Kate Chaney’s strange sighting inside Parliament House

An independent MP has used her first speech to Parliament to reveal one moment that was “very intimidating and a little bit strange”.

Kate Chaney likens her first week in parliament to a man eating a banana with a knife and fork.

It was a sight the new independent MP for Curtin witnessed herself when she first visited Canberra when she was five.

“It was very intimidating and a little strange – a bit like this week has been,” she told the House to much laughter in her maiden speech.

The thought of running for parliament made Ms Chaney feel like vomiting for a solid two weeks.

“There were so many reasons not to do it. My three kids, the lifestyle of a Western Australian federal politician, the inevitable public scrutiny and attack. This was a safe Liberal seat. The election was only four months away. I had no political experience,” she said.

“But there was one main reason to do it. It mattered.”

Kate Chaney being sworn in alongside fellow independents. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

It was a conversation with her daughter which spurred her on. The 10-year-old told her mum it would be bad for her “in the short term”.

“But in the long-term, it will be good for me, because it’s good for Australia,” she recalled.

Ms Chaney ousted the one-term Liberal member Celia Hammond, who succeeded Julie Bishop in the traditional blue-ribbon seat.

The new MP said she knocked on 10,000 doors in her campaign for stronger action on climate change and integrity.

But it was a meeting with 17-year-old Ruby Paterson who became a symbol for the campaign.

“(She) came with her little brother, her parents and her grandmother. I had never met Ruby before but she became a symbol in my mind of why I was here. She is in year 12, brimming with potential and hope,” she said.

Kate Chaney, with her grandfather Fred Chaney, who was a minister in the Fraser government. Picture: Colin Murty

“Ruby and her family wanted politics to be done differently, so they turned up and they became the movement.”

Ms Chaney comes from a long line of politicians.

In her address she spoke of her uncles, who served in Canberra for the Liberal Party from the 1970s to the 1990s.

Her grandfather, Fred Chaney Sr, “shocked” his strong Labor family when he entered politics as a Liberal.

On her mother’s side, her great grandfather and his father, Hubert and Henry Parker, were both in the WA parliament.

“It is hard to accurately see your own influences and is dangerous to retrospectively fit them into a neat narrative, but I’m sure these men in my family tree have in some way contributed to my strong sense of social justice and public service.”

But the Curtin MP said she had “never felt a pull towards either political party”.

However, she wondered what could have been if the party of Liberal Robert Menzies reflected his own words.

“I feel a pull when I read the words of Menzies, who said he looked forward to ‘a better distribution of wealth, to a keener sense of social justice and social responsibility’,” she said.

“I wonder if that might have been a party I would have been willing to join.”

Originally published as Kate Chaney’s strange sighting inside Parliament House