'They're feeling pain': Jacqui Lambie speaks out for 'hurting' No voters on Q&A

On Monday night's Q&A, George Brandis smiled at the nation - not once, not twice, but three times - and the viewer was left wondering: how did it come to this?

As luck would have it, the answer to that question was sitting right next to the sporadically beaming Brandis.

Jacqui Lambie, recently freed from her senatorial obligations and from whatever restraints previously applied to swinging from the chandeliers on live television, had arrived at the Q&A desk ready to partay.

She was, as they say in the politics business, very, very real.

Glammed up and grinning like a polished but slightly off-tune piano, Lambie was, as another panellist noted after one particularly enthusiastic exchange, not taking any prisoners. If she had taken prisoners, one imagines they would have had a fine old time for a while, before being asked to be released back into the community for their own safety.

In a discussion that spent most of its time on the fallout from the same-sex marriage survey result and the citizenship fiasco, Lambie had plenty of points to make. She dived in early on marriage equality, spinning what sounded an unlikely sad tale to illustrate the pain of those on the losing side of the exercise.

"You still have nearly 40 per cent of Australians out there hurting right now," she began.

"People that have been ringing me that have garden weddings, making cakes. I had a bloke ring me about two weeks ago saying, 'Jacqui, I want to know what my rights are right now because I only want to marry a man and wife in my garden'. I said, 'Mate, I can't help you out with that'.

"He's going to sit in limbo for months. He has a freedom in this country and a right to say, 'Because of my religious beliefs, I cannot marry you in my backyard'. This is what you are doing to people because you are going out there bull at a bloody gate as politicians do and they haven't filled in the gaps. How long are these people going to have to go through more pain? They've lost. They're feeling the pain. How much longer do they have to feel more pain?"

A little later she declared: "The parliament is falling apart."

Grinning George responded: "It's not."

Lambie, with feeling: "It is falling apart."

Grinning George: "We'll get it through by Christmas."

Then there was the questioner who wanted to know whether marriage equality laws shouldn't now be expanded to "other minorities that practice polygamy, such as Mormon Christians and Muslims?"

This was a magnificent troll under the circumstances, and everyone knew it. When Tony Jones threw the question to Lambie, she responded with exquisite comic timing: a you've-to-be-kidding-me grin at Jones followed by a long pause, and a theatrical groan.

Lambie: "Haven't we moved it on yet? OK. I don't know what to say to your answer [sic]. We have covered the topic to death to be honest. What we'd like to see is it all done and everybody's rights put into place. If you do not want to marry those people, don't want to bake a cake for the other side, then you should have that right to do so.

"I'd like that done as quickly as possible. I don't see that happening at the end of the year, I'll be honest with you. They'll leave it half open and the rest will sit there and wonder what the hell they're supposed to do and what the law is? You can't leave it sitting there like that, George. It's not going to work. What are these people supposed to do?"

And on the state of the parliament after the citizenship mess that cost Lambie her own seat in the senate, she was withering. There were other MPs in strife, Lambie assured us. "I think there's a lot more people going down than what they're saying."

People had come up to her - "and I won't mention names because I'm not like that - saying 'I think I'm in trouble'. They haven't even been mentioned in the paper. That is a problem."

Generally, parliament was "falling apart. I don't know what else you want me to say. It is shocking up there. It is not pleasant up there... If you're having debates about the UK - and you know who you are - do the right bloody thing and put it in and resign, like the rest of us have done, because that's the right thing to do and that's leadership."

People were angry, she said. Lambie certainly was. "I have veterans and aged pensioners saying to me they're eating bloody dog food and veterans that are saying, 'All these people that have served, Lambie, have got those big pensions and being flown around and allowed to have those free flights. Are we checking on them?'. Are we, George?"

Poor George. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.

But the Attorney-General took it mostly in his stride. And as mentioned, he even smiled. Over and over. Perhaps it was because he knew that with her resignation from the senate, for now this was the only forum in which he had to worry about Jacqui Lambie.

Whatever it was, he emerged less as the clueless Humphrey B. Brandis of his last Q&A appearance, and more like Bert Newton doing a grin-and-grip at the Logies.

Whatever else she does in public life, this might have been Jacqui Lambie's most remarkable achievement.