Locked-down Canberra is bustling compared to the deserted halls of Federal Parliament.

The people's house has been stripped to its bare essentials - while reinforced with health protections - to allow Parliament to proceed in the midst of a global pandemic which is gripping the capital more tightly than ever before.

A pair of nurses outfitted in protective gear and holding thermometers await the slow trickle of people arriving in the building.

A normal temperature, not just a security pass, is needed to enter the house on the hill on this bleak late winter's morning in the nation's capital.

The maze of corridors is hauntingly quiet; footsteps on floorboards and marble echo across the building's open spaces. There are no public tours or school students - both are banned.

The cafes, which would be teeming with staffers, lobbyists and parliamentarians in normal times, tend only to a few passing customers.

These are not normal times.

Federal Parliament has seen restrictions during the pandemic, but never at a time when the virus has been spreading so quickly on its doorstep.

One case of coronavirus thrust Canberra into lockdown on the final day of Federal Parliament's most recent sitting week.

Thirty infections were reported on Tuesday.

WA Greens senator Rachel Siewert has sat in Federal Parliament's upper house for 16 years. Never, she says, has it felt or sounded like this.

"Nothing in my experience in this place matches what we are going through now," she tells The Canberra Times.

"This is the quietest it has ever been. People have been very careful, people are subdued."

Siewert won't contest the next election. This is far from the farewell she had envisaged or hoped. But there is important work to do. Parliament must, if it can, go on.

"This is what democracy is about - the capacity to shine a light, particularly through the Covid crisis and the fact that they [the government] haven't been properly supporting people through the lockdowns."

Like Senator Siewert, Labor's Chris Hayes will end his long career in Federal Parliament at the next election.

The opposition's chief whip has been bunkered down in Canberra for more than a month; travel restrictions preventing him from travelling back to his coronavirus-hit electorate of Fowler, in south-west Sydney, between sittings.

"We're almost entitled to wear a Raiders jersey and say we're Canberrans," Hayes jokes.

Hayes says having adult children made it easier for him to volunteer to come to Canberra than it was for some of his colleagues.

Zoom calls every other day keep him in touch with his children and grandchildren. His local community is worried, he says, but also frustrated they've been treated differently to those in the affluent parts of the city where the outbreak originated.

"It's not the way you wanted to go out," he says of the circumstances surrounding what could be one of his final sitting weeks in Parliament.

"And it's not the way you wanted to leave a community like mine in south-west Sydney."

Only "genuinely and absolutely essential" parliamentarians, staffers and department employees are permitted to be inside Parliament House this week, as part of a raft of health measures brought in to allow the sittings to proceed.

NSW Liberal senator Andrew Bragg has no staff at all in his office this week.

He quarantined for a fortnight in Canberra so he could attend Parliament in person. He's noticed a shift in the mood of his colleagues in the past week - they've been buoyed by what he describes as their leaders' "plain speaking" about abandoning the "crazy pursuit of Covid-zero".

"There is no substitute for being here," he says of being in Parliament.

"I think it is really important that Parliament meets, and people can have their say about the impact of trying to achieve Covid-zero, kids in schools, mental health. What you have seen is some passionate and deeply felt views expressed from across the Parliament."

Inside the House of Representatives, there are just 63 of 151 members present. Members beam in remotely from their electoral offices across Australia, making up small squares on television screens set up in the four corners of the chamber.

Ministers including Paul Fletcher, Angus Taylor and Alan Tudge are relegated to the backbench, not for any misdeeds but for the necessity of physical distancing in the lower house.

At the heart of the chamber, plexiglass screens have been installed to separate Prime Minister Scott Morrison from Labor leader Anthony Albanese.

Question time presents a brief return to political normality, even if numbers on the floor are vastly reduced and the mood relatively subdued.

Labor presses the government on its failure to vaccinate vulnerable cohorts, including people with a disability, Aboriginal and Torres Islander communities and aged care workers.

The government pushes back on every attack.

"We are going to fight and continue to fight for every life - every life - every life," Health Minister Greg Hunt says in response to a question about the low vaccination rate for NDIS participants, each mention of a "life" delivered with more emphasis.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg delights in informing the house about the Doherty Institute's pandemic modelling, which he claims makes it clear Australia can "open up safely" regardless of whether 30 or 800 cases are circulating in the community.

Without notice, Speaker Tony Smith asks members to turn and look up to the chamber's public gallery, where the government's official photographer is stationed.

They oblige immediately, posing dutifully from their seats.

A brief hush falls over the chamber.

The camera clicks.

A surreal moment in Australian political history is captured, now frozen in time.

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