Six months since he was elected to the Senate with just 0.51% of the primary vote, the Motoring Enthusiast party representative understands the meaning of balance of power all too well

Ricky Muir hasn’t talked to the media much since that early car-crash interview with Mike Willesee when the senator-elect couldn’t explain the term “balance of power” even though his unexpected election meant he was about to assume a share of it.



He hasn’t said much in the Senate either. Since taking up his seat last July he’s only spoken three times – twice to state his position on a knife-edge vote and once to ask a question. He’s yet to give his maiden speech.

But six challenging months into the job, the former sawmill worker and Motoring Enthusiast party representative is starting to find his voice.

He is prepared to reflect about suddenly finding himself a senator with one of the eight crucial votes from which the government needs to win six every time a piece of legislation is opposed by Labor and the Greens.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ricky Muir stumbles through a TV interview with Mike Willesee.

In what he now describes as a “surreal experience”, in early July he and his wife, Kerri-Anne, drove eight hours from their regional Victorian home, with five kids in two separate cars, arriving in the nick of time for Muir to change and get to parliament house for a meeting with the prime minister. It was a “meet and greet” before a single weekend of what was dubbed “Senate kindy” – learning the complexities of parliamentary procedures with other Senate newbies.

Four days later Muir was a senator and the upper house was debating the carbon tax repeal – the most contentious issue of recent political times.

“That day I drove to Canberra and then got straight into a Comcar and five minutes later was actually sitting in front of the prime minister really was a surreal experience and it went straight from that to the massive load of legislation we had to vote on in that first week and being lobbied by everyone … it was a baptism of fire, but also an enjoyable journey,” he says now.

Ricky Muir with his family after being sworn in as a senator. Photograph: Mike Bowers

He’s a little less awed by prime ministerial meetings these days. He’s had three or four, including one during the final weeks of last year as the government was frantically – and in the end unsuccessfully – lobbying to get its higher education reforms through the Senate.

“The meetings were good and respectful but a lot of the conversation [in the final discussion] was really just reiterating conversations I’d already had with Christopher Pyne,” he says.

“I’ve had quite a lot of contact with a variety of ministers,” he says, nominating the education minister, Christopher Pyne, former health minister Peter Dutton, and former immigration minister Scott Morrison. “When it is getting close to a vote it is surprising how available ministers become.”

But he thinks it would be a good idea for new senators to be allowed to start work a couple of weeks early, instead of only being allowed staff and resources at the same time as they assume their onerous new responsibilities.

“A transition period for a few weeks would be ideal. I did have a huge amount to learn and the resources of my office weren’t available to us until the moment we took our seats and started work,” he says.

One of those early voting decisions was to allow through the government’s changes to financial advice laws, a decision Muir and fellow crossbench senator Jacqui Lambie reversed a few months later, stating frankly that they had made the wrong decision the first time round.

Soon after he was elected Muir signed a memorandum of understanding with the Palmer United party, and PUP leader Clive Palmer claimed that Muir’s vote gave him a voting bloc of four.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Clive Palmer and Ricky Muir shake hands at the National Press Club in Canberra in November 2013. Photograph: Alan Porritt/AAP

Muir insists he and PUP were never “locked at the hip”, but in the first three months of the new Senate he voted the same way as PUP almost all of the time.

Since November he has voted differently 29 times, and Muir now seems more comfortable making and explaining his own decisions as Lambie’s defection reduces PUP’s influence and throws Senate votes open to different crossbench alliances.

He says his most difficult decision was on the final sitting day last year on a bill that reintroduced temporary protection visas and dramatically increased the government’s powers to turn back boats.

In the end Muir voted for the legislation, but told the Senate the decision had been “without a doubt, one of the hardest decisions I have had to face – a choice between a bad option and a worse option. It is a decision that involves human beings: children, mothers, fathers. It involves the lives of people who have had to endure unthinkable hardship, people pushed to the point where they go to any lengths to seek asylum.

“In its initial form, I could not vote for this bill. What the government is proposing is not ideal. There are parts of the bill that I am not comfortable with. However, to do nothing is not an option either,” he said.

The government also agreed that 80 babies would be allowed to stay in Australia with their families to have their asylum claims assessed, rather than being returned to Nauru.

Looking back, he says “that last day was incredible, I was being lobbied by everyone, the opposition, the government, lobbyists, phone calls. The day of the vote was the busiest I have experienced. In the end the need to stop those babies going to Nauru helped me make my decision. Then I had to go to ground and put it into words.”

Ricky Muir in the chamber with fellow senator Jacqui Lambie. Photograph: Mike Bowers

During a long telephone interview with Guardian Australia, Muir also gave his views on:

Higher education

“The government does not necessarily have my support on this. I’m really not attracted to these ideas. I can’t vote for something that might make education inaccessible or leave students with unmanageable debts. The $100,000 degrees might have been a scare campaign but some courses could go up to that level. I think Nick Xenophon is right, we need to pause and look at this carefully and I’d like to see the alternative policy Labor has said it will unveil later in the year.”

Medicare co-payments

Muir was opposed to the reduction in a rebate for short consultations – the co-payment plan B that the government announced late last year and then recently shelved after an outcry from doctors. But he says he is also against the rebate reduction of $5, which is due to start in July and remains government policy.



“I’ve spent some of my short break going through emails and correspondence and it was through that that I realised how big a concern the co-payment was,” he says.

Renewable energy target

Muir is steadfast in his support for the current target of 41,000 gigawatt hours. He says there has been massive lobbying from all sides on the issue.

Climate science

“I’ve heard both sides of the story … but regardless of whether it is happening or not we should look for cleaner ways to do things.” He’s quite impressed with projects to capture methane from landfill and old mine sites.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ricky Muir says he was ‘forced into a corner’ on the Senate’s asylum seeker vote.

Muir was much less keen to talk about the huge turnover on his staff in just six months. His first chief of staff, Glenn Druery, who specialises in the kind of preference deals that helped Muir get elected with just 0.51% of the primary vote, left suddenly after reported clashes with Keith and Sharon Littler – Motoring Enthusiast party stalwarts who also work in Muir’s office. Former NSW MP Peter Breen and two other advisers also left.

“Every case had a different reason and I wish them all the best,” Muir says. He’s still in the process of filling two positions and moving his office from inner-city Melbourne to closer to his Gippsland home. The Littlers still work in his office.

Druery says: “Ricky is a good bloke. He came in with very little experience and he had a bad run with the media.”

Muir has also learned enough in the last six months to brush off that early encounter with Willesee, which he once described as “unethical”.

“You have to look back and laugh … it was all new to me then. The main thing I learned is you have to stay calm.

“I’m finding my feet now. I will be more visible. I’ll be talking more. And I will be putting my thoughts on the record.”

And yes, he can now explain the term balance of power. He understands it all too well.