Another former minister, Sussan Ley, was allowed herself to table a report by Finance Department officers into her travel claims. A neighbouring MP and junior minister, Michael McCormack, was accused of being a rorter when it was shown that he, in common with about 20 per cent of federal politicians, used his parliamentary travel allowance to stay in a Canberra flat rented to him by his wife. With delightful irony, given the way in which the abolition of penalty rates is on the Coalition agenda, he described the use of the perk as akin to workers getting penalty rates.

And other members and senators were the subject of comments and innuendo by their political enemies for implied misuse of position and public resources, or the fallibility of their memory when it came to giving evidence before official inquiries, or in meeting their reporting obligations under various laws. Some of the excuses that have been trotted out would not allow a person to escape legal liability if made about a disputed Centrelink benefit.

Turnbull would no doubt insist that a yet-to-be established body designed to critically monitor claims for political allowances would have, had it occurred after January, tripped up Ley, though that is far from clear. And he cross-referenced his imputation of corruption against Shorten with the report of the Heydon royal commission into unions. Actually, Heydon did not directly anathematise the somewhat questionable way in which money that should have gone to workers ended up instead in union coffers, or was used to promote the political interests of people such as Shorten. The money didn't end up in Shorten's own pockets, though mud sticks.

Politicians often deplore their declining status and credibility, and the allegedly increasing public appetite for independently minded representatives who proclaim a mission to "drain the swamp". They often forget how much their declining status is a function of direct attacks made by them on the honesty and probity of others. Or by evident hypocrisy, or dissembling, when their own words and actions are compared, usually by the media, with what they once proclaimed to be the standard.

For all that, a good many mainstream politicians continue to believe pretend that federal politics and administration are generally clean, with little evidence of systemic or entrenched corruption. Although each of the states and territories, except the ACT, now has a general integrity or anti-corruption body, each of which has found a good deal of work to do, they suggest there would be a risk that any such body at Commonwealth (or ACT) level would be a waste of money – an expensive toy with no real work to do.

In any event, it is complacently said, there are an array of existing agencies that monitor law-enforcement integrity or focus on protecting the public interest, whose functions overlap to prevent any serious possibility of serious fraud on the state, or damage to the nation.

But this year could be a turning point. The Senate has reconstituted a select committee on the question of having a national integrity commission, and it is calling anew for submissions, first on whether such a beast is needed at all and, second, what form it should take if it is. This committee was appointed by a rebel Senate during the last Parliament; it produced an essayish but humdrum interim report, vaguely, by majority, seeming to lean in favour of doing something. With the present Senate even more bolshie, one can expect more enthusiasm, if little in the way of prospect that the government will take much notice when it does.

A 2016 interim report saw the (minority of) Coalition senators agreeing that if, perish the thought, there were to be any corruption in Australia, the existing checks and balances would discover and punish it pretty damn quick. Their labours were not so extensive that they were able to note that none of the existing checks and balances dealt with the problem of misbehaving politicians.

The view of these senators was consistent with the view of the Public Service Commission that "we do not believe that the APS needs a full-blown ICAC-style anticorruption commission. The view has been that that would be overkill given that there are a number of agencies that already have jurisdiction in that area. Already we have found that there has not been the systemic corruption that has been the subject of investigations in the state systems."

The Attorney-General's Department put the government's official view that a national integrity commission was quite unnecessary. "The Australian government's approach to dealing with corruption is integrated and multifaceted. We work to get the standards and training right, assess risk and detect, investigate and respond to corruption. Underpinning this approach is our democratic system of representative government and the separation of powers enshrined in the Australian constitution.

"There are a range of institutions that play a role in protecting against corruption and enabling scrutiny of the public and private sectors. These include parliamentary committees that scrutinise government activity and proposed laws; a free media; and an active civil society."

Among the existing protections from corruption or abuse of power were the Ombudsman, the Auditor-General, the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, combined with the Australian Public Service code of conduct and ministerial code of conduct, enforced by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Public Service Commission.

Those getting ready to draft submissions to the Senate should keep their carbon paper handy, because the ACT Legislative Assembly is about to embark on hearings about the form an anti-corruption body might take at the territorial level of administration. Until the lead-up to the last election, both Labor and the Liberal Party were unanimous that there was no need for such a body in the ACT, but during the campaign both parties committed themselves, if in vague terms, to such a body.

The Greens, who hold the balance of power and have previously been in favour of such a committee, have a clause in the parliamentary agreement committing the Barr government to an independent integrity commission, albeit subject to two limits. It ought to be, the agreement says, "broadly structured on those operating in similarly sized jurisdictions" and "follow" a parliamentary committee inquiry into the most effective and efficient model for the ACT.

The limit barely conceals a want of Labor enthusiasm, presumably on the grounds that the very idea of a need for such a body is an insult to the good, open and transparent government it always delivers, and a lack of a feeling of urgency. The committee has been asked to report in August, but it is by no means clear that it would be up and running within a year of the report, even assuming it was given the resources to do so.

There are some grounds for thinking that the ACT government's preferred model would be on South Australian lines, established with a bias against holding open hearings or issuing public reports, and with an uncertain jurisdiction over the activities of politicians, as opposed to bureaucrats.

One would know of a conscious intention to make it as weak and ineffectual as possible if the consensus were to have it use the investigative resources of ACT Policing (part of the AFP) and the benevolent supervision of some retired, tame magistrate. Predictions that it would find itself with no work to do would quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If ACT Policing has detected or prosecuted systemic corruption at either government or bureaucratic level over the past 30 years, it has escaped my attention, though I do keep an eye out for such things.

The last, local, large-scale corruption case I can remember, and it was not a spectacular success, involved a late 1970s attempt by a South Australian businessman to corrupt a senior public servant over Belconnen mall's sale to the private sector.

The police force is not organised to confront, nor seemingly very keen, competent or efficient at large-scale crime-busting, particularly where the alleged malefactors wear white collars or are powerful players in the town. Perhaps that is, of course, because the city lacks players with a larcenous or villainous eye. That local police leadership has made no effort to anticipate the function speaks volumes of the service they would deliver. Locally and nationally, the AFP is best as a postbox for receiving and recording complaints; it is not geared for taking the initiative against crime, unless it is of the magical sort, such as wars against drugs, terrorism, bikies or pornography (where the public has no means of judging effectiveness, and statistics cannot be contradicted), or flavour-of-the-month crime, such as domestic violence or child sexual assault, very serious, but showing outputs commensurate with inputs.

At the national level, the AFP boasts a strong fraud and anti-corruption centre, but its success, measured in successful prosecutions over the three years since it was established with great fanfare, does not inspire great confidence.

The centre is supposed to coordinate the operational response to corruption by bringing together officials from different agencies and leveraging their strengths and expertise, such as the Tax Office, ASIC, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, Centrelink, the departments of foreign affairs, immigration and defence, and the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre. Officials from the Attorney-General's Department and the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions are also involved.

None of these, individually or collectively, have distinguished themselves in detecting or prosecuting major crime, fraud on public revenue or serious damage to the public interest in recent years. And in some cases – say, over convincing evidence of corruption over wheat for oil, international bribery or systemic tax evasion – the record has been particularly lamentable.

The Department of Human Services and various ministers in charge of welfare have run a strong line suggesting that welfare fraud is endemic and a serious cost to public revenue. But AFP anti-fraud activity has hardly ever focused on indications of systemic fraud by (generally white) businesses over the provision of goods and services to Aboriginal communities. Nor has it looked much at any number of indications of incestuous relationships between buyers in government agencies and people, including former agency employees, from whom they contract goods and services.

Nor is there much evidence, of the sort that state ICACs and American anti-corruption bodies have pioneered, of integrity-testing department buyers, many of whom have budgets in the tens of millions of dollars.

One must simply take the word of bureaucrats that pro-active work by the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity has produced a law-enforcement community as free of internal crime, corruption or improper purpose as the FBI boasted itself to be during J. Edgar Hoover's days. It was, of course, Hoover's boast that his was the world standard in an integrated (other than by race) and multifaceted system of internal checks and balances, which worked to get the standards and training right, assess risk and detect, investigate and respond to corruption.

It's much of a oneness with the insistence of successive premiers – from NSW, Western Australia, Tasmania and Victoria – that the commissions they resisted were unnecessary in their environment, because of a robust system that would realise badness immediately. Not one of these bodies, even those set up to fail, have collapsed for want of business.

Jack Waterford is a former Canberra Times editor.