Is it the PUPs as we had thought or is it the COCS, who have just insinuated themselves into its arcane workings?

This is now a very live question, even if the answer will take some time to emerge.

The PUPs of course are the three Palmer Uniter Party senators and their fellow traveller, Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party senator for Victoria, Ricky Muir.

It was already confusing enough. The PUPs, all three of them rookies of unknown lawmaking mettle, are led by their eponymous benefactor, the mercurial millionaire Clive Palmer. Palmer languishes in relative impotence as the sole PUP number in the House of Representatives. So as leader, he's not even in the place where his party's leverage is plied.

There in the Senate, the three rookies and their equally inexperienced add-on, nevertheless had constituted a crucial and frequently pivotal four-vote bloc.

As there are eight crossbenchers of whom the government needs six to pass any bills opposed by Labor and the Greens, the PUP-bloc always had to figure.

Yet now it seems just months into its inaugural term, PUP's leverage has eroded, frayed at the edges, disintegrated even.

And so is born the COCS - not an acronym they thought about for long one suspects - the coalition of common sense.

Coalescing around hostility to the government's financial planning laws - themselves a watering down of consumer protections already legislated - the new alliance contains two sympathetic PUP-bloc numbers in the form of Muir and the apparently rapidly departing PUP dissident, Jacqui Lambie.

Lambie's tenure as a PUP member looks to be over already.

To defeat the government's Future of Financial Advice changes, they have joined with senators Nick Xenophon, and John Madigan (who recently defected himself from the DLP, on whose ticket he was elected out of Victoria).

And they in turn, sit with Labor and the Greens on this.

Confused?

Now, the question arises: is this a wider, even permanent re-alignment of balance-of-power numbers on the red carpet or is it purely situational, a one-off relevant only to the FoFA issue?

Either-way, PUP's clout has taken a hit. It may regroup but it is already damaged and unlikely to regain its intimidatory strength. In all likelihood, it will now represent just three votes at best: Glenn Lazarus and Zhenya "Dio" Wang, as formal PUP members and Muir, if he decides to stay close. But even then, his departure on FoFA has made a repeat more likely on other issues. For him, that's where the power lies.

Ms Lambie is more of a loose cannon. Her vote is now anyone's guess.

For the government this might mean some bills are easier to get through, but it will probably find itself ceding ground on multiple fronts simultaneously as it horse-trades on a bill-by-bill basis.

While its GP co-payment and higher education changes were already blocked, the partial re-atomisation of Senate crossbench numbers presents an opportunity, if a diabolical one.

And so far, it has shown little aptitude for negotiation.

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