“The last Senate election was widely criticised. Australians were astonished to see people elected to the Senate whose primary votes were a fraction in the case of one senator from Victoria, about half of 1% of the vote … I think Australians were shocked by some of the results of the election.” Malcolm Turnbull, February 2016

“If your local vote is for Labor, Greens or an independent, and you are in one of the 20 or so key battleground seats across the country, it is a vote for the chaos of a hung parliament.” Malcolm Turnbull, June 2016

What an exciting time to be alive. You don’t dare turn away from political coverage in case another senator or MP is forced to quit, or quits their own party, or is sacked. Today, braveheart Jacqui Lambie says farewell. Lambie brought a decidedly earthy touch to the Senate, occasionally displaying quite despicable racism but also making good sense on other issues. Nor does she favour changing the constitutional section that has finished her political career for now; people in her position should just “suck it up”, she said this morning, a refreshingly blunt and correct assessment. Oh, and by the way, this morning the South Australian parliament signed off on Nick Xenophon’s replacement, Rex Patrick. One imagines he’ll be sworn in with his party colleagues beside him, unlike Fraser Anning yesterday.

Meanwhile, the weekend casualty, John Alexander, learnt this morning, along with the rest of us, that Labor is going hard for his seat, unveiling Kristina Keneally as its candidate (she lives in Trent Zimmerman’s seat of North Sydney, but argues she’s a local).

And yesterday the government caved in to Bill Shorten’s demands on the timing and detail of MPs’ and senators’ citizenship declarations. That’s despite Turnbull lamenting last week that Shorten had shown up to their meeting with nothing to offer, leaving the prime minister to fiddle with his iPad for two hours. Turnbull didn’t have a lot of choice — he needed some mechanism to deal with the crisis, and Shorten had outplayed him in appearing more committed to transparency.

In normal circumstances, quite remarkable events like the shouting match between George Brandis and Nick McKim in Senate question time yesterday over Manus Island would attract significant attention; at the moment, it passes with virtually no notice, even though the House of Representatives isn’t sitting. And none of this chaos looks like ending any time soon; the only hope for the government is that it can go to Christmas with New England and Bennelong still in its column and marriage equality legislated without imposing pro-discrimination laws, or a major split in Coalition ranks. 

At what point does the 45th parliament become a write-off? Eight senators have gone because of citizenship and another three have departed. That’s around 15% of the entire Senate. Several have left the parties they were elected under — in the case of Fraser Anning, left it before even being sworn in, a seemingly fundamental breach of the basic pact between candidates and voters (in his case, all 19 of them). The prime minister has already seriously canvassed parliament spending the rest of the year only dealing with non-controversial legislation (admittedly, the bulk of legislation is non-contro). There’s the lingering problem of how valid the ministerial decisions of Joyce and Nash are. The government is unable to pursue its agenda or even talk about anything other than citizenship and marriage equality. Perhaps it’s time to click on Control-Z.