Barnaby Joyce must have been watching the PM’s confrontation with Kerry O’Brien on the 7.30 Report on Wednesday, because since then the Senator for Queensland has begun thinking out loud about blocking the Telstra sale.

There’s still no sign on the PM’s website
of the “with respect Kerry” interview. No wonder. This was about as
rattled and uncomfortable as we’ve seen the PM in recent times, and
reflected a clumsy and slipshod week which ends with the Telstra sale
process up in the air again. You can check out the feisty
O’Brien-Howard exchange on the 7.30 Report site here.

Howard
followed up by clamming up in Question Time yesterday about just when
he took his legal advice on withholding the dramatic information gleaned
from the notorious August 11 Telstra briefing.

Howard responded
to questions from Labor by reading from the relevant Act of Parliament.
It was cute, but a transparent tactic to avoid confirming that the
Government’s been indulging in some classic backside covering this week.

The
Telstra briefing cover-up may not be the smoking gun, but this week’s
events might be enough to make early retirement “on top” look like a
smart option.

So by late yesterday it wasn’t a bad time to
throw some contentious “national security” legislation on the table,
while preparing to scurry off to New York to resume statesman mode. As Michelle Grattan points out today, the draconian security laws are all a bit hurried and messy. Why the big rush?

For
Peter Costello, it was probably a good week to leave town. Without his
parliamentary presence, the Government looked like a cricket team
desperately missing its number three batsman.

Costello left
Howard, Minchin and Coonan to carry the can for Telstra, and the
resulting debacle gave Barnaby Joyce the chance to ponder whether
blocking the sale legislation might not be a good idea after all.

For
Costello, the chance to see the tsunami damage first hand might have
given his political travails some perspective: as he flew over Aceh,
witnessing the awesome scale of destruction, with whole tracts of
coastal land sunk beneath the ocean, never to return, maybe the sale of
a phone company didn’t seem so vital after all.