Parliament shifts from jovial to toxic

HOW quickly the atmosphere in parliament can change.

Totally bipartisan tributes to Australia's latest VC winner on Thursday - the house's last sitting day for three weeks - gave way to exchanges over those two dreaded taxes, carbon and mining.

Julia Gillard did apply the word "mendacious" to Tony Abbott, who had the cheek to raise a Wall Street Journal editorial that pointed its readers to the mining tax for the "latest tutorial on lousy tax policy".

And Joe Hockey got himself kicked out after ignoring a warning that he claimed not to have heard.

That was believable. As Anna Burke complained: "You can't hear warnings because you are making too much noise."

Generally, though, it was all civil enough.

At one point it became positively jovial as Greg Combet gave us a Melbourne Cup-style race call on the Liberal leadership.

We had Malcolm Turnbull as a classy thoroughbred, Hockey hungry for a win but not up to Group One racing, Julie Bishop a real chance after being runner-up three times, Scott Morrison a promising weight-for-ager and (most cruelly) Bronwyn Bishop a 1994 favourite.

While there was, of course, a political point to it all - that the carbon price wouldn't affect the big event at Flemington next Tuesday - it was all good fun.

The cup, after all, only comes round once a year and plenty of politicians take a more than passing interest in it.

Then Julie Bishop returned to Gillard's role, if any, in a murky AWU fund of the early 1990s.

This is a matter that arouses raw hatreds, somewhat like those surrounding an earlier coalition opposition's pursuit of Paul Keating's piggery interests.

Bishop kept probing and Gillard kept insisting she'd dealt with everything at her news conference-to-exhaustion on August 23.

The PM also kept insisting that Abbott was hypocritical because he'd said only a few days ago that the fund stuff wasn't the main game.

Anthony Albanese and Christopher Pyne screeched and glared at each other across the dispatch box.

Gillard accused Pyne of "vile and ridiculous" comments, which Burke ordered her to withdraw.

The PM would prefer this inquisition, if it has to happen, from Abbott. She can hardly accuse Bishop of misogyny.

Not that Bishop, for all her icy determination, unearthed anything new.

She may, however, be making Gillard's line that everything was revealed last August look thin.

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