It’s always been risky to bellow from the press gallery, Lidia

There’s a place for politicians to do their shouting.

It’s not in the press gallery, as Senator Lidia Thorpe undoubtedly knows, which is why, we might assume, she chose it for her latest attention-seeking performance.

The gallery is a series of benches reserved for journalists to – silently – do their recording of the so-called debates that occur in the pits below, which is to say either the Senate or the House of Representatives.

Independent senator Lidia Thorpe outside Parliament House in Canberra on Thursday.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Those pits are where politicians do their bawling, screeching and yawping, and where they usually get away with it.

Anyone screaming from the press gallery can find themselves in very hot water indeed.

It happened the last time in 1971.

The late Alan Ramsey, a journalist of famously unrestrained opinion, discovered the limits of spoken critique after he couldn’t hold his tongue when the prime minister of the time, John Gorton, was holding forth in the House of Representatives about Malcolm Fraser’s resignation as defence minister.

Ramsey felt Gorton had contradicted something he had told him in a private interview.

“You liar,” he suddenly bellowed, so loudly the Hansard reporter below heard it clearly and faithfully recorded the words for posterity.

As fellow journalists reeled, politicians below cried: “Arrest that man.”

No less than Gough Whitlam, leader of the opposition, moved grandly that Ramsey be taken into custody by the serjeant-at-arms and brought before the Bar of the House the following day. The scent of a jailing was in the parliamentary air.

Ramsey skedaddled before the serjeant-at-arms could detain him.

From a hiding place in Canberra’s suburbs, he contacted the Speaker of the House, Bill Aston, who turned out to be sympathetic to Ramsey’s plight. These were overheated political times that would soon lead to Gorton’s replacement as prime minister by the peculiar Billy McMahon, and Aston wasn’t in Gorton’s corner.

Mr Speaker secretly helped Ramsey draft a grovelling apology.

Happily for Ramsey, Gorton accepted the letter of remorse.

The demand that Ramsey be taken into custody and tried before the Bar of the House drifted away as the politicians returned to their ritual of shouting at each other, rather than being shouted at from the press gallery.

The journalists returned to their role as merciless but silent watchers from the balcony.

Years later, Kim Beazley, a much put-upon opposition leader who would never be prime minister, remarked that the sight of the faces of hungry journalists in the gallery above was akin to looking at “three rows of crows staring down at a dead sheep”.

What now, though, for Thorpe, a senator with a flair for gathering notoriety?

Having been thrown out of the Senate pit for tossing ripped-up paper at fellow senator Pauline Hanson, Thorpe apparently figured it would be a worthwhile idea to invade the Senate press gallery and vent, loudly, about freeing Palestine.

Ramsey might have advised her differently. Alternatively, senators might have forgotten the power they have to prevent stunts from the gallery above.

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