When the coronavirus shutdown began, the government's first instinct with Parliament was to suspend it for the duration. Apart from passing legislation necessary to approve the emergency funding, there seemed no good reason to submit to the tiresome nit-picking of political opponents who broadly supported the government anyway. The establishment of an ad hoc "national cabinet" of federal, state and territory leaders, inevitably with cross-party membership, compounded the sense that partisan politics was on hold as the country faced an existential crisis. Parliament was therefore adjourned until August, though some committees could still operate.

Most members of the public probably wouldn't care if Parliament were not sitting for an extended time. Indeed, many might welcome the absence of the daily TV clip of question time argy-bargy which is their only direct experience of Federal Parliament. It's not as if the Prime Minister and his colleagues have retreated behind a wall of silence. The almost daily news briefings involving public health officials as well as ministers have kept the public well informed about the progress of the disease and the evolution of government policies.

But Parliament is too important to be sidelined altogether. In the event, second, wiser, thoughts prevailed and the government agreed to recall both houses for a limited number of sitting days. Critics had pointed out that Parliament had kept sitting through both world wars and the Spanish flu pandemic, thus refuting the suggestion that times of major crisis justify the suspension of parliamentary government. The structures of cabinet and the executive can be adjusted to fit an emergency but the fundamental constitutional principle of responsible government, that the executive is responsible to the legislature, remains.

Besides, at a time when the government was urging all other essential services to adapt to travel restrictions and social distancing, it seemed hypocritical not to be similarly flexible with its own procedures, including those of Parliament. The Senate, under opposition and crossbench control, had already shown the way, establishing a select committee to inquire into the Australian government's response to COVID-19 and providing that members of the committee would meet at a distance.

The three-day week of sittings in mid-May (May 12-14) illustrated the contribution that Parliament makes to government accountability. The centrepiece, the Treasurer's statement on the economy, may not have added much to his speech to the National Press Club in the previous week. But it did provide the opposition with a good opportunity to articulate its own preferred approach to the crisis, thus opening up political debate on the important economic choices that lie ahead. The current policy settings have broad cross-party support but they also raise major questions about the way ahead, issues that are inherently ideological and require political resolution. Part of this discussion centres on the speed of the economic recovery, with the Coalition keen to return to the economic status quo as soon as possible and the Australian Labor Party backing a much slower process with continuing government assistance.

To make this point, ALP members used question time to press the government on its prediction that the economy would "snap back" (the so-called "V-shaped recovery") and elicited an implicit concession from the Prime Minister and the Treasurer that "snap back" no longer featured in the government's talking points. At the same time, while the opposition generally agrees with the aims of the JobKeeper program, it also probed some of the scheme's obvious anomalies in an attempt to show the government up as heartless and inflexible.

In these ways, the opposition used Parliament as a forum to make ministers more publicly accountable for their handling of the crisis, fully justifying the decision to recall Parliament during the pandemic. In addition, the opposition also raised other areas of potential government vulnerability, including delays over responses to the bushfires, a long-simmering issue that has flared up again with the Eden-Monaro byelection.

The ALP also used question time to pursue the long-running sports rorts affair, in particular its claim that the Prime Minister misled Parliament when he denied that he or his office had played any part in deciding which grant applications should be approved. The denial has always seemed highly implausible but the Prime Minister has stood firm with a typical mixture of prevarication and issue-avoidance. This time Labor's question picked up on recent evidence from the Australian National Audit Office to the Senate inquiry. According to the ANAO, the Prime Minister's Office told the minister for sport's office that "it was expected that the minister would write to the Prime Minister to seek authority on the approved projects". This appeared to contradict the Prime Minister's insistence that the minister, Senator Bridget McKenzie, not himself, had the authority to approve grants. In response the Prime Minister tersely reasserted his view that the power to make decisions rested with the minister, while conceding that authority to announce the decisions might have rested with his office.

The whole exchange lasted less than a minute and came after a series of detailed questions on the economy. Labor appears to have accepted defeat on this issue, leaving the deputy leader, Richard Marles, rather than the leader, Anthony Albanese, to ask the question. The Prime Minister's version has been allowed to prevail, backed by his perception that most voters are put off by incessant "point scoring" on such matters.

Labor's unsuccessful attempts to force the Prime Minister to admit responsibility illustrate both the strengths and the limitations of ministerial responsibility as a mechanism of accountability. Repeated questioning of ministers has enabled the opposition to draw public attention to the manifest irregularities in how the program was administered. The possibility that the Prime Minister might have deliberately lied to Parliament over the extent of his and his office's involvement excited both the ALP leadership and the press gallery. The convention that misleading Parliament through an outright falsehood requires resignation still has sufficient force to encourage oppositions to search for possible breaches while ministers will go to great lengths to avoid the charge. Calls for resignation, however, always have more traction when directed at individual ministers, who are dispensable, rather than at the Prime Minister.

Though the convention remains essential for maintaining a foundation of integrity for parliamentary proceedings, its downside is that it can divert oppositions from focusing on more important issues. With the sports grants, that the Prime Minister's Office may have been involved in the decisions was not the most shocking aspect of how the grants were administered. Indeed, the program was clearly a government-wide policy, in which the Prime Minister's Office would naturally have taken a keen interest. Much more scandalous was the lack of clear legal authority for the program and the blatant disregard of established procedures in how decisions were made and implemented. Though the minister has been cut loose on a technicality, the Prime Minister has yet to admit that the program was seriously maladministered and that the whole process of grants allocation needs to be overhauled before the next election. These are the issues on which he should be pressed.

There is an echo here of the home insulation fiasco a decade ago, when the Abbott-led opposition, again with the press gallery in breathless support, chose for months to focus all its fire on the environment minister, Peter Garrett, in eagerness to force his resignation. First, Mr Abbott tried to convict him of misleading Parliament (on the highly trivial matter of when he had received a consultant's risk assessment). He then tried to paint Mr Garrett as personally responsible for the whole policy debacle, a charge which Mr Garrett gallantly refused to deflect when he could easily have pointed the finger at pressure from senior colleagues or inadequacies in his department. It was only much later, after several committee investigations and other reports, that the full story of system-wide failure emerged.

It is this next stage, the overall analysis and recipe for reform, that the sport grants issue needs and for which Parliament should be pressing. Or is the opposition actually happy to see the current system continue, for its own future benefit?