By Tony Wright
AS A (relatively) young journalist fresh to the Canberra press gallery, your correspondent attended his first question time in the House of Representatives and figured within minutes that he had a gripping story.
Bob Hawke was shrieking, his bouffant very nearly transforming into the sort of crest that would make a cockatoo proud; Paul Keating was accusing Andrew Peacock's opposition of every sin short of child molestation; Wilson Tuckey was squawking unmentionable curses until he was thrown out; and everyone in the place appeared to be shouting at once.
''Question time,'' I rattled out excitedly upon the keyboard, ''descended into chaos.''
Old stagers in the gallery had to avert their eyes from this example of naivety. One of the more generous veterans quietly pulled me aside and explained that the spectacle I had observed was no more than everyday business. ''You'll be writing the same thing every day if you think what you saw yesterday was chaotic,'' he declared.
He was, of course, perfectly correct. I have since been moved to counsel newcomers to the gallery, astounded and alarmed at their first viewing of the apparent tribal warfare being enacted upon the floor of the House of Representatives, in precisely the same terms. The battle becomes authentic rarely and only when real passion intrudes.
Indeed, only two such events come readily to mind. The first was many years ago in Old Parliament House when Labor MP Lewis Kent took massive umbrage at a fusillade of gibes from Wilson Tuckey. Kent was born Lajco Kapolnai in old Yugoslavia and he felt Tuckey was getting stuck into his ethnicity and impugning his hatred of Nazis. Fairly tearing the air with language too ripe for anyone to report at the time, Kent had to be restrained by colleagues from climbing from his third-row backbench seat to the floor, clearly intent on punching out Tuckey's lights.
A couple of years later, in 1986, it was again Tuckey who sparked a scene of genuine fury when he hurled into the fray the words ''Paul had a little girl named Kristine''. He was, it transpired, reminding Keating about an old broken romance and it drove Keating into a rage awful to behold. He blamed then opposition leader John Howard for letting Tuckey off the leash. ''From this day onwards, Mr Howard will wear his leadership like a crown of thorns and, in the Parliament, I will do everything I can to crucify him,'' Keating seethed.
Parliament in those days was not televised, and so, sadly, we have no film record of what it was to witness genuine question time passion. Regular free-to-air broadcasts of proceedings in the House of Representatives did not start until 1991.
Since then, question time has become a performance about as authentic as World Championship Wrestling, though less polished.
Today's Speaker, Harry Jenkins, is little more than a referee of a contest that is so confected that backbenchers are chosen for the spot behind their leaders purely on their ability to nod meaningfully for the cameras to grant the impression that debating points bear some profundity.
Politicians, of course, typically bridle at the suggestion they are mere actors in a filmed theatrical production.
But the Liberals' Christopher Pyne and no less than the Speaker gave the game away this week, and it's worth noting, for it was apparently so unnerving and revealing that the entire exchange was expunged from the written record of proceedings, a daily document known as The Greens, issued later by the Prime Minister's office.
Thursday's question time might once have appeared chaotic, but served instead to reveal the show was as hollow as an episode of Neighbours.
Abbott's team was bent on clubbing Rudd's mob with the insulation fiasco in an effort to prove the government couldn't be trusted to run a chook raffle, let alone a whole health system.
Rudd's tribe was equally intent on throttling Abbott with his past to establish that he couldn't be trusted with anything, least of all a parental leave scheme that was too good to be true.
By the second question of the day, Rudd was at full tilt, wailing about Abbott's history as a Howard government health minister who ''ripped a billion dollars out of health''.
It sent Abbott and Pyne into high dudgeon.
''It's a lie,'' Pyne cried. Of all the words a politician might fling around, ''lie'' is deemed the most evil. It must never be uttered. Politicians, apparently, don't lie.
Speaker Harry Jenkins, perched above the hubbub, sternly demanded that Pyne withdraw this frightful accusation. He did, but Abbott then strode to the dispatch box and reiterated that Rudd's statement was a lie. He was ordered to withdraw, and he did, though he clearly wanted to go on with it.
Pyne demanded that Mr Speaker allow the Opposition Leader to explain why Rudd's assertion was an ''untruth''.
Jenkins, as normal, told him there was a proper way to deal with grievances. He meant that at the end of question time, Abbott could claim to have been misrepresented and air his proof, as ancient protocol allowed.
Not good enough for Pyne. Why, he expostulated, the TV broadcast would be over before then and an untruth would remain ''on the public record''.
It was a rare moment of clarity. The majesty of Parliament, Pyne was saying, was nothing more than a TV performance. Mr Speaker, who tries often to appear as benign as a koala, was so offended by this exposition of a previously unspoken verisimilitude that his throat constricted and he could barely speak.
''One of the things that I have learned since becoming Speaker is that I am apparently producing a media event, because it seems the behaviour of members is dictated on the basis of whether there are visual images going out to people's lounge-rooms … that is not my problem.''
As his blood pressure rose to dangerous levels, anyone watching knew he was agonisingly aware that his protestations sounded absurd. Pyne had blown down the facade. Question time was nothing if not a staged media event, and Harry was trapped in The Truman Show.
Little wonder that Rudd's office cut it all out of the record. Happily, it's in the official Hansard.