Navigating a parliamentary inquiry is not so different from instilling order in a high school classroom.
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The committee room, too, requires a voice which can cut through the noise, and the egos, extract information and find level ground.
Labor senator Deborah O'Neill's no-nonsense approach makes sense then, given her past life was spent as a Catholic school teacher.
Alongside the Greens' Barbara Pocock, the backbencher has become a key performer in the Senate's probe into consultants, set up following revelations of a breach of confidential Treasury information by a former PricewaterhouseCoopers tax partner.
"You actually start to really learn to observe and understand people," she said.
"And it becomes pretty clear when someone hasn't heard what you said.
"It also becomes really clear when they're not giving you an answer."
A senator since 2013 - having served a term in the lower house before that - Senator O'Neill had already cut her teeth on high-profile parliamentary inquiries, including a dive into failing regulation of cosmetic surgeons and sexual harassment and bullying inside financial services company AMP.
Though oftentimes flying under the radar, the senator's fierce approach to accountability has delivered a steady flow of media attention over the years.
She points back to her role in the joint committee on corporations and financial services, which then assistant treasurer Bill Shorten tapped her to chair in 2012, for preparing her for the consultants catastrophe.
Whether a senior public servant, or a giant of the private sector, witnesses who have sought to slip out of offering up information to the inquiry, have come to know a particular kind of heat from Senator O'Neill.
It was Senator O'Neill who uncovered the earliest signs of the depth of PwC's misconduct, revealing in February by way of a well-placed Senate estimates question, that the information had traveled to up to 30 partners and staff at the firm.
That figure would later balloon to 63 after emails were tabled in Parliament in May.
"When I asked that question, I didn't know what the answer would be and that is the work of the Senate," she said.
"You have to go where the questions lead to, you have to go sometimes with fear and trepidation, I think to get the reveal of what's really happening."
She doesn't spell it out, but it's clear that her Catholic faith is the other force driving her through these hours-long hearings into the minutiae of private and public sector functions.
"My job is to put the facts, and get the truth, on the public record, in the national interest," she said.
"And there is no one who comes before the Senate, who is above the national interests, we are all servants of this democracy."
Born and raised in Sydney's western suburbs to Irish immigrant parents, the NSW senator said her upbringing stoked a sense of social justice, which propelled her first into a teaching career, then politics.
But politics came later in life.
"I was pregnant with my third child before I joined the Labor Party, already had a mortgage," she said.
"I had to ... sort those really essential things for me, like, I met somebody wonderful. I really wanted to have children, I really wanted to establish a safe and beautiful home for them to grow up in.
"I got those really important life things under my belt and then it was kind of like [time to] have a bit of a look around."
When she heard Paul Keating on the radio, speaking to his staff as he left power in 1996, her path to Parliament began.
"[Listening to] everything that he said then about what the mission was to create a more modern and functional Australia and the challenges of doing that and the good, the great legacy that had been left behind.
"I just thought, 'that's it, I'm joining the Labor Party.'"
The senator has said in the past that politics is not for the "faint-hearted" but asked about it, she revised the statement.
"I don't think life is for the faint-hearted," she said.
"Seriously, people talk about how messy politics is, but that I think it's illusory, that life is ordered."
And politics and power "is operating constantly" outside the halls of Parliament anyway, in the P&C, the sports club, the workplace, she said.
It is difficult not to draw comparisons between the Labor senator and her committee colleague, Senator Pocock. Both entered politics later in life, transitioning from higher education to eventually spearhead an expedition into the shadowed world of consultants, and its intersection with government.
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Both have loudly and clearly expressed their outrage about the public funds churned through firms which have failed to show their integrity.
But the Labor senator avoids comparison to Senator Pocock, bringing the focus instead back to the powers of the inquiry process and "the Labor vision of the world".
"That is a very, very different view from the ... Greens and Senator Pocock.
"It's also a very, very different view from [committee chair senator Richard] Colbeck.
"We have different worldviews. It doesn't mean that professionalism and a common sense of purpose, of serving your nation can't allow us to work together to do good work."
Labor's vision includes a bolstered public service, able to function without being propped up by billion-dollar contracts with third parties, including consultancies.
While Senator O'Neill blames the service's weakened state largely on the former Coalition governments - which capped staffing to 2007 levels - she does admit to a shared responsibility from both sides.
"Public service is very significant ... somehow, we allowed that to be diminished."
"And I mean, collectively there, that has been a mantra over the neoliberal period, but it just was all that and more on steroids in the last three terms of Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments, and there is a huge rebuild that needs to occur."
But Senator O'Neill maintains she will not need to turn her scrutiny on her own government's promises to rebuild the APS.
"The party has already lived up to its promises on cutting consultants, there has already been a huge cut," she said.
The Albanese government has set a pace on rebuilding the APS, starting out a sprawling agenda of reform.
But if it baulks along the way, Senator O'Neill could yet find herself in the uncomfortable position of measuring her values against those of her party.
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