But did the national cheek already have a vermilion tinge, put there by something that had emerged five days earlier? Did the Cape Town cricket nightmare only deepen that blush's hue, like the further ripening of an already ruby peach? Back, later in this smooth-cheeked column, to that possibility.

First though to the thought that it is not only that what our few offending cricketers did was so wicked but also that they were so stunned mulletish as to think they could get away with it. The dumbness of it all helps bring that blush to the national cheek because what they did (with a galaxy of TV cameras known to be stickybeaking at the so very public scene of their crime) reflects badly on the national IQ.

Perhaps it further underlines those OECD global education investigations, the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment Studies) probes that continue to show our schoolchildren getting further and further behind the urchins of the world (even those of Borat's Kazakhstan) in intellectual agility.

It is irksome to the nation to have a former prime minister (the insufferable John Howard) and our present prime minister leap to join the condemnation of our cricketers. It is not only that these two shifty Liberals have thrived/are thriving in a milieu, party politics, that is a continuous gutter of dirty tricks and amorality while cricketers only stray from the straight and narrow occasionally.

No, it is also that both men, Howard and Turnbull, personally seem to totally lack a moral compass. In living memory has anything more shameful befallen our nation than John Howard's taking us into the USA's and UK's Iraq War? Paul Keating has said, quite rightly, that Howard should "hang his head in shame" over the Iraq War.

Howard's shamelessness (he's never expressed any remorse over the Iraq catastrophe) agitates Keating, who has seethed at Howard's "craven and ill-judged support of the US and its invasion".

"Howard's stubborn and unctuous denial of his responsibility in committing Australian troops to the assault in Iraq should be held in contempt by every thinking Australian."

Imagining either of them, Howard or Turnbull, captaining an Australian cricket side it is hard to imagine either of them giving a fig for the mystical idea of "the spirit of cricket". It is an ethical concept, and so would baffle both of these stoats. Their match tactics would be dirty. There would be Underarm Incidents galore. Sledging would plumb new, slimy depths of Question Time nastiness. When and if they captained Australia against the US (a nation both men grovel to and do anything to please) they'd sneakily throw the game to make sure the US won. Every Australian player would be under strict, captain's instructions to butterfingeredly drop everything snicked to him by US batsmen.

It may be that the Australian cricketers' Cape Town behaviour owes something to the national moral decay that the Howard Years incubated. Subconsciously our boys may have been honouring the spirit of the Howard government's artful and nasty orchestration of the Tampa crisis.

Perhaps, too, our boys' Cape Town trickiness partakes of the same national zeitgeist that sees Julie Bishop shamelessly claim taxpayers' money to pay for her boyfriend to be velcroed to her side as she travels the globe. Celebrity expenses' rorters do rather set the national amoral moral tone. Perhaps, wondering whether or not to tamper with the ball, the Australian cricketers' thinking of it put their baggy-greened heads together, and asked themselves "Boys, what would Julie Bishop do?" and/or "What would John Howard do?"

Or even, "What would [minister for home affairs] Peter Dutton do?" For when I trilled, above, that the nation's cheek was already blushing with shame when Cape Town's Tampergate broke out it was the latest shameful Duttonism I was thinking of.

It had emerged (the probing, investigative press revealed) that a 10-year-old refugee boy who has made repeated attempts to kill himself while held on hellish Nauru had been ordered moved to Australia for acute psychological care. A Federal Court judge had intervened. It emerged, too, that Turnbull government minister Peter Dutton and his, Dutton's, home affairs department had fought the humane legal move to pluck the boy from Nauru.

Medical folk (including psychiatrist Patrick McGorry, last year's Australian of the Year) have pleaded and pleaded with the Turnbull government to allow proper care of the mentally distressed detainees on Nauru and elsewhere.

Alas, they have failed to find a trace of warmth in the icy computers that Turnbull and Dutton have where decent Australians have hearts. The fact that it has taken a judge to do the truly Australian thing and show the compassion that our Australian government is incapable of has good Australians blushing with shame.

And, important as cricket is, surely a nation's government's carefully-calculated and long-sustained policy sins must be more blush-makingly shameful than its cricketers' occasional hiccups of wickedness?