The Deputy Leader of the Opposition wanted to spend this week as a starring character in an investigative drama. She's ended up as the winning candidate on Red Faces,'' Julia Gillard said on Wednesday.

She was responding to the most pressing issue at the conclusion of a political year, which was, of course, the intricacies of the West Australian corporations law and whether an association to which she gave legal advice in 1992 had the requisite (five) members that legislation requires and had objectives fully in line with the purpose for which it was eventually used.

But it wasn't a bad comparison - Hey Hey It's Saturday and this Parliament. Like the long-running show, it's a little bit vaudeville and often very wacky but somehow you can't help watching.

Whether the deputy Liberal leader, Julie Bishop's, riff alleging that back in the early '90s Gillard was like the accomplice driving her bank robber boyfriend's getaway car - which prompted the Prime Minister's attack - would be the winning act, that's another question.

The interview of the boyfriend - Bruce Wilson - on the ABC's 7.30 this week, in which he revealed his then mate Ralph Blewitt had buried some of the allegedly ill-gotten gains in the backyard and they had been damaged by worms and water, would also have to be a contender. With refreshing self-awareness he said the story of his ''self-confessed bagman'' who couldn't put money in a bag properly ''sounds crazy''.

Gillard's own frontbencher Craig Emerson's desperately awful ''Whyalla Wipe-out'' song to the tune of Skyhooks' Horror Movie - complete with shuffly off-tempo dance moves and a BYO amp - would surely also give Bishop a run for her money.

And it would have been kind of fun to see what Red Symons made of it. The former Skyhooks guitarist said at the time of Emo's song and dance routine that it had ''whiskers on it''. But from memory when he sat on the Red Faces judging panel he was seldom that polite.

Wayne Swan's YouTube homage to Bruce Springsteen and the political motivations he shares with ''the boss'' also had the home-spun quality the Red Faces audience used to love. (And the Treasurer also had the very good sense to leave the actual singing to his talented daughter, Erin.)

Former senator Mary Jo Fisher's creative merging of the hokey pokey and the Rocky Horror Show's time warp into a political interpretive dance about the carbon tax during a speech in the Senate chamber last year would also have to be a contender.

And points for genuinely trying have to go to Bob Katter, who rose this week over in the Pluck-a-Duck corner of the crossbenches (everyone wins a prize), in the middle of a question time focused on the real issue of WA-Corporations-Act-gate, and had the temerity to try to suspend standing orders to talk about something he truly believed in, namely the Murray Darling Basin plan and the effect he thinks it will have on irrigators.

And the brave faces award would surely go to Tony Abbott, who spoke this week of the ''intellectual toil'' in writing the book he was in the process of launching, which was in fact a compilation of speeches he had already given.

But there are many things about this Parliament that are neither vaudeville, nor wacky, and under no construction could be considered funny.

A Senate committee recommended this week that Newstart recipients (single rate $245 a week) should not receive an increase in their allowance because Australia couldn't afford it, even though it also found the payment was too low for people to ''live at an acceptable standard in the long term'' and that even with our relatively low levels of unemployment, 60 per cent of people on the allowance have been unemployed for at least a year.

Even the Business Council of Australia says the current level of the dole is so low it makes it harder for the unemployed to find a job. The report got lost in the melee.

Both major parties now support the excision of the whole of Australia from Australia's own migration zone.

''That our leadership has come to an enabling consensus on this matter is not a display of unity and bipartisanship, but rather a retreat from leading the national debate to a higher place for a greater purpose,'' said the Liberal MP Russell Broadbent this week as he confirmed to the Parliament he would vote against the move. Almost no one noticed.

The Labor Party still has a policy to release proven refugees into the community, deny them work rights for up to five years and pay them even less than the dole, about $220 a week. The Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, told caucus this week the provision might be ''softened'', but not when, or how.

The government introduced legislation this week on its important Gonski education reforms, which didn't actually say anything specific or new or binding about what it would do. The Australian Education Act does not create legally enforceable rights or duties, which does raise questions about what it was for.

On a positive note, the government has pledged to show next May how it will make room in the budget - not just over the next four years but in the long term - for both of its big reforming policies, the Gonski education changes and the National Disability Insurance Scheme. And the Coalition has pledged to release a full suite of costed policies next year - as oppositions traditionally do in the run-up to elections.

But this year's focus on the wild and the wacky, and the constant character attack of each major party's leader, has left the electorate eager to give the whole show the gong.

MPs Behaving Badly - A Year Best Forgotten

and, from Mike Carlton ….

'Sometimes there are moments when a prime minister must keep faith with their convictions," snapped yet another scolding editorial in The Australian on Wednesday. Oh dear. Sometimes a leader writer must keep faith with plain English grammar: tautology, singular, plural, that sort of thing.

Even in quiet times the Oz's Canberra political coverage has a hectoring tone. Obsessive, bombastic, endlessly repetitive, it is a newspaper with Asperger's. Platoons of reporters, columnists and commentators, all grandly titled - chief this, national that - tumble over each other in furious agreement with their proprietor's view that only nice Mr Abbott can save the nation from the perdition to which Labor is leading us.

This week they soared to dizzy new heights. What I suppose we must call the Gillard/AWU Affair whipped them to a frenzy, to page after page of grey print that bellowed and howled like some lunatic chained in a padded cell. It seems every hack on the payroll has lunged into the fray, save for the golfing writer and the food editor so far as I can gather, but sooner or later even they will be expected to join this News Ltd stampede to crucify the Prime Minister. It's the group-think way the joint works.

HOPELESS JULIA DOUBLE-BOGEYS 18TH. PM's COQ AU VIN POISONS CAT.

With the federal election due next year, the creative possibilities are endless.

Towards the end of the week a collective madness seemed to infect everybody. Fairfax Media, publisher of this very organ, was berated by the Prime Minister in Parliament over its front page splash on the subject. At the ABC, a couple of impenetrable interviews on 7.30 shed more heat than light.

Despite the sound and fury, what have we got at the end of this week and this turbulent year in Parliament? For all the lurid talk of slush funds and bagmen, the allegations of fraud and other sinister crimes, no one has produced one shred of evidence to nail Julia Gillard with any corrupt or illegal act during her time as a lawyer at Slater & Gordon. Neither The Australian nor the opposition has come up with the smoking gun in the drawing room, the bloodstained candelabra in the library, the clump of charred faxes in the fireplace. Nothing.

Yes, she once had a dud boyfriend, until she dropped him like a hot brick. Show me a woman her age who hasn't. Even the sanctimonious but risibly ineffectual Julie Bishop might have to plead guilty to that heinous offence.