Spring has sprung in Canberra and with it this week, a new Senate has also blossomed.
The Coalition's upper-house majority has been wound back and the country can look forward to the sorts of protracted bargaining, haggling, wheedling, dickering and cherry-picking of Government legislation that the Democrats so enjoyed and the likes of Brian Harradine and Mal Colston so exploited.
This time, South Australia is the lucky winner.
Just as Tasmanian Independent Senator Harradine and ex-Labor Queensland Senator Colston managed to divert veritable rivers of Commonwealth funding to their home states in exchange for an affirmative vote for the Howard Government in the Senate, South Australian Independent Nick Xenophon looks set to turn his state's fortunes not to mention its infrastructure budget projections around.
He and Victorian Family First senator Steve Fielding will be the popular kids of the new-look upper house as their votes, combined with those of the five Greens Senators, will allow Labor to pass its legislation in the face of Opposition blocks.
During parliamentary sitting weeks, Senator Xenophon will no doubt find his diary crowded with dinner invitations, coffee requests and amiable offers of advice and assistance from some of Labor's more experienced hands.
As the last vestiges of the Howard Senate majority were removed this week, outgoing Liberal Senate president Alan Ferguson expressed his dismay that Parliament would return to being held hostage to the whims of two Independents.
''I am not sure that I really like a situation where one or two people control the legislation that is passed in the chamber, when it comes down to the whims of one or two people. Sometimes that is not as good for the country.''
Senator Ferguson is respected on both sides of politics and has been elected unopposed as Deputy Senate President. His lament that the major-party duopoly had been upset by pesky renegades is not surprising.
But as he cleared out the last boxes from his salubrious suite to move to slightly less posh digs down the hall, Senator Ferguson had even bigger concerns for Australia's democratic future. He labelled question time a farce and roundly condemned the quality of debate from both sides of politics in both chambers.
He said prevailing arrangements wasted hours of valuable public servants' time every day as bureaucrats helped their minister prepare for potential curly questions from the other side questions that most of the time never got asked.
The rules of relevance were so rubbery as to allow the most blatant obfuscation on the part of ministers, and time limits needed to be enforced to stop their endless blather.
Well, perhaps Senator Ferguson put things a little more diplomatically than that. ''If you cannot answer a question in two minutes, you probably cannot answer it at all,'' he suggested.
His argument is that question time is an exercise in point-scoring and dodging bullets rather than the straightforward act of asking and answering questions, and it is bringing Federal Parliament into disrepute in the eyes of voters.
His email inbox can attest to the public's fury after catching just a few minutes of the ABC's broadcast from 2pm during a sitting week.
Senator Ferguson will take his complaints to the Senate procedures committee which he chairs and will call for an overhaul.
He won't be the first to have done so.
Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard made a similar call back in 2006 when she was in charge of Opposition tactics.
She, too, condemned parliamentary standards, proposing time limits on questions and greater power for the Speaker to force ministers to be relevant.
Called to account this week, Ms Gillard seemed far less concerned about standards of parliamentary debate from the perspective of the ministerial front bench than when she wrote her paper.
She said Labor had cleaned things up somewhat by moving to a system of ministerial statements that is, not using question time to announce new policies.
She also said question time was longer under Labor, although one can only presume Labor MPs are just obfuscating more persistently, because the number of questions remains the same.
With Parliament resuming this week after the winter break, the standard of debate seemed particularly turgid.
In the lower house on Tuesday, the Opposition asked how tax hikes on condensate, alcopops, diesel fuel and luxury cars would lower inflation and the Government answered that threats to block the budget would damage the surplus and vandalise the economy.
An example by way of illustration:
Question: Nationals leader Warren Truss. ''How will the Government's increased registration charges and fuel excise for heavy vehicles reduce inflation?''
Answer: Treasurer Wayne Swan. ''The most fundamental thing that we can do to reduce inflation is to build a significant budget surplus absolutely. What we have got to do is make our economy much more productive.
''We have got to do something about the capacity constraints in this economy that were left to us by the previous government ...'' And on he went for some time.
Were these two actually in the same chamber?
In the other place, Senator Ferguson asked Industry Minister Kim Carr, ''Will the minister be convening an urgent crisis meeting, as called for by the AMWU, to discuss the massive job haemorrhaging which has afflicted Australia's manufacturing sector since the election of the Rudd Labor Government?''
Senator Carr responded, ''What I would like to do is advise the Senate that IBM and the University of Ballarat have announced today, 27 August, that they will be constructing a new $10.8million IT services centre at the University of Ballarat in connection with the Victorian Government and the City of Ballarat ...''
Just what IBM and the University of Ballarat had to do with a union crisis meeting is anyone's guess.
But Senate President John Hogg proved woefully powerless to call Senator Carr to account.
Add in a liberal dose of catcalls, interjections, smart-aleck insults and the resulting handful of expulsions, and it was just another sitting week in Parliament House.
It is hardly surprising members of the public get so frustrated they dash off emails of contempt.Surely the politicians themselves, save for those few brilliant performers who use the lectern as an opportunity to showcase their talents, must find the charade of question time counter-productive, not to mention exhausting.
Given that it's spring, voters would be best served by turning the TV off when 2pm rolls around and head outside to enjoy the sunshine instead.
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