Cash is what Australians call a hard arse. Someone who toughs it out right until the end, no matter what the circumstance. In some ways, it's admirable. That brutal determination to crush your opponents underfoot – and win – is a skill the Australian Labor Party could do with acquiring.

Of course, we don't yet have all the facts of who knew what when about the Registered Organisation Commission, the Australian Federal Police raid on the offices of the AWU and the tipoff to journalists. But someone knows.

Someone knows what Michaelia Cash knew and whether her staffer, the capable and courteous David De Garis, who has worked for Cash for years, was expediently thrown under a bus as Labor is claiming. On Friday, Attorney-General George Brandis said the ROC has referred the leak to the federal police so we may know. In time.

But I do know this. The brand new Liberal government decided to cut funding to community legal centres and the CLCs were set to take a massive hit - by up to 30 per cent. It would result in thousands of women turned away from centres every year. Cash gave a speech at the inaugural Our Watch awards, for reporting of domestic violence, in 2015 where she spoke about the media's responsibility to help stop family violence but refused to take responsibility for the funding cuts which would see a flood of women unable to get legal help.

I think I was the next to speak. Angrily I demanded the government stop the systematic dismantling of the centres and I said: "The government needs to take responsibility and start funding it appropriately or we are going to have more and more women dying and more children dying."

And the whole time I spoke, Michaelia Cash stood not three metres away, shaking her head the entire time, dismissing what I had to say. There were no cuts. It was a line also adopted by her colleague George Brandis. By the then failed treasurer, Joe Hockey. I remember the manners of one of Hockey's staffers absolutely deserting him when he told me that the cuts "were only in the minds of you people". The government finally restored the money earlier this year and were very pleased with themselves.

Cash was again doing the deniability tango in Senate estimates this week. Toughing it out. Denying and denying until denial was no longer plausible. The West Australian senator is a meticulous and organised politician. The idea that she did not know what her staffer knew – that she did not know of an AFP raid – is nearly impossible for me to believe.

She is also a hugely successful politician in a party which, it's not too much to argue, actively excludes women. The WA state Liberal branch does – in the circumstances – the job required to temper women for the heat of politics and when Brandis goes, Cash is bound to be the next attorney-general. That's a job only given to those who are good at both the machinery and the machinations of government.

But this episode has exposed a flaw. Either she knew of both the investigation and the tipoff – or she has no business being the first law officer of the Crown.

And this government is – at warp speed – losing credibility in its appointment of its various independent commissioners. The Nigel Hadgkiss fiasco should have been reason enough to sack Cash. Mark Bielecki only began his appointment as the Registered Organisations Commissioner in May this year and already he's embarrassed himself. Like Cash, he too had to retract his statements to Senate estimates when he claimed that the AWU had not fulfilled all "notices to produce". Instead, the specialist in complex litigation confused the AWU with a different registered organisation.

Maybe all unions look the same to him.

On Thursday, ACTU secretary Sally McManus took the government to task for its war on unions and the Australians who unions represent. Personally, I'd like to go one step further.

If we ever have another ALP government in this country, I'd be keen for that government to scrutinise corporations and businesses with the same gimlet eye that the Liberal Party focuses on unions. To send in the AFP and raid the Commonwealth Bank. To completely redo the rules around lobby and corporate influence.

Do I care about an AWU donation to GetUp? Not really. I care much more about the kind of unseen influence that happens when banks and mining companies donate money to the Cormack Foundation.

All donations should be subject to public scrutiny all the time. The donation of money to GetUp! will look laughably inconsequential in contrast to so many others.

As my colleague Thomas Clarke, professor at the Centre for Corporate Governance at the University of Technology, said the other day: "It is disgraceful that it is being disinterred after 10 years and with the force of federal police.

"Whoever inspired this needs their head examined."

I'd swap examining heads for scrutinising donations any day.

Jenna Price is a Fairfax columnist and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.