“To ask people, maybe just momentarily, to remove their party blinkers.”

But, Swan said, “the divisive tone that’s pervaded this place in the past week has made me realise that reaching out to the other side is perhaps impossible”.

Swan said he remembered the Tampa episode of 2001; that he recalled “the way it changed us”.

Before then, “covert appeals to racism and xenophobia were regarded as unworthy” of our country’s elected representatives. But then John Howard’s government turned the Tampa back.

“Something else floated into our harbours in its wake,” Swan said, in a slightly wonky naval metaphor.

“That was American race-based dog whistle politics.”

Sure enough, he said, 18 years later, here it is again.

“Read the Hansard and the ministerial transcripts of the past few days. The only thing missing is the subtlety of yesteryear.

“My hope is that this ugly approach is so soundly defeated at the ballot box that it can never, ever rise again.”

Swan said the Coalition had lost its “moral right to govern” and was about to lose its numerical majority.

As he spoke, he was surrounded by a cluster of his Labor colleagues – a strong visual representation of the party unity lacking during Swan’s time as treasurer and deputy prime minister.

The member for Lilley stood in his Labor red tie, watched affectionately by Jenny Macklin and Kate Ellis, who are also leaving Parliament, Nick Champion, Chris Bowen, Tanya Plibersek (who cried a little), his protégée Jim Chalmers, Linda Burney, Richard Marles, Mark Dreyfus, Graham Perrett and more.

Shorten, the former factional head-kicker who once helped place Julia Gillard in the prime ministership with Swan as her deputy, watched magisterially from the frontbench as Swan paid tribute to the strength of his leadership, a leadership that had given Labor “a new lease of political unity”.

Fellow Queenslander Bob Katter also showed up, as did Kerryn Phelps of Wentworth.

Swan is a fighter, an old-school Labor man who had Gough Whitlam campaign for him, whose politics was formed in the crucible of Queensland under Joh Bjelke-Petersen. He started working for the Labor Party soon after graduating university, and has never left.

Swan paid tribute to the great Labor men he has worked alongside – Mick Young, Bill Hayden, Whitlam, Kim Beazley and Wayne Goss. He paid tribute to the Labor women he has seen coming through the ranks in his 23 years in Parliament, and to Julia Gillard, who, he said, “possibly alone of recent prime ministers has cracked the secret code of how to carry herself with dignity after leaving the job”.

That was the closest Swan came to mentioning his fellow Nambour High alumnus, Kevin Rudd, the man whose political career would come, in some ways, to define his own. (They were never friends at high school, there was a three year gap and, as Rudd once said, “Wayne was very, very cool; and I was very, very not".)

Swan, who will remain as Labor's federal president, lauded his own work as treasurer to avoid recession during the global financial crisis, a feat for which he has never been duly recognised (except by Euromoney and Joseph Stiglitz).

Australia’s avoidance of recession meant we have missed many of its consequences, Swan said, pointing to the rise of “populism and ugly nationalism” in other parts of the world, “the end of the last remnants of political consensus in the United States”, the resurgence of the far-right in parts of Europe, Brexit and serious inequality and poverty.

Swan’s second grandchild, a baby girl, arrived just two hours before the speech. It couldn’t have been more apt. One era ends, but a new one begins.