It is the restaurant of choice for the rich and infamous – singer Beyoncé dined there last year, as do bikies – though the paradox is that the pricey cuisine is influenced by poor areas of central Italy where simple country cooking, like roast meals, dominate.

Wang has the opportunity to order a craft beer or fine Italian red on AFR Weekend's tab, but he opts for a glass of Coke.

"After one beer my face is all red, and I lose my tongue a bit," says Wang. "I tried to improve my alcohol tolerance. I tried for two years; it didn't work out."

Wang is 181 centimetres tall and his absent belly suggests he has no food or beverage vices, let alone a drinking problem. He reckons he loses up to three kilograms a week when he is in Canberra, because "who has time for lunch, anyway?"

PUP senator Dio Wang tells the AFR's Jonathan Barrett over lunch that without the Tiananmen crackdown - despite its casualties - "the country [China] would have descended into hell". Philip Gostelow

This sparks a conversation about politicians and their eating habits, and I start relaying the details of Education Minister Christopher Pyne's calorie-counting diet obsession I once read about.

"I think it was Christopher Pyne who was on same strange…" I begin.

"Drug," Wang says, on cue with a laugh.


Wang's Coke arrives. On the waiter's advice, I am drinking a glass of red from the Vietti vineyards, located in the north-west of Italy; an area encased on three sides by the alps.

The right way to create wealth

Zhenya "Dio" Wang was born in China's mountainous east, in Nanjing, where his parents worked in a forklift assembling factory.

He describes his childhood as "just below middle class", before the market principle reforms in China of the late 1970s and early 80s allowed his family to forge ahead. The period of economic reform has left Wang with an ideology that could be described as a mix of capitalism and socialism; both without the hard edges.

"You can't put everyone on the same wealth line; you need to let someone who is more entrepreneurial to grow their business and they will in turn provide jobs and drag people out of poverty," says Wang. "But if you allow capitalists to develop their way, eventually we will be looking at very low wages because all of their interest is in exploiting workers … to create wealth for themselves."

Wang emigrated to Australia in 2003, and in the ensuing 12 years he studied civil engineering, headed a resources company controlled by businessman and politician Clive Palmer, and won a spot in the Senate.

Along the way, Wang adopted the nickname "Dio" to give Australians "a name they can pronounce".

(Zhenya is pronounced with the "j" sound associated with the name Gerald. His surname is regularly mispronounced "Wang" when it sounds more like "Wong". Not that he minds either way: "I'm the last person in the whole world who is worried about my [name] pronunciation," he says.)


Now aged 34, married and father to a five-year-old daughter, Wang is often dismissed as a "puppet" for his larger-than-life party boss. But after spending almost two hours with the West Australian Senator, I wonder who is really pulling the strings.

"I had the benefit of working with [Palmer] for several years before joining the party so I know exactly how he operates," says Wang. "I know how to convince him and I know sometimes how to work around him."

After almost one year into his first term in the Senate, Wang is primarily known for not being well known.

It's not that he is necessarily shy. He is known to try and order "off the menu" – when he last ate at Perugino, he unsuccessfully tried to order pizza as a main course; this time he chooses the gnocchi in a duck ragù, which once again, doesn't usually come in a main course size – and he has unexpectedly, and somewhat boldly, brought his chief of staff along to eat on this newspaper's tab.

He discloses part-way through the lunch that he loves spicy food, because chilli-filled Sichuan cuisine was all the rage during his taste-bud formative teens, but he politely turned down several offers to choose a restaurant that suited his tastes, and instead relied on my recommendation.

I chose Perugino for no other reason than it was the infamous "crime scene" of 2005 when the then Labor leader Kevin Rudd dined with disgraced former West Australian Premier Brian Burke, among others. Rudd survived the intense fallout even though association with Burke proved fatal to many other political careers.

While restaurant staff are sick of the Rudd-Burke story, it has enhanced its mystique, and perhaps allows it to get away with charging $6 for a coffee

Party process for one


Wang's rise in the political ranks didn't involve any clandestine lunches with powerbrokers. Despite having little political interest before the 2013 federal election, he expressed an interest to Palmer in running for PUP, and was subsequently placed at the top of the party's Senate candidate list.

His role in Parliament was secured after a rerun of the Senate race in Western Australia was held in April 2014, made necessary after almost 1400 votes went missing in the original race.

The once influential PUP had a crucial voting bloc in the Senate before Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie, and then Queensland Senator Glenn Lazarus, sensationally quit. Wang says he initially tried to convince both senators to stay with the party; although in Lambie's case, personality and ideology clashes made the split inevitable.

"We knew she would leave the party at some stage. In the latter stages I didn't bother," Wang says.

It's hard to tell whether Wang is being tongue-in-cheek when he says that the party resignations aren't all bad. "The party room process is a lot easier now – it's just myself," he says.

No lunch date is complete with at least one awkward moment.

That occurs when I ask my lunchmate about the circumstances around Lazarus' party resignation, which occurred in March shortly after his wife, Tess Lazarus, was sacked by Palmer for "failing to comply" with the terms of her employment.

I ask what caused Lazarus to resign.


"The media has reported correctly," Wang responds.

"What does that mean?" I say.

Silence.

"Can I have a no comment on this one," he finally says.

Anti-politician

Wang hasn't had a drink, but his face does turn a light shade of rouge. It's as if it pains him not to speak openly about a subject. He doesn't like political games. He is, in many respects, the anti-politician.

He is not ashamed to publicly wrestle with a difficult policy. While he mostly supports the Coalition's asylum-seeker policies, he concedes that stopping the boats and "saving lives at sea" might just mean a refugee dies somewhere else.

"They are just dying at different places by different means," he says. "I guess there's no shame in struggling with this one as the whole world is struggling with this."


Answering critics who say he went underground during the election, he says that just because he doesn't call press conferences, it doesn't mean he has nothing to say.

"When I have something to say I'll come out and say it," says Wang. "But when someone tries to push me into saying something…

"I believe the less you say the better it is in getting the real message out."

Besides, he says the media hasn't been interested in his views, while they "jump up and down" when Palmer says something.

So, Zhenya "Dio" Wang, what do you want to say?

In Wang's maiden Senate speech, he made an impassioned plea to remember Japan's "six week-long massacre, a six week-long nightmare" in his childhood home city of Nanjing.

"For China, it may be the longest six weeks in its entire history," Wang said in his speech, alleging, "But for the Imperial Japanese Army, it was never too short to torture, to rape, to murder 300,000 innocent men, women and children."

Wang says Parliament offered the perfect forum to raise war crimes he says that Japan has never properly apologised for.


"I think we need to be reminded of that," he says. "It had to be there [in the speech]."

Wang is eating chocolate hazelnut cake, while my policy of always ordering tiramisu at Italian restaurants has been put at risk by the waiter's recommendation to try the baked ricotta, which has been "made in Naples for I don't know how many hundreds of years".

(The waiter gives me a half slice of both.)

Defence of Tiananmen

I ask the Senator whether he considered critiquing China's actions in his speech, such as the Tiananmen Square massacre of June, 1989, when the military used live ammunition to clear a protest, resulting in several hundred casualties.

"Based on the information I have, I think the government did the right thing," Wang says. "Obviously when criminals and students get mixed up, you can't really identify each one of them. So when there was force to be deployed you may get innocent casualties."

"Sorry," I say. "Are you saying at Tiananmen Square, the government did the right thing?"

"I think they did the right thing," Wang says. "Otherwise the country would have descended into hell."


Wang does denounce China's bloody Cultural Revolution, but I get the impression through the lunch that he wishes Australia was a little bit more like the Middle Kingdom.

"I am fairly supportive of China simply because, despite the critics, I think it's moving in the right direction," Wang says. "It's probably moving in the direction I was talking about – socialism and capitalism one day connecting."

MENU

Perugino,

77 Outram Street,

West Perth

1 homemade gnocchi in duck ragù, $28

1 rotolo di vitello, $37

1 chocolate hazelnut cake, $18

1 half serve each baked ricotta and tiramisu, $18


vegetables, $16

1 Coke, $6

1 glass Vietti Barbera d'Asti, $12

1 espresso & 1 double shot macchiato, $12

Total $147

(Total for three diners, including Wang's chief of staff, with lunch special discount) $199.50