To entertain myself, I've read pages and pages of Hansard where Senator Bernardi, of South Australia has interrupted other speakers on a regular basis and made what I consider to be personal remarks (apparently, "the absence of belief in a greater being is generally replaced by something less than beneficent").

But it was his comments about the United Nations which are important now.

He said of the UN: "The government's record and future agenda also threatens to concentrate power in Canberra, while outsourcing aspects of our national sovereignty to unaccountable foreign organisations like the United Nations. This was highlighted by the government's commitment to a climate change treaty prior to the Copenhagen conference in December last year, which would have seen billions of dollars of Australian taxpayer funds disappear into that fiscal black hole of bureaucracy known as the United Nations."

Now Bernardi is off to the United Nations for a three-month secondment alongside Senator Lisa Singh, the Tasmanian Labor Senator who defied her party's poor judgment and was re-elected from the position of sixth on the Labor ticket.

One is a good choice with wide experience, that's Singh. The choice of the other is quite remarkable unless his colleagues are using this opportunity to send Bernardi to a re-education camp. I guess that's possible.

Leading up to his time at the UN, Bernardi has claimed acts of Islamic terror "are now a seemingly everyday event" and made it clear he opposes same-sex marriage. Famously he once said: "There are even some creepy people out there... [who] say it is OK to have consensual sexual relations between humans and animals. Will that be a future step? In the future will we say, 'These two creatures love each other and maybe they should be able to be joined in a union'." To translate: the step from same sex marriage to bestiality is just one ceremony around the corner. Bernardi has already proposed a watering down of the Australia's Racial Discrimination Act and claims the ABC is biased.

But the secondment to the UN, or in this case, the re-education camp, may find Bernardi surrounded by people who may not believe in higher deities, who may be same-sex attracted, who may take offence at racist commentary, who might live in non-traditional families. Goodness, he might even find the occasional proponent of public broadcasting. And Muslims!

Singh has a master of international relations and extensive experience on various committees dealing with foreign affairs, defence and trade as well as operating as the shadow parliamentary secretary for environment, climate change and water, was the president of Tasmania's UN Association. Bernardi has a diploma in financial services and a graduate certificate in business management. His parliamentary experience is more along the lines of families and community services. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

But I am slightly concerned about what will happen to Bernardi when he plays on a bigger stage to a wider audience while he represents Australians. As we can all agree, the last week in politics was embarrassing, not just to the politicians but to the voters. Looks like politicians – and Bernardi in particular - can't manage tension without resorting to name-calling and abuse, who can't manage the internal dynamics of their own organisations without resorting to undermining each other.

In the last week, in the stoush between Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie and Bernardi, we've had plenty of personal attacks. Briefly, Lambie compared Bernardi to sex workers and then apologised. To sex workers. She was, at the very least, attempting to be funny although there were no audible laughs in the senate. "Bernardi lecturing this Parliament and displaying mock outrage regarding [Sam] Dastyari and Chinese political donations is like an angry prostitute lecturing us about the benefits of celibacy," she told Parliament last week.

Bernardi took a while to respond and did so with neither good humour nor wit. Instead he labelled Lambie as thick.

"There's an inherent dignity in being a Senator," he said.

"I just don't think that Jacqui Lambie has demonstrated that. I just think she's too thick to pay any real attention to, that's my view. I choose to ignore her."

This from the man who says that: "One only has to look at the cesspit of Twitter to see how debased our culture of respect has become." One only has to look at transcripts of Bernardi interviews to reach the same conclusion.

And he does this while trying to position himself in a particular way, as a purveyor of the "common sense" brand. His website proclaims "Common Sense Lives Here."

I tried to find out what common sense meant by reading Bernardi's website. That was a lost cause so I rang Kate Reynolds, a professor of organisational psychology at the Australian National University, who is clear-sighted about this.

She says he is trying to position himself as someone who can speak on behalf of "ordinary Australians".

"Common sense is a strategic way to capture people's attention ... what would be considered reasonable, accepted, appropriate.

"He is trying to position conservative common sense as being legitimate and reasonable."

And his behaviour?

"Very personal ... it is better in politics if you play the issue and personal insults aren't the way we want to see community leaders behave."

Particularly on the world stage.

@jennaprice

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