And yet.

Could it be possible that the most noxious political brawl, which has subsumed the better part of a decade, could be in the process of grinding to a resolution? And could that be because the political class has finally recognised that the public and the national interest must be served if the parliament is to regain a shred of dignity?

We are referring, of course, to what is drolly called the energy debate.

That's the one that over the past seven years has been responsible - at least in part - for the destruction of four prime ministerships (Rudd, Gillard, Rudd and Abbott) and the current torment of a fifth (Turnbull).

That's also the one that will determine whether you will be able to afford to warm or cool your home in future summers and winters, whether businesses and farmers will be able to rely on electricity to run their tools and machines - or whether they should invest in diesel generators as insurance against blackouts - and what you might tell your grandkids when they ask whether more could have been done to help deal with the climate change afflicting them.

It couldn't get worse. Could it?

In fact, given the well-established clashing of the factions within Malcolm Turnbull's government over power generation, no one could have expected much better than the risibly named National Energy Guarantee that was announced this week.

A guarantee from a government - any government - is barely worth the breath expended upon it these days, and a guarantee of anything related to power prices is surely asking for trouble.

Still, the plan has the benefit of offering a level of investment certainty to the power sector, thus holding out the promise of increasing reliability of electricity supply, all the while requiring power generators to reduce carbon emissions.

Given the outright warfare promised by Tony Abbott and his little band of vandals if there had been a sniff of a clean energy target or fresh emphasis on renewables, Turnbull has possibly even exceeded expectations by managing any halfway-serious policy at all.

You wouldn't know it, but Bill Shorten's Labor Party thinks so, as it happens.

But Shorten's keeping it a secret. For now.

Turnbull's energy "guarantee" had barely been announced before Shorten was firing up all the derision he could muster. It was a "joke" and a guarantee that wouldn't work, he declared.

His first effort relating to the matter in question time was this: "I refer to the Prime Minister's latest energy policy. Can the Prime Minister confirm that the government has not modelled its impact on business, has not modelled its impact on renewable energy jobs, has not modelled its impact on the broader economy, has not modelled its impact on households? Why should Australians believe anything that this Prime Minister says about a lousy 50-cent saving in people's power bills?"

You'd imagine that the Shorten-led opposition was gearing up to kill the scheme stone dead.

You'd be wrong. His hot words are a political feint, as Fairfax's Mark Kenny astutely observed this week.

And why?

All sides of politics, with the notable exception of Abbott and gang and a few of the Greens, have known for a very long time that Australia's householders, which is to say voters, are fed up to the back teeth with the esoteric arguments and endless political warfare associated with energy.

Just about everyone wants to know that if they are to flick a light switch, light will ensue, and they want to do it without fearing a power bill that will bring them to their knees.

Further, a sizeable proportion of that population recognises by now that any workable policy from a nation worthy of the name has to have embedded within it a mechanism to reduce carbon pollution.

Even those who believed Abbott's carry-on about Julia Gillard's "great big carbon tax" came to learn that once the tax was removed, electricity prices barely paused before continuing to rise. Abbott's caterwauling hadn't been worth the candle.

Turnbull's plan, for all its unexplained parts, offers a wink to the return of a form of carbon pricing. Fairfax's Peter Hannam took the trouble this week to dig through the advice being provided by the new Energy Security Board, and discovered a a mechanism to be added to the National Electricity Market in 2019 and 2020.

"Some electricity retailers will not be able to meet the required emissions profile, while others will overachieve," it reads. "Therefore a secondary exchange will occur between retailers to balance their portfolios."

There lie, clearly, the makings for a default carbon price.

All of this, equally clearly, adds up to a political approach Labor could live with.

One senior Labor figure close to Shorten laid it out this week.

"We'll let Turnbull do the heavy lifting, but we'll end up taking something like this policy to the election," he said.

In other words, Labor will play hard and let Turnbull take fire, but as the months go by, pinch a fair slice of his policy and modify it, allowing, for the first time in seven years, a degree of bipartisanship.

Maybe things aren't getting worse, after all.