As news broke that Perth will become one of the first cities in the world to trial driverless cars, Australia’s innovation prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was leading an even bolder pilot – the driverless government.

After suspending parliament while his deputy got his papers reissued, the PM handed operational control of the government over to a gaggle of disaffected National party backbenchers who promptly called a royal commission into the banking industry.

In scoping this project, the PM decided to trial another novel approach, allowing the industry under investigation to set their own terms of reference, a bold initiative even for someone whose default to most challenges is to outsource to the private sector.

Meanwhile, the head of the government’s NBN came to the conclusion that the only way to stop people complaining about the PM’s much-vaunted copper-plated network was to cease operations for the foreseeable future.

On energy policy, having decided it’s all too hard, the government has handed control to a pop-up committee of regulators with an impressive title that includes the word “security” and then told them to convince the state premiers to work it out among themselves.

And having delegated the work of determining whether to allow people who love each other to get married to a joint venture between the postal service and the general public, the PM has now empowered conservative MPs to set up an inquiry to find new ways to discriminate against homosexuals.

As for attacking his political opponents, the PM appears to have asked his security agencies to take on the job of opposition research, to some initial success.

Now we enter the final week of parliament, with the government ready to ask the high court to decide who can and cannot keep their jobs, based on the timeliness of the processing of paperwork of other nations who appear to be trialling their own driverless government projects.

To quote Malcolm, who has personally driven this innovation, “there’s never been a more exciting time to be an Australian”. As they say in the Valley, where to now?

This week’s Essential Report illustrates that our attitudes to driverless cars might help the PM answer that question.

At first blush we broadly support the idea of driverless cars. After all who wants to drive a car? It’s stressful, you can’t use your mobile phone and if you fall asleep at the wheel people can die.

It’s when we think about the safety implications of driverless cars that we get a little concerned; being asked to picture a vehicle with no one at the wheel careening out of control gives us pause for reflection.

We also show concern when confronted with the impact of driverless cars on our fellow humans, the thousands of truckies and couriers, public transport workers and taxi drivers who will be surplus to requirement. That sympathy may not extend to the Uber drivers who have happily been developing the automation model for the past few years, but compassion is rightly a finite commodity.

Faced with the data showing cars driven by humans are not exactly safe (last year more than two million people lost their lives in car accidents worldwide), we are more comfortable with the alternative. But deep down, we remain sceptical about the idea of trusting our safety to the robots. While we accept human error and frailty, we are not quite ready to look for a new custodian of our collective well-being.

At first blush the project to get rid of government is a no-brainer too. Politicians are at the bottom of the food chain when it comes to public trust, and think of all the money we’d save without them. Who wouldn’t want to pay less tax? After all, we can’t all afford the Panama tax haven.

It’s only when we think about the implications of having no one driving government that we start to worry, depending on your politics about the health and education funding, or the defence and border protection. When the link between lower taxes and lower services is made clear, enthusiasm for lower taxes ebbs.

The mission of smaller government is also an anti-jobs mission, the losses to the livelihoods of individual public sector workers having a multiplier effect when flowing into the communities in which they workers live.

Just like the driverless car, there is an immediate appeal to the idea of smaller and less powerful government. Those on the right can articulate the principles of freedom; those on the left embrace the decline of centralised authority. It’s only when we dwell on the alternatives that we begin to have second thoughts.

Weaker central government is a short cut to greater corporate power, more influence of cashed-up interest groups and individuals, declining public services replaced by business solutions, the inability to execute long-term plans in the national interest. In other words, our current lived experience.

And if this tortured analogy holds, it is the one piece of good news for a prime minster whose primary vote remains in the cellar and for whom a leadership challenge is now a topic of conversation.

Because there’s nothing to suggest a change of leadership will do anything to improve the situation of a government that has stopped meeting its key objective: to govern.

So if the prime minster manages to limp to end of the year, the one learning from 2017 must be that his driverless government experiment has been an absolute flame-out. As they say in the design lab: fail fast, fail forward.