Carrying on like this would get you sacked from any other workplace

And I don't just mean the lack of leadership from those in any of our political parties but let's cover that off to be thorough.

Labor's Anthony Albanese is a disappointment for the ages. The Coalition's Peter Dutton's solitary idea of leadership is to model hostility, hatred and greed. And now it turns out that Greens leader Adam Bandt can't even sort out behaviour in his own tiny party. No wonder the Greens are suffering reputation damage and hurting in the polls.

To me, from the outside, reading what I read, there is barely a politician worthy of respect and future endorsement. Just in the last couple of weeks, we've heard about them hoovering up freebies and bullying and abusing their staff. I have yet to hear of bad behaviour from among the teals (I wish I really knew and understood what went on between Monique Ryan and Sally Rugg) but I am sad to say I expect to hear more any minute. Let us all hope that the Independent Parliamentary Standards Commission will improve this particular hideous workplace.

I honestly believe most politicians could be taught to be better bosses and better colleagues. Can we teach them all to be reasonable and decent and considerate human beings? Perhaps. Eventually.

But if you can be bought, if you think it's OK to do favours for favours, I'm not sure that's something that is fixable. And we don't have the mechanism to keep them honest. NACC is not appropriate for the big job it has.

Stephen Charles, co-author with the Centre for Public Integrity's Catherine Williams, of Keeping Them Honest, says we have such a long way to go.

Now, I'm paraphrasing Charles's views here but in summary - the National Anti-Corruption Commission is a godawful mess, an utter failure, a disaster unable to do what it is meant to do.

The original Dreyfus proposal included an ability to hold public hearings when it was in the public's interest to do so. Now this ground has been well-traversed by others who know much more than me - but Charles makes it clear that without this element reinstated, NACC will never be much good.

And why did we end up with secret hearings? Well, among all the dismays I feel on a regular basis (and I will argue for dismay having the capacity to be plural until my dying days), there is the dismay I feel at the Coalition bartering away our right to know so they could protect dishonesty and dishonour.

Naturally, the Coalition was very nervous about public hearings and because of those nerves, we can only have public hearings in exceptional circumstances. My own feeling is that the lack of trust we have in politicians - and now sadly in the politicised public service - is exceptional.

"The Coalition in the last nine years behaved so consistently badly that Australia's position on the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index fell from sixth to 18th," Charles says.

Yeah, I had a look at the graph. Rapid decline in the Coalition years. Teensy improvement since Labor was elected. We are dismal.

Charles makes it very clear that NACC is severely reduced in its impact because it can't hold public hearings. We can't see the favour-for-favour interactions, such as the upgrades on flights, the lovely lounges. Might look like minor corruption but it is still influential.

"The consequence of it is that when all politicians are receiving favours from Qantas, what can Qatar or Virgin expect?"

We have no real NACC. We are not getting any progress on integrity. The decision not to accept the robodebt referrals was a disaster and one which will impact us for years until it is righted. I'm still waiting for the appointment of the "independent eminent person" by NACC to see what went wrong.

Plus, how the hell does anti-corruption commissioner Paul Brereton get to decide who judges whether he was wrong in the first place? That's not how appeals work, is it? I ask. "Never," says Charles, who was a judge of the Supreme Court of Victoria Court of Appeal.

"Since when did an erring judge get to decide the identity of his appellate tribunal?" asks Charles. Exactly.

I hope and pray that David Pocock, Helen Haines, David Shoebridge and other like-minded souls have the knack to fix the NACC.

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How to improve the standard? Well, first the preselection process would have to be a hell of a lot better than it is now. For example, the NSW Liberal Party would rather pick a man who turned out to be under investigation for sexual assault than anyone else. They say they did not know. Why not? How does this happen?

And of course we have recently had the egregious example of failed politician Ralph Babet, who thought it would be amusing to use social media to share the work of Andrew Tate. Right now, Tate faces restrictions on his movements in Romania for allegations of rape, sex trafficking and other criminal acts. I am totally unsure why an Australian politician thinks linking himself to any of those alleged behaviours is suitable.

Senator Babet, we pay your wages, do you understand that? And if you think you are paid to be vulgar and stupid, instead of working to help Australians, you are in the wrong job. Perhaps you could stand aside and do stand-up comedy instead. I doubt you'd have much of an audience. Does your patron, Clive Palmer, know and understand how utterly pathetic you are, what an embarrassment you are? I sincerely hope you have no family to speak of. I feel for your mother and your father and your decision to align yourself with this kind of schoolboy behaviour.

I rang the office of the mother of the house, Senator Penny Wong. Turns out she's from the school of "ignore bad behaviour". OK, I guess that's one way of dealing with it. With any luck, unless Clive Palmer wants to throw another hundred million dollarbucks in his direction, we will be rid of this idiot.