Waleed Aly: the Turnbull government's descent from embattled to ridiculous

First, consider the announcement of that same-sex marriage postal plebiscite that would cost upwards of $120 million, and in which Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull would be forced to declare himself "a strong leader" in a way that can only mean he is not.

The point here is not merely that this plebiscite is bad policy. It is that it is so self-evidently cynical, so nakedly an act of political game-playing for internal Liberal Party reasons that it ceases even to be clever. To see this, consider that in order for this thing to be legal, the government will have to convince the High Court it is a statistical exercise, rather than a serious vote. That is, the government will have to tell the court the "plebiscite" is something quite different to what it has been telling us it is. It will do this with a straight face, and it might even win. But if it does, it will only be because the government has misled the electorate, and dreamt up something that doesn't even match the election promise it now says is so sacred that it must be kept.

Next, consider the farce surrounding Barnaby Joyce's New Zealand citizenship. This slew of unwitting dual citizens in our Parliament may well develop into a constitutional crisis, and may in time threaten the Coalition's one-seat majority. But it is only a political crisis right now because the Turnbull government has contorted itself into a mass of contradictory positions. Back when only Greens senators were in this situation, the Coalition couldn't resist over-reaching, lambasting the Greens as an amateur operation that couldn't do basic paperwork. Now that it turns out the Coalition's own cabinet can't either, there is simply nothing coherent to say. Resources Minister Matt Canavan felt the need to leave the cabinet, but for some reason Joyce refuses to.

Canavan, you see, is waiting dutifully for the High Court to rule on the matter. But when it comes to Joyce, the Prime Minister has simply decided to make the High Court's decision for it, saying: "The Leader of the National Party, the Deputy Prime Minister, is qualified to sit in this house, and the High Court will so hold!"

Sure, double standards are the bedrock of politics, but even then some modest subtlety is required. To go from insisting all dual citizens must be shamefully banished from the Parliament, to demanding that the High Court exonerate them in the space of a few weeks is worse than unpersuasive. It's grimly funny.

And that's what made the Turnbull government's next move so dumbfounding. It is one thing to seize on news that a Labor staffer had inquired of one of the party's New Zealand counterparts about the workings of New Zealand citizenship to accuse Labor of foul play. But to wheel out the sitting Foreign Minister to accuse Labor of something approaching espionage, and then to declare that the Turnbull government would struggle to work with New Zealand Labour should it win the upcoming election, was to behave like a government that was prepared to compromise real relationships with real allies for the sake of a headline.

Perhaps the Coalition thought that, if it acted outraged enough, people would simply assume something truly outrageous had happened. But that only works when the starting point isn't something that's your own stupid fault in the first place - like failing to know your own Deputy Prime Minister's citizenship. Attacking in such an overblown way from a position like that becomes heroically desperate.

If you squint, you can discern the faintest contours of a strategy here. The Turnbull government has spent quite some time lately trying to position Bill Shorten as a shadowy, quasi-criminal figure. That process, of course, began under Tony Abbott in the form of the trade unions royal commission.

Last week it took the form of new legislation to prohibit unions from receiving payments from companies with which they are negotiating, at which point Turnbull gleefully pointed out that the "conduct of Mr Shorten [as a union leader], if it were repeated, under these laws, would attract criminal sanctions". I suppose from there it seems a modest leap to try to paint Labor into a seditious corner, colluding with a foreign power to bring down the Australian government – to "steal" power no less. Like a criminal, you see. Lock him up, etc.

But there's a difference between casting a shadow on your opponent, and wildly claiming a grand conspiracy. There's a difference between running relentless political attacks and a series of aggressively whacky reactions to one crisis after the next. And there's a difference between being a fearsome political operation and a comical one. Fail to spot that difference and your situation quickly becomes irretrievable. And it's incredible just how invisible these things become in politics once you're in a spiral of losses.

Waleed Aly is a Fairfax Media columnist and a host on The Project.