The Germans call it fremdschämen - that feeling which invades the stomach when you witness someone embarrassing themselves and realise they have neither the wit nor acuity to feel it themselves.
After Thursday's antics inside Parliament House, the Turnbull government just calls it Ian Macdonald.
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One politician's crusade for free travel
Veteran Liberal Senator Ian Macdonald is pushing to keep the Life Gold Pass that gives former parliamentarians taxpayer-funded business class travel for life.
There is a certain macabre irony in a politician whose most recent contributions to the public discourse have involved shushing others and wrestling with a noisy iPad timer, complaining MPs don't get paid enough.
But when it comes just a day after his own Prime Minister deploys wealth as a weapon of personal destruction against his chief political opponent - at the same time his party attempts to position itself as anti-establishment and justify cuts to some of society's most vulnerable - it only serves to reinforce every negative cliché ascribed to politicians.
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Senator MacDonald earns $200,000 a year. He receives more for committee work, and can also avail himself of generous travel and allowance arrangements.
When he leaves Capital Hill, it will be with a six-figure pension and open doors for the rest of his life, safe in the knowledge he will never have to choose between paying for electricity or groceries.
But the man for whom a defining legacy is proudly declaring he did not bother to read a report on children in detention (despite chairing a committee examining the issue) draws the line at his government taking the knife to one of the most outrageous and outdated of political perks. He has rumbled into the public sphere simply to keep his free rides.
The good senator argues he is standing up for the Gold Life Pass, which the Turnbull government has vowed to axe, for all the former MPs who can't. The perk allows free business-class travel for former parliamentarians who entered Parliament before 2012.
He's justified, he says, because he and every other parliamentarian could have earned more in their law and medical practices, their vet surgeries and their small businesses.
Instead, the poor old senator has only earned nearly three decades worth of salary on the public purse. And merely the privilege of representing the Australian people.
Ian Macdonald just told voters it was never about them.
And you can guarantee they heard.