No early marks for naughty MPs

It's as if Qantas and Virgin have asked Bronwyn Bishop not to toss MPs out of question time on Thursday afternoons.

The last sitting day of the week is notoriously ratty, with plenty of MPs getting their "early marks" which, it's suspected, are sometimes turned into earlier flights home.

You could sympathise with the airlines having to deal with politicians wanting last-minute flight changes. Perhaps a special "Naughty MP" check-in queue has to be set up.

This Thursday's question time was about standard for noise, silliness and all-purpose abuse.

By question three - after a wall of ironic cheering from Labor when Tony Abbott said cabinet made a decision on national security and the start of what became a running fight over who accused the government of dog whistling over the same issue - the Speaker intervened.

She knew it was Thursday, when behaviour was usually appalling, and she wouldn't tolerate it.

No one took any notice.

When Tony Abbott scoffed at Labor's "fixation" with cabinet leaks, Richard Marles took a point of order to get in a quick shot at "hapless government confusion".

That's an open-and-shut case of misusing a point of order and is almost always punished with a suspension.

But this time Bishop, to Marles' surprise, merely warned him.

Soon afterwards she issued a general warning: "Silence or people will start to have their early marks."

Still she was ignored.

Graham Perrett interrupted Peter Dutton to accuse him of a slur on hardworking union members and went unpunished.

Joe Hockey and Chris Bowen had an unparliamentary exchange over who said what and when about the impact of household consumption on the national accounts.

The treasurer ended it by reeling back as if mortally wounded. "A killer blow ... a brutal shot," the ham actor declaimed.

And so the session wound up, with nothing out of the ordinary happening.

Except no early marks had been awarded.