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No police officer will face criminal charges over the death of Tanya Day. No officer will be investigated, charged or held personally responsible, despite the coroner finding an “indictable offence may have been committed in connection” to her death. Foremost in the coroner’s findings was a recommendation that Victoria’s public drunkenness laws be repealed, similarly called for by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody three decades earlier.

While Covid-19 may have halted proceedings at the true home of Australian democracy, The Masked Singer, it has failed to stop parliament, which resumed this week after a nine-week hiatus. The break has been devastating for the ABC, which has been battered in the coveted 2pm time slot since losing its flagship Question Time program to tide viewers over to their afternoon nap. It was relatively smooth sailing for the “virtual parliament”, although Oculus Rift is not yet sold on the concept as a game for consumers. There was brief alarm when a Twitter troll appeared to hijack proceedings; however, it was soon explained that Senator Malcolm Roberts was, in fact, entitled to be there.

Red-faced and contrite, the minister for Aged Care and Senior Australians and minister for Youth and Sport, Richard Colbeck, apologised in the senate and offered his ‘sincere condolences’ to hundreds of grieving families. That he cut a sorry figure in the red chamber, though, was not all his own doing. This government, with its failures in aged-care policy and delivery, must share a good deal of the blame.

Last month, the University of New South Wales published on its website an interview with Human Rights Watch Australia’s director, Elaine Pearson, who also holds a position as an adjunct lecturer at the university. The interview focused on how the international community can respond to Hong Kong’s new authoritarian national security law imposed by China. UNSW posted a link to this article, with a quote, on its Twitter account on July 31. By that evening, individuals on the Chinese social media platform WeChat were encouraging one another to get on Twitter and demand the university delete the post.

It has been said that Scott Morrison’s great skill is for accidents. He even made his leadership look like one, moving a column of votes at the last minute. For a while now he has pretended that the destruction of the university sector is an accident, too. He ignored the calls to offer JobKeeper, and waited for the staff to be sacked. He pretended not to notice, as a sector dependent on international students lost its key revenues.

With the speed of a sputtering meteor we’ve seen gilded careers disintegrate. So it has been with that magisterial expert on promissory estoppel Dyson Heydon as doors slammed in his face following the High Court’s findings of his inappropriate sexual harassment of young employees. Then, early this month, Melbourne silk Norman O’Bryan, a chap with plenty of smarts and entrepreneurial flair, hit the ropes.

Any notion that ministers, state or federal, are responsible for anything much appears sunk in the wake of the Ruby Princess. And the ramifications are significant for the quality of our democracy and what we as citizens can rightly demand of our elected representatives and the governments they form.

The prime minister’s post-Covid-19 plan is to roar ahead with a slate of mega-projects that would be delayed by any proper consideration of their environmental and Indigenous heritage impacts. While the EPBC Act rarely leads to any project being given the thumbs down, it does require environmental impacts to be assessed, and this takes time. The government’s solution? Get rid of the federal assessment.

The same week Sussan Ley refused to give protection to the Djab Wurrung trees, she gave special heritage status to the Parkes radio telescope. This is how culture is preserved in Australia.

The ghost of Rex (The Strangler) Connor lives and breathes. Gough Whitlam’s hulking Minerals and Energy minister, who slept by the telex machine waiting for news of Tirath Khemlani’s $4 billion loan, has been reborn as a modern-day inspiration. The Strangler’s plan more than 45 years ago was for a nation crisscrossed with gas pipelines. It was believed his vision went further, and that he saw a future for a massive pipeline between Australia and Japan.