Levity was in short supply as Michaelia Cash sat pinioned in a parliamentary committee room, subjected to the pitiless gaze of five television cameras, the bazooka-style lenses of four news photographers, the relentless questions of an accusation of Labor senators and, at her back, the scribbling of press gallery journalists.

The Employment Minister assumed the attitude common to almost all parliamentarians who have found themselves over the decades arraigned before their peers for sins either actual or imagined, the demand for a resignation echoing from the walls.

It begins with an initially cheery "I'm innocent, but I'm here to assist" that slowly morphs into a world-weary exasperation, as if, somehow, her accusers are too thick to understand the evidence, before moving on to a snappishness that, loosely translated, means "I've answered that, how dare you keep asking".

Senator Cash was well into the third stage when One Nation leader Pauline Hanson bustled in, sat down, fixed the minister with the sort of stern stare that could be interpreted to mean anything....and, presumably unintentionally, threw the switch to vaudeville.