It starts with a media report, then proceeds in ritualistic fashion: initially there are denials; the MP and party officials believe they have no issue around their eligibility. That belief, it turns out, isn’t backed by evidence; the “checking” that they’ve done proves cursory or non-existent or an exercise in firing off emails to non-existent addresses. Embassies and High Commissions are contacted — the UK High Commission in Canberra must now have a full-time case officer to handle citizenship requests — and more often than not, the news from the diplomats is not good.

While the government and the opposition haggle over the details of a self-reporting scheme in the register of pecuniary interests, the drip of cases continues. John Alexander awaits the call from the Brits; Jacqui Lambie could be a Scot; Jason Falinski might be a Pole; Pauline Hanson is mentioned in dispatches — hilarious if true, a second senator from a passionately anti-immigration party turfed out for being the descendant of migrants — Labor MPs who renounced their citizenship before election might be caught out anyway. The ravenous section 44 demands ever more political blood, to be fed by the High Court, through the portals of which lies a corner of some foreign field that is forever England/New Zealand/Canada, wherein a growing number of political careers lie interred.

That Bill Shorten entered yesterday’s meeting with the prime minister to settle terms and emerged shaking his head, disappointed that he couldn’t be satisfied with the rigour of the mechanism proposed by Malcolm Turnbull — you could have bet your house on that. The party that watched Tony Abbott run the most cynical program of oppositionism in recent political history wasn’t about to forgo the chance to make the prime minister sweat a little, to take the opportunity to appear tougher on transparency than the Coalition. But there’ll be an agreement of some kind, and soon. The rivalry here really isn’t between the government and the opposition, but between the politicians and the media, with the latter racing to unmask the next alien in our midst. To keep mixing the metaphors, it’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but it’s we who do the communal shrieking, not the aliens.

The High Court decision — one way or the other — was meant to rule a line under all this. If Turnbull could get the Court to sign off on the plebiscite, then the citizenship of Barnaby Joyce, Fiona Nash and Matt Canavan, then steer through the marriage equality legislation, he would have some hope of clear air heading into 2018. And even after the decision, with Tony Windsor out, Joyce looked a safe bet in New England; as for Nash, well, no great loss, and the government even got permanently furious man-child Matt Canavan approved and ready to resume his role of sitting in the corner in cabinet meetings licking a piece of coal. But Stephen Parry blew it all to hell; the push for an audit of some kind — no matter how the terminology was parsed — became irresistible and more by-elections, seemingly, inevitable. Turnbull, who must, along with his few competent ministers like Mathias Cormann, Simon Birmingham and Scott Ryan, surely take a daily break in a soundproof room and indulge in some primal screaming about all this, had little choice.

So now there could be a round of by-elections next year if the High Court wields the axe on some Reps MPs on both sides, not to mention yet further recounts as the Senate shuffles personnel — there’ll be four new senators sworn in next week and a new president, while we wait for Richard Colbeck to come back from the Phantom Zone into which Eric Abetz thought he’d banished him. The outlying possibility, once unthinkable, is of an early election. That, in turn, changes the dynamic around Turnbull’s leadership: 2018 no longer stretches out as a substantial period in which Turnbull can — with the help of some of that fabled “clear air” — mount a recovery effort and build the Coalition primary vote back to 40%; the carnage that polls suggest Queensland and Western Australian voters are ready to inflict on Coalition ranks might instead be Coming Soon in the New Year.

That might concentrate some minds about who can “save the furniture”. Which, at the moment, isn’t the incumbent.