PwC tax leaks scandal: the Senate inquiry into consultants revealed ...

Burrowes has a terminal case of resting bulldog face. On this occasion, a bulldog that has just tasted something exceptionally unpleasant. It’s married to a runaway hairdo that gives the impression it would rather be vertical, but runs out of conviction half-way up.

To be fair, PwC Global sent Burrowes in to make brutal decisions to protect the brand. Outside work hours, ideally he’d be kept in a cupboard to avoid frightening children.

He certainly wasn’t chosen for his capacity to handle Senate interrogations. “I’ll apologise as many times as I need to,” he said repeatedly, with just a little rasp creeping in, as he explained again how the Senators had completely misunderstood what PwC had done.

But Sayers was a man ready to please. “Chair, where shall I sit?” he asked Colbeck.

“You sit where you’re comfortable, Mr Sayers,” Colbeck told him. “We’ll still hit you.”

The Senate consultants inquiry is a bit like watching cricket, only that each inning begins with the slow bowler, Colbeck, who throws down a few interminable overs before he chucks the ball to the quicks, Labor senator Deb O’Neill and the Greens’ Pocock, for a spot of bodyline.

During each endless, lumbering run in you have time to count and recount the seconds of life you have lost before Colbeck gets to the end of the question he’s asking.

But on Tuesday Colbeck dropped straight into line and length, straight for the stumps, starting with Ziggy Switkowski’s devastating report on PwC culture.

“It was almost depressing every time I started a new section of the report,” he told Burrowes. “Because it basically reinforced at each level how crap things were in your business. And how the systems that you parade to your clients don’t work.”

Colbeck latched on to the lack of international action by PwC and forced Burrowes to concede that nobody in Australia had read the Linklaters report into whether partners outside the country were involved in the confidentiality breaches of Treasury and ATO documents.

Six overseas partners should have realised something was amiss and raised questions about the documents they received, Burrowes said, and they would face consequences of some kind. That’s if they were still with the firm, and he didn’t know who they were or what the consequences would be. He hadn’t thought to ask.

Sayers’ evidence painted a parallel universe which he generally signalled with the words “to be very clear”, with just a hint of mansplaining in his responses to questions from O’Neill and Pocock.

That was never going to end well, except in Sayers’ private world. “To be very clear, I had a balanced scorecard,” he insisted as they shredded him.

“You had a great balanced scorecard and you exported it around the world,” Colbeck told him.