Parliamentary privilege is used as the WikiLeaks of sex scandals more than anything else. Under its banner, Craig Thomson was named as the misuser of his union credit card on brothels. Senator Bill Heffernan falsely accused the great High Court judge Michael Kirby of using his Commonwealth car to pick up rent boys. Kirby accepted the ungracious apology and held out his hand in the ''spirit of reconciliation''. Deirdre Grusovin named the late John Marsden as a paederast when it was clear the accuser was more saucy than source, causing Channel Seven to pay lawyers more money than they did in the network's failed Foxtel case.

Women and men in Parliament get their knickers in a knot about gays. Franca Arena outed retired judge David Yeldham before he committed suicide by car. South Australia does bat above its weight with gay accusations made by its representatives. Liberal Mark Brindal pointed the finger at Ralph Graham as a paedophile, ''I believe Ralph Graham has predated at least two or three of the boys he raised'' and ''gossip in the gay community certainly confirms my statement'' Brindal told the South Australian Parliament in 2005. Brindal himself had dated a 24-year-old-man.

In Britain, a super injunction, protecting soccer star Ryan Giggs's affair with model Imogen Thomas, was broken by an MP in Parliament. Who wouldn't want an affair with Thomas, a former Miss Wales? She is a classy act, refusing money to name Giggs, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro for a children's hospice and quarantining herself in a flat after contracting swine flu on a holiday in Marbella. I would have risked it, in this time of swine, to swash my buckle in her flat.

I cannot understand Giggs's motive to keep Thomas a secret but the reality of Twitter and other cross-border networks means courts cannot keep secrets any more than the gay community in Adelaide can contain its gossip.

And Xeno's attitude makes horse sense when you discover he said in his maiden speech to Parliament that Woody Allen was ''my role model, some might say my kindred spirit''. Presumably Xeno has no problem with the filmmaker's own famed peccadilloes. And anyone who looks up to Allen is very short indeed.

When he came to power on a platform of ''no pokies'', I thought it was about the poker machines not the sex lives of priests. Woody and Xeno are both Worrier Men.

A flurry of abuses