediately bailed out, declaring that the constitutional requirements they had breached were very clear.

What was the government’s response? According to the government leader in the Senate and the man masquerading as Australia’s top law officer, George Brandis, Joyce’s case was different to Canavan’s. How different? “There are obvious factual and legal differences between the two cases,” Brandis told Senate question time. Fair enough. What were they? Alas, “it would not be appropriate to engage in discussion of them”. Why not? Because “the matters are now before the High Court”.

That is, Brandis had stolen Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts’ excuse last week for refusing to explain why Roberts wasn’t a Brit. But it was better than that, because the differences are “obvious” — but not so obvious that saying what they were wouldn’t somehow prejudice Joyce’s case. That’s a particularly niche position in the spectrum of obviousness, but given Brandis’ long history of torturing not merely the English language but French and Latin as well, it’s perhaps unsurprising.

[If Barnaby Joyce goes (and he could well be going), the government could fall]

In contrast, Malcolm Turnbull had an entirely different approach in question time in the House. Apparently provoked by continued Labor questions, he skipped over not commenting on the substance of the matters before the High Court, and decided the outcome himself. “The Leader of the National Party, the Deputy Prime Minister, is qualified to sit in this House, and the High Court will so hold.”

It’s not clear whether Turnbull was making that statement based on his own formidable legal knowledge, or whether he is a Minority Report-like clairvoyant, a jurisprudential pre-cog capable of sensing the outcomes of High Court cases before they’re even heard — a wonderful gift, if true, that would enable us to get rid of that expensive institution and just go with whatever the Prime Minister reckons, even if it wouldn’t make for quite as exciting a movie. It was up there with last week’s “I am a strong leader”, a statement in an unusual epistemological category of immediately being false the moment it is uttered. There was no sticking to the government line — if there even is one. And the Prime Minister himself was the worst offender.

This is not complicated stuff. But the failure to do these kind of basics is one reason why a permanent atmosphere of crisis and chaos surrounds this government.