The microphone didn't pick it up but those opposite did. And it had Leader of the House Tony Burke up on his feet instantly, demanding the comment be withdrawn. Opposition Leader Angus Taylor had called the PM an "arrogant prick". He withdrew the comment after Speaker Milton Dick ruled the words unparliamentary.

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Call me jaded but I thought Taylor's barb was lame, in no way clever and, by the standards I'd grown up watching, quite parliamentary.

He could have called Albanese a "little dessicated coconut", "a shiver looking for a spine to run up" or perhaps even "a dog returning to its vomit".

But standards and rules evolve and, somewhat sadly for those who prefer their debate spicy, insults of Paul Keating's calibre are no longer tolerated, certainly not on the floor of parliament. Over the years, the colour has been all but drained from the House.

No longer will we hear classics like the following, which shot across the dispatch box from Keating towards John Howard during a particularly heated debate in 1995: "He's wound up like a thousand-day clock! One more half turn and there'll be springs and sprockets all over the building. Mr Speaker, give him a valium."

Or this, from 1989, directed at John Hewson: "Unless you're scripted, you're useless ... Mr Speaker, unless he's in with a question in his hand written by someone on his staff, Mr Speaker, he's useless."

Nowadays, even suggesting a member is a "liar" will earn you a rebuke from the chair. Surely, no politician would ever sink so low as to meddle with the truth. Would they? You can't even say "bullshit" in the very place it's thrown around with abandon, as David Pocock discovered in the Senate when bemoaning climate denialism.

But even back in Keating's day, as treasurer in the Hawke government, his language was raising eyebrows, including the famously arched ones of Richard Carleton, who asked this in a 1990 60 Minutes interview: "Well, let me ask you if some of your language........

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