As some of us suspected it would, last week turned into a disaster for the government. Parliamentary weeks often blow up for this lot, but last week was like watching a fireworks factory going up.

In a way, the citizenship decision was the least-worst explosion. The outcome was what many expected — including, it seems Barnaby Joyce himself. Inexplicably the PMO hadn’t worked out who would be acting Prime Minister if the High Court knocked him off on the eve of the Prime Minister travelling abroad — or if it had, it hadn’t let the Nationals know. How many times have we lamented that Turnbull’s PMO doesn’t do the basics right? Chalk that up as another example.

What was curious was that rather than getting such straightforward issues sorted out just in case, Turnbull and his advisers were presumably working out what to do with the High Court’s reading of the constitution. “The government will refer the decision to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters,” said the Prime Minister on Friday afternoon, “so that it is able to consider, among other things, whether any changes to Section 44 should be recommended, how the electoral laws and practices could be changed so as to minimise the risk of candidates being in breach of section 44, and ensuring in our multicultural society that all Australians are able confidently to stand for and serve in our Parliament.”

The Prime Minister — and his Attorney-General — have a point, that in a society where so many of us are either foreign-born or have parents who were foreign-born (“foreign” pointedly including our cousins across the Tasman), a constitution that has such a hard bar on political participation might be worth reconsidering. And it’s noteworthy that the two big parties remain (so far) unaffected — they have the internal resourcing to ensure candidates are properly vetted, in a way that smaller parties and independents don’t. 

Nonetheless, the sheer laziness that appears to have been the modus operandi of the Nationals, and the clarity of the requirements for anyone filling in the nomination form, suggest that the issue is less about the clash between a late 19th-century document and Australian society in 2017, and more about conducting some basic due diligence when filling out a form. And does Turnbull seriously think a referendum to change section 44 will be successful or regarded as a priority by the electorate?

While the Prime Minister was flagging a constitutional amendment process to fix the section that had just knocked out two of his ministers, he was copping a pasting for effectively killing off the Indigenous recognition process. This may yet prove of greater long-term damage than the citizenship issue, because the anger at Turnbull’s rejection of an Indigenous voice extends well beyond Indigenous leaders and encompasses conservatives and progressives alike — as even The Australian pointed out in polling today. And consider the symbolism of a government rushing to change the constitution to include people with foreign citizenship in the name of inclusion while brushing off a constitutionally conservative proposal for an Indigenous voice.

The fact that the decision was leaked ahead of the announcement, and was accompanied by language like “undesirable” and peddled the lie that the proposal was about a “third chamber”, will reinforce the sense of bad faith. Indigenous recognition is now dead in the water, another victim of a startlingly incompetent government.