MIX a pathetic tax, a messy political divorce and an unaccustomed spotlight and you get a Senate on steroids.
The upper house is supposed to be a little more measured, a tad more civil, than the unruly mob in the Reps.
Not on Monday, as a rare week when only the Senate is sitting started with a goodly audience of journalists rather than the usual lone scribe or two.
Question time seemed a place of surrogates - Stephen Conroy for Julia Gillard, Penny Wong for Wayne Swan and so on.
But the subject matter - mainly that under-performing mining tax - and the insults were familiar.
There was plenty of "reckless negativity" and many references to Gina Rinehart and other rich miners from government ranks. The opposition replied with periodic shouts about Eddie Obeid.
Then Eric Abetz, the opposition leader in the Senate, interrupted the session with a motion of no confidence in the government over its handling of the tax.
This is a quite common ploy in the Reps and is usually disposed of rapidly. It's very unusual in the Senate, and the result was an interminable exchange of insults as speaker after speaker went on for 20 minutes.
Samples: Kevin Rudd deserved to be ousted, but Gillard has been 10 times worse (Abetz); having known Wayne Swan since uni 35 years ago, he was a dope then and is a dope still (George Brandis).
From the government side, we had Wong imagining Abetz preparing for his speech by puffing himself up in front of the mirror.
Having plenty of journalists watching helped explain the hyperbolic performances. At one stage Abetz turned to the press gallery with "To our friends in the media..."
But it probably wasn't the main reason.
The Nationals' Barnaby Joyce interrupted Wong with a point of order supposedly on relevance, saying the only relevant matter was whether the Greens would vote with their old partner.
That sort of spurious point of order would get him kicked out down below, but they don't kick people out in the Senate. And, of course, given Christine Milne ripped up her agreement with the government last week, it was one of the more acute observations of the afternoon.
Milne, who'd been doing a lot of consulting during earlier speeches, dealt with it quite cunningly.
She moved an amendment whose effect would be to have the Senate call for a mining tax that raised enough money to pay for long-term reforms like Gonski and the national disability insurance scheme.
Then she launched into "a pox on both your houses" speech, with the opposition copping the greater part of the disease.
Her quick footwork meant she was continuing the Greens' product differentiation from the government, which was behind the divorce in the first place, without in any way moving into the opposition's camp.
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