A lump of coal and a lump of coral have brought a Senate hearing to a standstill.
Greens leader Richard Di Natale on Monday was quizzing officials from the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority about the latest reports of coral bleaching when he produced a lump of dead coral.
"Do they look like this? Is this what you'd expect them to look like?" he said, showing a white coral about the size of a rockmelon.
"That looks like a dead coral to me," authority chairman Russell Reichelt replied.
Committee chair Linda Reynolds warned Senator Di Natale against using props.
"We had the treasurer in the House of Representatives waving a lump of coal..." the Greens leader protested, producing his own chunk of coal, a similar size to the coral.
When he refused to put them away, Senator Reynolds suspended the committee hearing to tell him off privately.
Later, Liberal senator Jane Hume asked Dr Reichelt if there was a chance the chunk of coral "when it was chipped off the reef could still have been alive".
"I don't know where it came from so I won't guess," Dr Reichelt replied.
"I hope it wasn't alive on the barrier reef."
After the incident, Senator Di Natale said it demonstrated the hypocrisy within the parliament.
"Apparently it's acceptable for the treasurer to hand out a lump of coal on the floor of the house but not for me to draw the connection between dirty, polluting coal and the death of one of our greatest natural wonders, the Great Barrier Reef," he said in a statement.
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