Speaker Tony Smith is dragged to the chair by Lucy Wicks and Michael Sukkar following his election in 2015. Credit:Andrew Meares "Peter Slipper threw me out when I brought that into the House." Peter Slipper was the Speaker of the House of Representatives at the time, and No Carbon Tax was the mantra of Tony Abbott's opposition. Slipper has long gone from the Parliament, Abbott is no longer Liberal leader, the Coalition has morphed out of opposition into government... And now Tony Smith is Speaker.

Hot seat: Speaker Tony Smith at Parliament House in Canberra. Behind the serious face he wears up there in the big chair, he'd still like to be a bit of a boy. Credit:Andrew Meares He is charged with cracking down on stunts by MPs who haul silly items into the House. Perhaps the bucket reminds him that at heart, behind the serious face he wears up there in the big chair, he'd still like to be a bit of a boy. Speaker of the House is a job invested with the gravity of ages. Smith's position is one of the two most powerful in the Parliament (the other is President of the Senate). Tony Smith walks to the House of Representatives chamber from his office. Speaker of the House is a job invested with the gravity of ages. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen A Speaker can suspend a Prime Minister from the House if he's in the mood – though such a thing might be career suicide – and even police must get his and the President's permission to set foot in the parliamentary precinct.

But Smith is also a local member, elected to represent the interests of about 100,000 voters in the electorate of Casey. Casey is a big place: 2337 square kilometres of once far-flung farming and tourist villages that have become subsumed by Melbourne's restless sprawl, plus still half-remote villages and towns, where orchards, farmland and forest climb into the foothills. Speaker Tony Smith enters the House of Representatives. He and the Senate President, Tasmanian Stephen Parry, jointly administer a budget of around $300 million a year to run the giant Parliament House. Credit:Andrew Meares We cruise to the small suburb of Seville – strangers are informed it's pronounced "Sevl". A knot of councillors from the Shire of Yarra Ranges, parents and netballers greet Smith at the Seville Football and Netball Club to show off the newly resurfaced netball court, which got an $18,000 federal government grant. There are murmurs, meant for his ears, that the courts could do with a roof now to make them properly all-weather. Smith nods at the right places, talks about the weather and poses for a photograph. Then it's on to the Seville village shopping centre to attend a pre-Anzac ceremony complete with a piper and the unveiling of the design for a Seville War Memorial. Speaker Tony Smith at an event in Old Parliament House. Credit:Rohan Thomson

It will cost around $180,000 – much of it from local fundraisers. The federal government has kicked in $14,000, and Smith – who has long been an amateur military historian – could hardly miss the meaningful looks of those pointing out that more money was required. It is a long way from Canberra where Smith and the Senate President, Tasmanian Stephen Parry, jointly administer a budget approaching $300 million a year to run the giant Parliament House, with its staff of more than 1200, and its constant maintenance and security upgrades. Smith says some of his constituents worried he'd have to move to Canberra when he became Speaker, and that the electorate could drop from his priorities. Keen to dispel any such notion, he spends every free day wheeling around the highways and byways of Casey. Still, the electorate's not really big enough to require a V8, four-wheel-drive ute to get around.

Smith, who's been the member for Casey for 16 years, is a petrol head. He's loved the sound and the urge of a big eight-cylinder Australian motor since he was a university student. He worked the night shift, cooking 11pm-7am at a fast-food joint, Denny's, to help support himself through Melbourne University, and finally raised enough to buy a car. Smith's father accompanied him to the the "golden mile", a jumbled stretch of car yards in Ringwood, where the young Tony had spied a Holden Monaro. Its thirst for petrol and its sheer size didn't make it particularly suitable for a university student, but the boy had eyes only for it. The deal done, Smith's father confided on the way home there had been only one reason he'd come along. "Your mother wanted to make sure you didn't buy the Monaro," he said.

A portrait of the Speaker of the House Tony Smith as a young hoon with his Holden Monaro. Tony Smith's tendency to bring home powerful cars without warning has continued through his marriage to his wife, Pam. He has, he says, owned "heaps" of V8 Holdens. Anyway, the ageing blue twin-cab ute is useful when he's touring the electorate, Smith insists. He needs only lift the cover on the tray and drop the tailgate and he's got a mobile office. The Commonwealth didn't pay for the vehicle, he's keen to inform. The Speaker, Tony Smith, meets constituents at his "mobile office" - an old V8 Holden twin-cab ute. Picture supplied. Supplied

Personal indulgences at taxpayers' expense are a mortal danger to the careers of politicians these days. It's why Tony Smith is the Speaker. When Bronwyn Bishop chose to take a helicopter from Melbourne to a Liberal Party fundraiser in Geelong and charge the taxpayer $5,227.27 for the privilege, she sealed her own fate. In the uproar that followed, it became obvious the Parliament would need a new Speaker. It was equally obvious to everyone who had watched the daily cage fight that the House of Representatives had become, that any new Speaker would need to be vastly more even-handed.

In just 20 months in the chair, Ms Bishop had booted MPs out of the Parliament 400 times. An astonishing 393 of these sentences were on Labor MPs. Just seven were from the government. Exhausted by the delirium, MPs from all sides sought Bishop's polar opposite. Labor, which had used crafty tactics years before to lever Peter Slipper out of the Liberal National Party and into the Speaker's chair – only to watch his costume drama sink into a swamp of scandal – didn't bother nominating an alternative when Tony Smith's name was put forward in August 2015. Smith stared down several Liberal contenders to win his party's nomination, though his own prime minister, Tony Abbott, wasn't among his supporters. Smith had been on the outer with Abbott for years. After serving as John Howard's parliamentary secretary during the last year of Howard's government and holding a series of shadow portfolios in the oppositions of both Malcolm Turnbull and Abbott, Smith was on the backbench when the Speaker's job spilled.

Abbott, a technological dunce, reportedly blamed Smith for letting down the side on broadband policy before the 2010 election. Smith moved fast to declare his would be a non-partisan chair. He quit attending Liberal party room meetings (although he went to the one that ended Abbott's prime ministership a month after he became Speaker, where he voted for Malcolm Turnbull) and established regular sit-downs with leaders of all parties and the crossbench. More than 19 months later, Smith – the 30th Speaker of the Australian Parliament – is widely judged to run a relatively fair-handed and effective regime, even if the dull roar that personifies Question Time continues and sometimes reaches a shriek. "It's not a classroom; it's not a church," says Smith, seeking to explain that he's prepared to allow the chamber its head to a certain point.

"It's a debating chamber designed to be robust." Still, it doesn't pay MPs to ignore his warnings. Speaker Smith has given the heave-ho to MPs 133 times in the life of the current Parliament. The score stands at 122 Labor ejections and 11 for the Coalition. He's even suspended two government ministers - Justice Minister Michael Keenan and Urban Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher. Lecturing the House recently about dressed-up questions he deemed to be out of order, the Speaker reverted briefly to the rev-head. "Let me put it in more simple language: You can't come along with a Holden badge and stick it on a Mazda and say 'it is a Holden'," he declared. "The question is out of order."

Tony Burke, the manager of Opposition business, delivers a backhander to Bishop and cool praise for Smith when asked for his judgment on the Smith period. "Since he [Smith] became Speaker we've spent a lot more time talking about the country and a lot less time quibbling about procedure," he says. Smith says he'd never sought the job until Bishop resigned. He'd never even been on a Speaker's Panel – MPs who are relied upon as stand-ins when the Speaker or Deputy Speaker are unavailable. But Smith had been around the Parliament long enough for everyone to know him, and to have built a web of supporters – he'd been around, in fact, longer than most of his colleagues.

He arrived in 1990, hardly out of short pants, as a staffer to Peter Costello. This was six years before Costello became Treasurer in John Howard's government. Smith was 23, and still doing an honours thesis at Melbourne University. He'd already worked a day a week for Dr Michael Wooldridge, a Melbourne-based Liberal who became deputy leader of the party for a year in the early 1990s before Costello got the job and kept it for a record 13 years. He'd given another day a week while a student to undertaking research for the conservative Institute of Public Affairs, an influential proponent of free-market economic theory and a founding organisation of the Liberal Party. Smith, in short, was well-connected from the start, and his connection with Wooldridge would become crucial later in his career trajectory. Smith says he'd gone to university planning to become a history teacher. He began studying arts, and later shifted a gear into history, politics and economics.

Along the way, he joined the university Liberal Club, became gradually immersed in university politics and got himself elected club president. Smith met Costello when the Liberal Club invited him to address one of its gatherings. Costello was at the time a conservative star for his role as a junior barrister in a case against a union picketing a Melbourne confectionary company called Dollar Sweets. Costello won the case, the union was ordered to pay $175,000 in damages and the picket was dismantled. When Smith and Costello turned up in Canberra, they were so physically alike – the blonde hair, the square jaws, the boyish, open faces that hinted at concealed mischief – they were regularly required to explain they weren't brothers. Smith was Costello's media adviser for the opposition years, and he got a reputation for playing things infuriatingly close to his chest.

To questions about the byzantine leadership theories swirling around the Liberal Party, often involving Costello, he'd reply "I'm telling this only to you … no comment." When Costello became Treasurer in the new Howard government in 1996, Smith became Costello's senior political adviser, confidante and quiet protector: privy to everything at power central. By 2001, a seat in Parliament beckoned. Dr Wooldridge, Smith's first political employer, confided in Smith he was about to quit his seat of Casey. Smith, raised in metropolitan Box Hill, wasn't particularly familiar with the far-eastern area of Melbourne. But he proved a quick study. In the footy-mad Melbourne manner, he recalls he won Liberal pre-selection for Casey "on the Thursday night before the grand final" when Costello's beloved Essendon lost to Brisbane (Smith is a Carlton man).

"Within a week John Howard had called the election," says Smith. He won Casey by a margin of more than 7 per cent, and has held it comfortably ever since, burbling around in an old ute every chance he gets: the quiet achiever with a taste for powerful motors and now, holder of the most powerful seat in the land.