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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

When Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie entered politics - via a housing commission, the army and eventually Clive Palmer - her speeches on Sharia law, and her op-shop outfits, marked her out for ridicule.

Since then Jacqui Lambie has had a remarkable turnaround - wielding her influence in the senate to advocate for veterans, those on low incomes, and to argue against corruption.

In that time, she’s become known as one of the most fierce, and outspoken conviction politicians in the country.

Writer and contributor to The Monthly Chloe Hooper spent months talking to Jacqui Lambie, finding out how the public persona matches the private Jacqui.

Today, Chloe Hooper on the real Jacqui Lambie.

It’s Monday, March 14.

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RUBY:

Chloe, can you tell me a bit about why it is that you wanted to spend all of this time thinking about it and writing about the Tasmanian MP Jacqui Lambie?

CHLOE:

I think she's a pretty fascinating character. She is truly independent. She has, often has the balance of power in the Senate and you can't really quite pin her down.

Archival Tape -- Jaqui Lambie:

“You have freedom to make a choice, but if you make a choice, those choices have consequences..”

CHLOE:

She's also a fighter. On the Senate floor, she has a kind of feral streak.

Archival Tape -- Jaqui Lambie:

“Here's the thing being held accountable for your own actions isn't called discrimination. It's called being. You wouldn't believe in a god damn bloody adult!”

CHLOE:

And she's not ashamed to really argue out a point in a way that is so passionate and kind of makes a lot of her parliamentary colleagues look as though they're just on automatic.

Archival Tape -- Jaqui Lambie:

“There were times when I would sit in a corner and cry because I felt so shamed for two days, I didn't know how I was going to put bread and milk on the table.”

CHLOE:

She makes an art of her authenticity, and, you know, truly, I think what you see with Jacqui is what you get.

Archival Tape -- Jaqui Lambie:

“We're surviving, we are surviving to try and put bread on the table. We are surviving to try and make sure that our kids can get the basics in life.”

CHLOE:

It's not a kind of manufactured ordinariness that we see with Scott Morrison. When, you know, suddenly he's filleting a fish or wearing a hard hat or washing a woman's hair. I mean, you know, all of these things feel like a marketing executive's photo opportunity, Whereas Jacqui is very raw and she turns what's abject or humiliating about her own life into kind of, you know, a set of medals that she wears with pride.

And so for me, as a writer, this is a golden opportunity.

RUBY:

Right, ok. So how did someone like Jacqui Lambie - who does seem so different to other politicians - genuinely unpolished - get into politics in the first place?

CHLOE:

Well I think she's very upfront about the fact that she got into politics because she despised the Department of Veterans Affairs and she'd been in a legal fight with them for for 10 years, you know, maybe 12 years before she actually was elected to the Senate and that has driven her political career.

Archival Tape -- Jaqui Lambie:

“When I was discharged, medically discharged from the armed forces in 2000, when I was medically discharged, I thought no rose. The Department of Veterans Affairs will help me get back on my feet and they'll look after me. Well, that did not happen to me. So for me to be able to survive as a single mom with two kids, I had no other choice but to go to Centrelink.”

CHLOE:

Jackie's been very upfront about what she describes as her lost years, which is a decade after she was given a medical discharge from the Australian Defence Force.

Archival Tape -- Jaqui Lambie:

“During that time, our times were tough.”

CHLOE:

She suffered from debilitating back pain and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which was supposed to give her vocational support, decided to, you know, throw various psychiatrists and insurance I don't know apparatchiks her way, and they actually called her a malingerer and suggested this was a sort of, you know, just a ruse.

She then started to unravel, she had a serious alcohol addiction and and was, you know, on a range of painkillers and that she developed quite severe, you know, very severe depression. And, you know, she was watching daytime television for most of the day.

Keeping Up With the Kardashians was probably just in its sort of first years. Kim Kardashian is her favourite.

She would watch Days of our lives.

And imagine that she was going to be found by a sort of rich prince who would sweep her off her feet. And, you know, the various other fantasies were sort of fuelled by what she was watching on television.

But she also, in her channel surfing switched over and started watching parliamentary question time.

And the idea then of becoming a politician and actually sort of taking up the fight against the DVA, you know, lodged in her mind. And slowly, she then sort of rebuilt herself by entering a psychiatric clinic. And not long after that, she actually, was elected to the Senate.

RUBY:

So she goes from watching daytime TV - and also question time - in a lot of pain it sounds like both physically and mentally in a lot of pain to to entering parliament 18 months later. What's it like for her when she gets in?

CHLOE:

Jacqui when she first reached the Senate, was tilting very hard towards the right.

Archival Tape -- Jaqui Lambie:

“When it comes to Sharia Sharia law, you know, to me, it's it's it obviously involves terrorism.”

CHLOE:

She was a Palmer United Party senator and she also had an adviser who felt passionately about legislating the ban, the banning of Sharia law.

Archival Tape -- Barrie:

“By saying that if you reject Sharia law, full stop, you're asking them to reject their religion?”

Archival Tape -- Jaqui Lambie:

“Well, you know, it's either one or the other. You're either an allegiance to Australian law and show your allegiance to our Constitution, but you can't have 50/50.”

CHLOE:

And so often this was a talking point that Lambie sort of really leaned into, even though she now acknowledges she didn't understand half of the things that she was saying.

She was kind of a wrecking ball careening around, not really owning her own political priorities. But you know, she's very open about the fact that she had been, as she puts it, brain dead for so long. She hadn't worked for 12 years just getting her back used to sort of long hours, let alone her head, was a real undertaking. She had no money because she hadn't yet been sort of paid. For being a senator and the clothes she was wearing, what these sort of $10 outfits and she was, you know, absolutely pilloried for her appearance. And I think she was kind of regarded as a bit of a joke.

RUBY:

Mm and it sounds like those first years in parliament weren't easy. They were also short lived.

CHLOE:

Well, that's right.

In 2017 came what Jacqui describes as her bitch slap, where she realised that her father, who'd emigrated from Scotland as an 18 month old, had not renounced his citizenship, making her a dual citizen and was forced to resign.

RUBY:

We’ll be back after this.

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RUBY:

Chloe, In 2017 Jacqui Lambie was forced to resign from Parliament. So let's talk about her comeback. How did it happen?

CHLOE:

OK, so Jacqui decided that she would hit the reality television circuit. She had no money and she needed an income so as to fund her campaign. But she also wanted to keep her her name in lights, so to speak.

Archival Tape -- Presenter:

“Jacqui Lambie is looking for true love, and she's found two possibilities. Fly in, fly out miner Craig Casey…”

CHLOE:

So she appeared on Sunday night, which decided to cover her love life, and it filmed her speed dating.

Archival Tape -- Jaqui Lambie:

“The dating game has been quite difficult for me, and I'm quite sure there are millions of other Australian women out there that's it been difficult for too..”

CHLOE:

She went on, I'm a celebrity, get me out of here.

Archival Tape -- Jaqui Lambie:

“Hi, guys. I'm about to go to the jungle, I'm so relaxed too, by the way, I'm so looking forward to it. I'm very keen. I've got about six hours to go…”

CHLOE:

She can be seen espousing views about Tony Abbott stopping the boats being the best thing he could have done.

Then she also went on SBS's Go Back to Where You Came From. And that shows her being driven around by soldiers in Syria. you know, in one episode, she meets a boy who has had his legs blown off in a landmine.

Archival Tape -- Jaqui Lambie:

“You playing with your mates out there with soccer ball.”

CHLOE:

You start to see a kind of uncertainty creeping in, and you can see her starting to acknowledge that refugee politics, you know, is far more vexed than you might have thought from her pronouncements earlier in her career.

Archival Tape -- Jaqui Lambie:

“You know, if it was one of my sons of a bloody angry, I'll be so bloody angry. So it is really, really awful…”

CHLOE:

It's kind of remarkable for a politician to actually, you know, do an about face and wear it and evolve in their, you know, political thinking.

And after her various reality television appearances, she was re-elected in 2019.

RUBY:

Hmm. And so this time around, then can you tell me a bit about what it is that she's been focussed on and what she's actually achieved?

CHLOE:

So when Lambie was re-elected in 2019, she sat down with her chief advisor and tried to work out what were her key goals. And one of them was to achieve a royal commission into Veterans Affairs.

Archival Tape -- Jaqui Lambie:

“It's not over PM, we've been begging for a royal commission. We've never got gotten hands and bloody nice like, god sakes”.

CHLOE:

There had been, you know, 17 investigations into the department in 17 years, and she managed to work out legally the strongest frames of reference for a royal commission. And after also putting out a series of advertisements she has managed to steer Morrison towards announcing a royal commission.

Archival Tape -- Scott Morrison:

“Today I formally announced that a Royal Commission into defence and veteran suicide will be undertaken following approval by the Governor-General earlier today.”

RUBY:

Mmm that must have been quite a moment for Jacqui Lambie - as someone who had personal experience grappling with the department of veterans affairs, to get a Royal Commission off the ground.

And as you’ve been describing her journey from that time in her life until now - it really does sound like she has changed a lot, and that there is a lot of integrity there, and that with someone like her what you see is what you get. And I wonder if after spending months with her Chloe, if that is what she is really like in private. What do you think of Jacqui Lambie?

CHLOE:

I think that there aren't very many people in politics who have the kind of background that Jacqui has.

Her mother, Sue, who worked in factories, is Indigenous and had 20 siblings. Her parents separated when she was a teenager and she went with her mother to live in a housing estate in Devonport. And I actually don't think you see very many successful women leading the country who have spent, you know, 10 years on the couch with alcohol and drug dependency and sort of, you know, massive depression.

Politicians talk about a lot about battlers and understanding battlers, but they haven't grown up in a in commission housing. I mean, Albo did, but he also, you know , then went on to university, whereas Jacqui hasn't finished high school.

And here is this person who entered this fight with the Department of Veterans Affairs. They told her she wasn't smart enough to go and have tertiary study.

I mean, it's sort of amazing to me that she or really anyone with so many things stacked against them actually has the force of personality and self-belief to, you know, radically remake this script and succeed.

You can have a burning passion to make things better and, you know, be elected and it's possible.

RUBY:

Hmm. Chloe, thank you so much for your time.

CHLOE:

Thanks for having me.

RUBY:

You can read Chloe Hooper’s Essay “The Jacqui Lambie Reality Show” in the current edition of The Monthly.

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RUBY:

Also in the news:

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy has warned that Russia could only take the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv if it “razes the city to the ground”.

Satellite images show Russian troops are within 25 kilometres of the capital. Zelenskiy said as many as 600 Russian soldiers had now surrendered.

French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Olaf Scholz have continued to push Russian president Vladimir Putin for a ceasefire as a condition for structured negotiations.

Reports from those conversations suggest Putin is not ready to end the war.

**

And Covid-19 cases continue to rise.

In its Sunday update NSW Health reported more than 13,000 cases and seven deaths. Victoria reported more than 5000 cases and four deaths.

The deadline for mandatory third-dose vaccination in key professions passed on Saturday.

In Victoria, workers in aged care, disability, emergency service, meat processing, quarantine and food distribution must now have had a booster to work.

I’m Ruby Jones this is 7am see you tomorrow.