With news of Family First Senator Bob Day’s resignation comes the fevered speculation on who will replace him in the Senate. One person who has already put his name forward is Day’s chief of staff, Rikki Lambert, who told The Australian he planned to nominate. The father of five had been a Family First candidate in the July election, but he pulled out before polling day.
Lambert, however, is famous for more than his role in Day’s office. When working for South Australian Family First MP Robert Brokenshire, he came into possession of the pay details of the ABC’s top journalists after they were accidentally sent to Brokenshire in a response to an FOI request. Brokenshire himself said he had never wanted the information to go anywhere, but his staffer at that point, Lambert, sent it to a South Austrlian reporter at the Oz. The scoop embarrassed the ABC and caused no end of internal strife. When the truth of how the data ended up at the paper came out, Lambert was suspended from his role as a media and policy adviser in Brokenshire’s office, though only for a day and on full pay. The “mistake”, as Brokenshire called it, doesn’t seem to have harmed his career much.
Another name doing the rounds is Family First’s No. 2 Senate candidate in South Australia, Lucy Gichuhi. The Swahili-speaking lawyer is a migrant from Kenya, who settled in Adelaide in 1999.
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