Jones is now antepenultimate.

Jones, 22, was selected as a for-the-record Liberal candidate for the supposedly safe-as-houses Labor seat of Adelaide and accidentally elected during the great anti-Labor landslide of 1966.

He told an Adelaide Liberal Dining Group the year after: "Canberra is a lonely place for a fellow my age who has little in common with other politicians, many of whom are half-drunk half the time.

"I was amazed to be in the House one day and see nine members out of 124. Three were asleep. Two were doing the crossword, and one was reading an outdated Donald Duck comic. This was the way the government was being run on that day.

"I have been disillusioned by the filth, the smut, jealousy and friction I have seen in Canberra politics.

If you open your eyes – as I am inclined to do most of the time – some of the other politicians are prepared to cut out your gizzards and have your guts for garters."

It was no joke to be "sitting on your backside all days not fully understanding what was going on". He could not understand parliamentary procedures, and there was [then] "no preschool to tell you what goes on".

It goes without saying that when Jones got into trouble for this, it was not for seeing it, or thinking it, but for being caught saying it.

This imaginative collection of canards – honestly, can you imagine a half-drunk National Party member reading a Donald Duck comic, even in the old Parliament House? – came immediately to mind this week when I discovered that the House of Representatives, on the advice of its procedures committee, has decided to permit members to use electronic devices in the chamber, or during committee hearings.

This is subject to a number of conditions. The mobile telephone, iPad, or whatever, are not to be used, in the chamber for actual telephone calls.

Nor, supposedly, should they be used to photograph or record anything, or in a way that interferes with or distracts other MPs or proceedings. And no one is to comment on things said during private committee meetings.

The resolution also noted that it was unlikely that parliamentary privilege covered electronic communications made from the chamber or committee rooms. This is a proposition I doubt.

And "reflections on the chair ... made on social media may be treated as matters of order just as any such reflections made inside or outside the chamber".

I await the first expulsion, "under 94A", of the first Labor member for texting what so many whisper aloud to each other, and the world, that Bronwyn Bishop is world-class for partisanship.

An opposition MP in Singapore would have a better chance of defending a defamation matter brought by the government or the Lee mafia (much the same thing) in the local supreme court than an annoying Labor MP in Bishop's court of public opinion.

But there are more disruptive things than modern social mediums, and I doubt that Parliament will change much as a consequence of regularising;larising a situation which has been going on for more than a decade.

In my experience, fewer members of parliament are drunk these days, or nights, than were during the time of Andrew Jones.

The death, on Friday, of Peter Walsh, in his time one of the most effective Labor ministers, but a man more than fond of a drop, reminds me what a depressingly sober and staid, and generally well behaved lot most politicians are these days. In the old House, one sometimes gasped for oxygen in the non-members bar; in the new one, the non-members quickly closed for absolute lack of patronage, even by journalists.

On an average dozy parliamentary day, about the same number would be asleep, whether in the chamber or their offices, as in 1967 although fewer, these days, would be sleeping it off. It was then, as it is now, bad form to draw attention to this sort of inattention.

One of the sources of great personal tension between two recent (now sadly departed) Liberals (in one case ex-Liberals) from south-eastern Queensland in the last Parliament was that one broadcast an photograph, taken in Parliament with a mobile, of his snoozing, snoring open-mouthed colleague.

It's many a year since I have seen a comic in evidence, but I have seen any number of airport novels, magazines, newspapers, Sudoku and crosswords receiving close attention, sometimes between the covers of something that, from a distance, might seem of great importance.

More often, alas, it's a straight rather than a cryptic crossword, which says something of modern political subtlety.

It is cheering enough to see a politician reading anything at all. I will not condemn even the reading of a picture book: Ben Chifley, for example, read pulp westerns to relax and fall asleep; a distinguished feminist of my acquaintance was hooked on Mills & Boon, and I have known High Court judges to read Phantom comics.

Alas, more usually, most members seem to be conscientiously reading reports, in some cases submissions.

Or drafting, redrafting and signing interminable items of correspondence, increasingly these days straight on to computers. Or, actually, sitting up and giving every appearance of actually listening to a speaker reading (perhaps from a tablet) a prepared speech.

It is rather tedious. Though the lack of people in the chamber after Question Time occasionally shocks ordinary members of the public, it is quite understandable that most members go back to their offices to read, work, plot, or perhaps sleep or fornicate.

One can, in any event, do any of these things while being able to hear, via the parliamentary sound and light system, anything going on in the chamber.

(Some may wonder if anyone could sustain a romantic mood while Christopher Pyne or Christopher Bowen drone on in the background; all that I can remark is that politics has always been remarkable for the sorts of characters and personality types thrown up, as it were, and there is no top or bottom to human ingenuity or depravity.)

Even in the days of Jones, there were politicians seemingly unable to sit still, who had to be fiddling with something. These days, that something is usually a mobile phone, one with access to the internet, or a tablet, or some other form of access to social media,.

More and more members chatter and tweet; some have yet to learn how unwise it can be to let go, as it were, with the first thing that comes to mind.

A witty remark, like a witty interjection, can make one immortal; it can also, by failing some or other test of political correctness, have one crucified, and not only by one's colleagues but by a very judgmental and shaming twittersphere. And no one ever forgets an injudicious tweet.

By now, moreover, a good many politicians use or have used social mediums to record or broadcast things that, strictly, they are not expected to.

Thus some politicians, in breach of the Telecommunications Act, surreptitiously record with devices such as their mobile conversations with people they do not trust. Meetings of caucus, or sub-caucuses have been recorded, sometimes with video.

I expect some smarties even use GPS to track other politicians (or their wives and mistresses), or can access, one way or another, some types of metadata.

And one can always rely on a number of ambitious politicians to get involved in a competition, with their favourite snoutees in the press gallery, to tweet the results of a caucus ballot, or something indiscreet said by a minister one loathes, before these are formally announced.

For snoutees, being a millisecond ahead of some other snoutee in revealing the winner of a caucus ballot is at the height of professional excitement.

It was always thus; it is now more easy. I have yet to see any evidence that it serves any great purpose, or fundamentally changes the game of politics.

Parliament is being typically slow in recognising and allowing, reluctantly or otherwise, what has already been happening.

The courts have been even slower, and, sooner or later, will come a great cropper not because they forbid it but, probably, because they have failed to take into account the fact that it occurs. In my youth as a court reporter, for example, suppression orders were often made at the end of the day.

Now interesting material is texted out of a court into the wider world even before the next sentence is spoken. A judge can no more order that such publications be retracted than she can order the rain to stop.

Are we better off? Or better informed? I doubt it. The risk, as ever with new technology, is in thinking that it really changes fundamental things, rather than time, mechanisms, manners.

Questions of judgment, trust, confidence, character, and principles have not changed much in 5000 years, let alone 50. We will survive the mobile, and the text message. They will probably even fall out of fashion.