More than three weeks after Christian Porter outed himself as the accused rapist in the Morrison cabinet, adding his strenuous denial, the Prime Minister finally has realised that it’s untenable to allow him to remain as Attorney-General of Australia. It took more than three weeks of unrelenting political damage for Morrison to see the blindingly obvious.

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The person presiding over Australia’s system of justice cannot be a person accused of such a vile injustice, especially when there is no mechanism to allow him to clear his name.

But instead of a decisive fix, Morrison is planning a thoroughly inadequate measure. He will remove Porter from the Attorney-General’s post, but give him another post in his cabinet. The Prime Minister will explain this as addressing the technicality that there could be a perceived conflict of interest when the Attorney-General, the person who nominates judges to the Federal Court, is also bringing a case before the Federal Court. That case, of course, is Porter’s defamation claim against the ABC.

But the political reality is that Porter is damaged goods. By protecting him from the outset, Morrison fed the anger that moved 100,000 to march for justice for women. But now he’s planning to give Porter another cabinet portfolio.

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If Porter had any loyalty to his Prime Minister, his party, his government or his country he would have stood down weeks ago and gone to the backbench. That would have been the cleanest fix. You can’t be the subject of a national protest movement and pretend you enjoy public confidence.

The next best fix would be for Morrison to send him to the backbench. But he’s not planning to do that.

Third best would be for Morrison to appoint a retired judge to assess whether Porter is a fit and proper person to hold ministerial office. As a NSW Supreme Court judge, Justice Francois Kunc, wrote this week, such an inquiry would not undermine the rule of law, as Morrison claims, but would actually “enhance it” by addressing the question of public confidence. But no, Morrison says Porter will “continue to play a very important role in my cabinet”.

Likewise, he’s going to remove the Defence Minister, Linda Reynolds. The Prime Minister said she’s guilty of “disgraceful” misconduct by calling her former staffer and alleged rape victim, Brittany Higgins, a “lying cow”. Removing her is an acknowledgement that Reynolds, too, is damaged goods politically. But he won’t send her to the backbench either. Like Porter, Morrison says she will “continue to play a very important role in my cabinet”.

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So whichever portfolios Porter and Reynolds are to be given next week, their constituencies can rejoice in the knowledge that they’re having political problems – damaged goods – dumped on them. As with almost every move Morrison has made in this saga, it doesn’t solve a problem, it compounds a problem.

And the more he ducks and dodges and delays, the more scandals emerge, the more problems build, the worse the situation gets. The Prime Minister accused of misleading Parliament is at the mild end.

The Prime Minister’s staff has been accused of “backgrounding” reporters with damaging claims about Higgins’ loved ones to diminish her demands for justice. For weeks this was in the realm of questions from the opposition while Morrison hoped it would go away, but now Higgins herself has lodged a formal complaint with his chief of staff.

It joins the multiple other internal inquiries Morrison has ordered into related questions of cover-ups and bungling. The whole lot now sits festering in Morrison’s personal office, issuing a rank stench throughout the executive wing of Parliament and a pall of disrepute across the entire government.

Morrison’s plain lack of good faith in confronting the problems has served as a dare to malcontents in his own party, a dare to see how far they can push him before he confronts the problems fully, or breaks. So the disclosures ramp up.

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Liberal staff members masturbating on female MPs’ desks, perhaps, and filming it for wider circulation. Or, if that’s not lurid enough, claims of Liberal staff holding “gay orgies” in MPs’ offices during question time, according to Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff, Peta Credlin.

How about a government MP, Andrew Laming, who holds the Queensland seat of Bowman, disclosed to have been harassing two women online and in person for years? Both women are constituents of Laming’s. One woman, a charity worker, says she was suicidal as a result of his harassment. The other, a teacher, reported Laming to the police after he hid in bushes and photographed her.

If Morrison had trouble grappling with problem cabinet ministers, surely he could act decisively with such outrageous conduct by a backbencher? It depends on your definition of decisive. Morrison demanded Laming apologise, which he did in the House on Thursday. On Friday the Prime Minister said his behaviour had been “disgraceful”.

A spokesperson for the Prime Minister’s Office said: “At the Prime Minister’s request, the Member for Bowman issued an unreserved public apology. His comments were not acceptable to both women and also to the Prime Minister. Every Australian has the right to feel safe online and Mr Laming has made a commitment to change his online communication practices.”

And that was it. End of story. Nothing to see here. Online communication practices is one of the great euphemisms for trolling or harassment or abuse. What euphemism would the PMO geniuses come up with for a strangler in the Liberals’ midst, one wonders? Someone counselled to change his “respiratory modulation practices”, perhaps?

But at least the PMO was prepared to acknowledge that online trolling of constituents was bad. Hiding in the bushes to harass a constituent is, apparently, just the modern Liberal Party doing its thing.

For perspective, the Laming story would have dominated the news for a week in less torrid times. He would have been drummed out of Parliament unceremoniously. But Morrison is content with his apology. Laming apparently intends to stand again at the next election.

If Morrison is going to continue to accept him as a fit and proper member of Parliament, Labor leader Anthony Albanese says he will personally campaign against Laming in his seat at the next election.

Of course, Morrison should have required Laming to announce he would leave Parliament at the next election, at the very least. Instead, Laming becomes just another running sore for the government. The government is in a death spiral and Morrison is proving incapable of pulling it out.

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When this sorry saga is written up as a case study in crisis management, it will be cited as an outstanding example of the “how not to” address a crisis. Perhaps the endless pattern of inadequate response, followed by escalating crisis, followed by inadequate response and so on will become known as “Morrison syndrome” or “doing a Morrison”.

But that would be unfair to the other Morrison. The then Chief of Army, Lieutenant General David Morrison, was lauded for his decisive action in the so-called Jedi Council scandal of 2013 when he expelled army members for demeaning women. He made a public declaration that any man in the army who didn’t respect women as equals should get out: “There is no place for you amongst this band of brothers and sisters.”

David Morrison, later the Australian of the Year, stamped this quote onto the public consciousness: “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”

On the evidence to date, how would the Scott Morrison standard best be formulated? Perhaps like this: “The standard you think you can get away with is the standard you accept.”

Except that he’s discovering, in this endless crisis, that he isn’t getting away with it.