No one is exactly covering themselves in glory in the Opposition’s pursuit of Peter Garrett.

There’s a sense from the Opposition that if they only go through the rituals enough, they can knock Garrett off.  The constant calls for resignation, the questioning — very occasionally forensic, mostly only vaguely on point — of Garrett, the censure motion after half a dozen questions… Yesterday it all had a by-the-numbers feel.  The media is baying more ferociously than Opposition MPs, most of whom look like they have better things to do in Question Time than snare a prize scalp.

Then again, there was the small problem that officials from Garrett’s department had, yesterday morning, backed up Garrett’s case and carefully explained they hadn’t provided him with the Minter Ellison report the Opposition and media are trying to re-work into a smoking gun about warnings of risk to life and limb. Indeed, the Minter Ellison risk management plan was thin stuff indeed on which to try to pin claims Garrett had been warned of life-threatening risks in the program. I’ve seen more detailed documents emerge on planning workshop butchers paper.

Last night Laurie Oakes called Tony Abbott’s censure motion speech “devastating”.  He must have watched a different speech, because all I saw was a predictable, and actually rather flat, flaying of Garrett with a wet lettuce. Worse, Abbott said one of the more tasteless things I’ve heard from a politician in a while, when he made a pun about the deaths of three of the four men who have been died installing insulation. Having insisted the censure motion was about an issue more important than the usual “argy-bargy of parliament”, Abbott then cracked wise about the deaths. “This minister is in electrocution denial. That is the problem with this minister. This is a government in electrocution denial.”

Why Abbott or his staff thought such an asinine and insensitive line was appropriate is a mystery. It was only a passing remark but one more small piece of evidence that Abbott lacks the sort of substance that is required of prime ministers.

And all the more so given Greg Hunt followed up with an appropriately sombre speech, although his insistence that the insulation program was the greatest policy failure in decades was nonsensical.

In ALP Caucus today there was a call for more effort to be made to nail the Coalition when they overreached. Overreach of the comical sort was achieved by Simon Birmingham, who declared this morning that terrorism was less important an issue than insulation. “The greatest threat to the safety of many Australian families over the last 12 months has been the home insulation programme,” he thought.  Perhaps it’s time to update that apocryphal 90s statistic that women over 40 had a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than of getting married.

Despite overreach, and an Opposition Leader crassly exploiting the deaths of four people, the only calculation that matters for Garrett is how long the Government is willing to let this issue deprive it of clear air to pursue its policy agenda and the task of attacking Abbott.  That has nothing to do with the merits of his case and everything to do with the cold political calculation that another week of headlines on this issue is intolerable for a Government used to having its own way when it comes to managing the media cycle.

So far, though, Garrett’s position within the Government remains solid. The Opposition, having already blown a censure motion with three days of Parliament left to run this week, has to work out what new material it can run with. As some of us predicted last week, there are now media stories about workers put out of work by the overhaul of the program, thereby demonstrating that no good deed ever goes unpunished.  Maybe Tony Abbott can make a wisecrack about unemployed insulation installers.