As Q&A was there to remind us - as Australia stood on the edge of a cliff screaming “make it stop” - our nation now lives in what we might call Barnaby Minutes.

If only we lived in Shareena Minutes.

Since the official debut of the Barna-baby scandal 13 days ago, Australia has lived through 18,720 minutes of thinking about Barnaby Joyce’s sex life. That’s 1,123,200 seconds - a million seconds, plus change - though of course nothing really will change, the Prime Minister’s valiant efforts to police the poke notwithstanding.

On Monday night we briefly saw an alternative universe, one in which we listened more to the stories of people like the actress Shareena Clanton, who after the endless Barna-baby opening managed to stop the show completely for close to a full four minutes.

These four minutes were more enlightening than most of the 18,720 minutes that had preceded them over the previous fortnight. But, as is our national inclination, in the opening half of Q&A we spent 28 minutes pondering Barnaby, or to put it another way, whether a beetroot is a fruit or a root vegetable. (It’s the latter. Obviously. Debate over.)

Those 28 minutes of Q&A were interesting enough, as root vegetables go.

The opening question - including the line “Where does the Prime Minister get the righteous moral authority to humiliate one man, Barnaby Joyce, in front of the nation?” - was a cracker, and blessedly left out the obvious conclusion that humiliating Joyce is the media’s job when it has nothing better to do.

In response, panellist and publisher Louise Adler contended that a private life is a private life.

“I couldn't agree with you more. I thought it was an extraordinary performance by the Prime Minister, acting as the moral arbiter-in-chief of the community.”

Josh Frydenberg, the Liberal MP who drew the short straw when the email went round asking who could say “sex” the most times on live TV without losing more hair, was there to defend the government. Poor Josh looked liked Yul Brynner in The King And I before the clock had ticked quarter to 10.

Tony Jones: “Quick question for you, personally, do you think Barnaby Joyce should resign?”

Frydenberg: “Barnaby's political future is a matter for him and the National Party.”

Jones: “What is your personal opinion?”

Frydenberg: “It is not for me, Tony, with the greatest of respect, to have a personal view because I don't sit in the party room. What I did do, though, is today in Brisbane, I did my own pub test. I went out and I met some people at the front bar and they - of course, they like to talk about sex bans more than tax codes - but what they did say is we want you governing for the nation, we are interested in jobs, were interested in health, we’re interested in education, we’re interested in energy. And once this issue subsides…”

And so on.

Barna-baby, Barna-baby, Barna-baby.

But eventually the debate turned to indigenous issues - the Uluru Statement From The Heart, the question of indigenous recognition in the federal parliament - and it was here that Shareena Clanton owned the Q&A stage like few guests before her in this program’s decade on air.

The question, from Mick Scarcella, about the Prime Minister’s reaction to the Uluru statement: “Is this a sign of a leader who wants to close the gap on indigenous disadvantage or holding his colonial foothold on the throat of the oppressed indigenous population?”

The answer, from Clanton, ran unhindered for a powerful and compelling three minutes and 44 seconds.

"Thank you, brother, for your question," she began. "The [Closing the] Gap Report shows that indigenous men will die 10.6 years less than their non-Indigenous counterparts.

“I as an Indigenous woman already have the odds already stacked against me. I'm 9.5 years less life expectancy than my non-Indigenous counterparts… Malcolm Turnbull walked out of the Close the Gap report, walked out of the Uluru Statement From The Heart. When do Indigenous people get a social, cultural and economic empowerment and voice in Parliament?

"We're asking to deconstruct the systems that exist. We’re asking to be invited to the table. The Indigenous Advisory Body wouldn't hold any political sway whatsoever, it’s an advisory body for members of Parliament who are already in a position to influence the parliamentary decisions."

And further on: "We are the sovereign owners of this country… we have never ceded sovereignty. I'm tired of begging and asking for our humanity. When is it enough?

She said Indigenous peoples were "closing the gap" for themselves.

"My mother, at 31, went back to law school. I'll tell you about closing the gap. It is coming from Indigenous peoples, not from initiatives created in Parliament," she said.

"As an Aboriginal woman, she went back and became the first Indigenous female state prosecutor in Western Australia. I'm a daughter of five girls. Every single one of us is in university. My sister is in medicine at the moment. My two younger sisters are about to graduate. My second - my twin sister - is [a] university graduate. I have qualified through university. I'm about to go into my honours at Curtin University. So in terms of closing this gap and this healing that they want to create, there is no healing going on. When you apologise, you do not do it again."

The full answer ran is worth watching in full.

Three minutes and 44 seconds. That’s approximately 18,320 fewer minutes than we have spent discussing Joyce’s sex life in the past fortnight.

You do the math.