On Qantas, question time is limping irritably into irrelevance.
The political pointscoring over what should be done to help the ailing airline dominated parliament on Wednesday for the third straight day.
Nothing new of substance emerged.
Instead, there was Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's claim the government was punishing Qantas for not blaming the carbon tax for its ills, an unlikely action Prime Minister Tony Abbott thrice denied.
There were also competing claims about who had said what about Qantas in times past, which were all designed to show inconsistency, if not hypocrisy.
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But generally, it was same old, same old. Shorten charged that Abbott had no plan for jobs beyond sending them overseas, and the prime minister insisted he had a great plan, which was of course scrapping the carbon and mining taxes, raising productivity and re-creating a strong construction industry watchdog.
There wasn't even much passion in the shouts and groans from the back benches.
Clive Palmer enlivened proceedings momentarily with what amounted to an election plug for his Palmer United party. Vote for his lot in the re-run of the West Australian Senate election and you'll get rid of the carbon tax.
Speaker Bronwyn Bishop ruled most of his question - it wasn't really a question at all - out of order. But who cared? He'd had his 60 seconds of fun.
Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull, that ever-reliable comedy act, did a turn on his favourite subject, Stephen Conroy.
Turnbull has invented a dread ailment he calls conrovianism. Its symptoms are denial of reality and delusions of grandeur.
"Conrovianism may have no cure, but our broadband policy will stop it spreading," Turnbull said with a straight face.
The Labor ranks didn't seem to mind that the factionally powerful senator was being humiliated in absentia, though Anthony Albanese did suggest that irony was a breach of standing orders - and was threatened with expulsion for his trouble.
If anything really stirred Labor, it was the continuing differences with the Speaker, who continued to thin its ranks with one-hour expulsions.
At one point, Tony Burke, after fruitlessly appealing to Bishop to order Abbott to be relevant, snapped at the Speaker: "Everything he (the PM) says, you allow."
That's pretty right. But then most speakers give prime ministers very long leashes.
