He was wrong on one word. No “perhaps”, it is!

The Liberal Party slipped further into the mire in the last seven days.

Reeling from the scandal involving Speaker, Bronwyn Bishop, another senior member, Kevin Andrews, found himself embroiled in controversy twice in the same week about political donations.

Then the Libs found themselves in a dispute within their own federal parliamentary wing about the “blackout” on women being pre-selected.

Women make up just one-fifth of Liberal MPs but nearly half (45 per cent) of Labor's, which prompted the Liberal MP, Sharman Stone, from Shepparton, to argue there should be a quota for women.

This, not surprisingly, brought a sharp “no” from Christopher “Poodles” Pyne, who doesn't like quotas and said pre-selection must be merit based.

If merit is the Liberals criterion how come Andrews is still rummaging around Parliament after his appalling handling under the Howard Government of the Dr Muhamed Haneef affair for which the Australian taxpayer paid “substantial” damages, an amount that remains secret?

Andrews has plenty of mates in the current parliament; their worth and performance accurately summed up this week by Stone as a disincentive to women wanting to enter politics.

Stone said Question Time was a “waste of time and rubbish; just screaming matches between the boys. The public is over it. They look at Parliament, they see it as time-wasting, confrontational, men versus men, screaming at each other to see who can get thrown out the quickest.” 

Some misguided male MPs see getting “kicked out” as a badge of honour.

There's no comfort for the Labor Party in all this. Leader Bill Shorten might have been pleased with his performance after the ALP Conference at the weekend but there's not too many taxpayers cheering.

He's still tied to the union bootstraps.

As Fairfax's political editor, Peter Hartcher, so neatly put it this week: “Labor must unhitch the union chariot. It remains union-owned and union-controlled ... the unions collectively still own 50 per cent of conference delegates in a country where less than 20 per cent of the work force is unionised.”

Certainly there is a place for unions but it isn't running the country any more than the Coalition thinks it can keep on accepting political donations while allowing what The SMH this week described as a "flawed system" to continue.

Shorten just might improve his stocks if he and his party set about leading parliamentary debate to abolish any political donations (including those from unions) and re-setting the bar on MPs entitlements.