NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian (Image: AAP/Bianca De Marchi)

Can anyone now seriously imagine Gladys Berejiklian staging the kind of face-off she engineered with John Barilaro and his koala-killing mates a few weeks ago?

Of course not. Her political authority is gone. Her moral authority, too. Berejiklian lecturing anyone else about standards of conduct is now laughable. The woman who knew enough to know what she shouldn't have known when it came to her boyfriend is no longer in any position to criticise anyone else for their poor judgment.

What does she do in the next ministerial scandal? A premier who vacillates between telling the Murdoch tabloids about how she hoped to marry Maguire and insisting to ICAC that the relationship wasn't intimate or of sufficient status to tell her family about can't complain about others being jesuitical with parliamentary and ministerial codes of conduct.