There is one thing to be said for this wretched state government: it has an infinite capacity to stun and amaze.

Just when you think it might be returning to the job of governing, however badly, along comes another scandal to grab the headlines.

It never ends. We have had a paedophile minister, a police minister and his bouncing underpants, the Della Bosca soap opera, the knifing of Nathan Rees, the backbencher from Penrith rorting her expenses, the ongoing comedy double act of Joe Tripodi and Eddie Obeid, and now the awful tale of David Campbell and his visit to a gay sauna.

It's as if they were British Tories. Bring on the fishnet stockings, the Nazi regalia, the whips and exotic leather harnesses, the strapping young guardsman from a smart regiment.

How we love the shock and horror. We are avid for scandal. Let us wallow in that most excruciating moment of all, when the whey-faced wife is propelled before the news cameras to assure us that she is standing by her man.

This is hypocrisy on an epic scale. Campbell's private life should never have become public. His sexual preferences have no bearing on his fitness for office. Yes, he was a dud minister, but it wasn't because he was cruising Ken's at Kensington.

The Daily Telegraph yesterday ran a po-faced editorial denouncing him for using his government limo to drive to the sauna, but in fact he was perfectly entitled to do that. Ministers may take their cars wherever they like. It was no more of a crime than if he had stopped off at Mass.

The true scandal of this government is its stupidity and incompetence. Headed by a featherweight Premier, it is tired, stale, devoid of ideas. There are perhaps three ministers who are up to their jobs.

The rest remind me of that famous remark of Kim Beazley snr: that when he joined the Labor Party it was the cream of the working class. When he left, it was the dregs of the middle class.

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Julia Gillard was on the money with her crack that you can never tell which Tony Abbott you are getting. Is it "Gospel Tony, who is telling you the truth, or Phoney Tony, who isn't?" she wondered on Tuesday.

Actually, there's an easy way to pick it. Watch his lips. When People Skills is about to lie, or to "go a little bit further", to borrow his own exquisite phrase, a strange thing happens. He flicks his tongue like a lizard. It's a nervous tic I have noticed often over the years, and a dead giveaway every time.

There's the tongue, in and out between those oddly dysmorphic lips. Next a splattering of ''ums'' and ''ahs''. Then away he goes with the porky. Abbott's floundering admission on the 7.30 Report, that you shouldn't believe a word he says, was riveting stuff. The tongue popped out, the ums gathered pace, disaster loomed. It was like watching a skier whoosh down a slope and crash into a tree.

Funnier still were the efforts by his lieutenants to spin the blunder the next day. Andrew Robb solemnly suggested it was because he had been educated by the Jesuits. Barnaby Joyce, ever the maestro of the loony non sequitur, explained that ''what someone might say to their lover in the heat of passion is entirely different, or should be entirely different, to what you say to the lady checking out your groceries at the supermarket".

Gillard's Phoney Tony line will haunt Abbott for what is left of his political career, although his habitual deceit would not surprise those with long memories. Back in 1998, you might recall, he famously lied to Four Corners, flatly denying he had set up a slush fund to bankroll the destruction of Pauline Hanson's One Nation gang. With fabulous irony, the fund was given the name Australians For Honest Politics. When it blew up in Abbott's face a few years later and he was questioned about it by Deborah Snow, a reporter from this newspaper, he offered the immortal explanation that "misleading the ABC is not quite the same as misleading the Parliament as a political crime". So that's all right then.

I think his former boss, John Hewson, has him pinned down. Hewson told Four Corners this year that "what you've got is constant colour and movement, and he's very good at it. His strengths are, he's obviously very bright, but he's very cunning, and I think that cunningness shows.

"And he can see an issue and he can grab an issue. And how does he handle it? He gets right in your face. He exaggerates; he grabs the headlines, even if he knows that the next day he's going to have to back that off."

Amusing in an opposition leader. Impossible for a prime minister.

MIKE CARLTON