When three men dressed as a biker, a niqab-wearing woman and a Ku Klux Klan member turned up at Parliament House on Monday, it looked like the set-up of a joke your casually racist great-uncle would tell at Christmas after getting on the special sherry that is supposed to be reserved for Santa.
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And yet, despite looking as though they were extras in a Benny Hill caper, these men, members of an anti-burka group called Faceless, were there to make a serious point.
It just wasn't clear what that point was. Parliament's infamous near-burka-ban was revoked weeks ago.
Apparently the protesters wanted to show how outrageous it was that women in face coverings were allowed into the building, while law-abiding men wearing bike helmets and/or the garb of the world's most notoriously racist and violent hate group were cruelly discriminated against.
That message was sadly blunted after all men were let through security after being politely asked to remove their respective facial coverings. Rosa Parks it wasn't.
But the burka ban is so two weeks ago. Politics has moved on to a policy issue that has the potential to affect the lives of people other than Senator Cory Bernardi, and this is the carve-up of the GST.
Using the unlikely scene of a Saturday night speech delivered in Tenterfield, Prime Minister Tony Abbott has opened up a policy debate about the tax distribution between the state and federal governments, or the rather easily cracked code for: "We need to talk about the GST."
In question time, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten felt it was incumbent upon him to remind Mr Abbott of his pre-election promises in this touchy policy area.
"Before the election, the Prime Minister promised the GST was not going to change, full stop, end of story," Mr Shorten began.
"Given the Prime Minister has broken so many promises he made before the election, when will he break his promise that the GST is not going to change, full stop, end of story?"
You can see what he did there.
Mr Abbott responded with an appeal for bi-partisanship. Labor seemed disinclined towards that. Despite being in some disarray on their own asylum seeker turning back boats policy, the opposition seemed to hold firm on their "no GST rise" line, even if, it seems, it is accompanied by cuts to other taxes.
Mr Abbott was undeterred, and said a national discussion such as this should be "a mature debate rather than a screaming match", which caused some eyebrow-raising as our Prime Minister has not always been famous for the delicacy of his own rhetoric.
But it was a day for surprises, as the niqab-wearing biker white supremacists demonstrated so aptly in the morning.
