When Jacqui Lambie is asked if she has changed since being elected in 2013, she’s typically frank.
“God, I bloody hope so,” the Tasmanian senator tells Guardian Australia.
“I was a wrecking ball when I first came to parliament. I barely knew the difference between the red house [the Senate] and the green house [the House of Representatives].
“I used to think I had all the answers, but the truth was I was in over my head and I just didn’t want to see it.”
Lambie’s life has itself been full of change.
The former soldier and single mother of two was a staffer for Labor’s Nick Sherry before joining the Liberal party and seeking (but not winning) preselection in the seat of Braddon.
But her political success came as a Palmer United party candidate in 2013, riding the well-resourced coat-tails of mining magnate Clive Palmer. Her loyalty lasted less than a year, and she ditched PUP to run as an independent. Nine years later (with a citizenship-related hiccup from 2017 to 2019), she has welcomed Jacqui Lambie Network teammate Tammy Tyrrell into the red house with her after an irreverent 2022 election campaign.
She says “every day” she’s “trying to learn and be a better person”.
“I’m like everyone – sometimes I make it, sometimes I don’t,” she says.
When Lambie was elected, she entered the Senate alongside a grab bag of misfits who got in thanks to the mystical powers of Glenn “Preference Whisperer” Druery.
When the Senate first sat in 2014, it was occasionally likened to the bar scene from Star Wars, where diverse aliens from across the galaxy gather.
Mark Kenny was a journalist at the time, and is now a professor at ANU’s Australian Studies Institute. He recalls it as a “wild time”.
“Lambie rides in on this PUP thing, and she’s very raw indeed,” Kenny says. “She was a very rough diamond … I think it was authentic but it wasn’t particularly productive.”
She shot to infamy in those early days after telling a radio station that she was looking for a rich man with “a package between their legs”.
When the firebrand first entered parliament, she was Hansonesque.
She wanted to ban the burqa, deport anyone who supported sharia law, and stop Muslim immigration.
“That was rightwing populism, it was what Hanson represented and in some ways Lambie did as well, but it was a Tasmanian version,” Kenny says.
The Tasmanian, though, has shifted her views dramatically since those early days.
She now regrets trying to “mirror” Hanson, blaming bad advice from a former adviser. Her anti-Muslim stance was “really, really nasty stuff”, she later said.
Since that “nasty” phase, and after leaving PUP, Lambie went from wanting to ban the burqa to saying she was working for the protection of refugees.
The “new” Lambie has argued – passionately – for justice for war veterans, revealing her own decade “in hell” while serving and successfully pushing the government into a royal commission into defence and veteran suicide.
She has argued for fairness for tertiary students, for support for domestic violence survivors, for action on mental health.
Now she’s lauded by many on the left for her vociferous criticisms of the former prime minister Scott Morrison.
Her speech against a One Nation bill to end vaccine mandates went viral as, with wrath and scorn, she shouted “It’s called being, you wouldn’t believe it, a God-damn bloody adult”.
Then, last week, Lambie appeared to support a tweet from Hanson telling the Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi to pack her bags and “piss off back to Pakistan”.
That tweet raised eyebrows. In the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s death, Faruqi had said she could not “mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised people”.
When Hanson told Faruqi to “piss off”, Lambie said she was “right on the mark”.
Lambie qualified but did not recant her statement (it’s complicated).
Television presenter Adam Liaw said he was “incredulous at the free pass Lambie seems to repeatedly get”.
Author Ketan Joshi tweeted that he was “honestly feeling pretty damn embarrassed that for a slight moment I entertained the possibility that Jacqui Lambie had changed”.
The Greens, in the main, reserved their criticisms for Hanson, although senator Nick McKim was critical of the tweet.
Lambie’s office referred Guardian Australia to the statement Lambie made at the time, in which she describes Faruqi’s comments as “disgraceful” but says she didn’t “agree with all of Pauline’s tweet, or the language she used”.
The whole messy incident was a reminder of Lambie’s start, but that is itself a reminder of how much she has changed.
The highest praise for Lambie comes from the former South Australian senator Nick Xenophon. Lambie has credited Xenophon, who has his own political battle scars, with taking her under his wing. He says they didn’t get off to the best start while she was still a PUP, but then they warmed to each other.
“We became mates pretty quickly,” he says.
In Xenophon’s typically effusive way, he says she’s the “real deal”. “She’s genuine,” he says.
“She’s an instinctive politician and she has an incredibly good heart. She’ll always be there for the battler, the underdog. She’s done it tough. We swap stories about our back pain.”
(Lambie was eventually discharged from the military after a back injury, which led to years of depression, painkiller addiction, and legal woes with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs).
Xenophon says Lambie’s still a “rough diamond” but that she’s developed some political savviness. Mostly, though, he sees her as someone who’s overcome ideology to focus on fairness. And he’s sentimental about her.
“Jacqui’s going to be a lifelong friend,” he says.
“I can only say that about a handful of people in my life. To the end of my life she and I will be close friends.”
The veteran Labor senator Penny Wong (whom Lambie once declared “wears her heart on her sleeve”) says she values Lambie’s “direct and honest” approach.
“We deal with each other frankly and respectfully, which I value,” Wong says.
“Jacqui would be the first to admit she hasn’t always got it right. She’s upfront about her mistakes and she’s been prepared to own them.”
Kenny sees that Twitter brouhaha as a misstep borne more of her military background and respect for the monarch than any echoes of “go back to where you came from”.
“She is … a politician who’s gone on a journey and for the large part that’s been one of growth,” he says, pointing to her ongoing and passionate representation of Tasmanians and the downtrodden.
“It doesn’t mean I agree with all of her conclusions but I do think it’s good to see, rather than the head in the sand approach … she has been open about learning and transforming and that is probably part of the reason she still seems authentic.”
Haydon Manning, adjunct professor at Flinders University’s college of business, government and law, agrees that people appreciate her authenticity even if they don’t share her views.
“You’ll always listen to her because you know there are no puppeteers, no sense of her being under party discipline, she’ll call it as she sees it,” he says.
Lambie says being “the meat in the sandwich between the big political parties” contributed to her changing. Being a crossbencher means people petition her with their points of view. She has met people “from all walks of life [and] heard what they need”.
“I hear from people on welfare, migrants, students. You can’t do that for eight years without it changing you,” she says.
Lambie thinks Australians like a politician who “can admit they’ve messed up”.
“People want their politicians to be human,” she says. “To bugger up is human, right?”
