If Senator McKenzie survives as a minister,her adventures will inevitably evolve into a full-blown political offensive on Prime Minister Scott Morrison for failing to have her sacked.
And that will stir memories in the Speaker's chair.
Twenty six years ago,at the height of another political conniption over another sports minister and her prime minister,it was Tony Smith himself who invented the ruinous term “sports rorts”.
He watched at the closest of quarters as his verbal grenade was used to demolish the credibility of Prime Minister Paul Keating’s sports minister,Ros Kelly.
He’d know that all these years later,Labor’s Anthony Albanese and his MPs need only refine and re-use the parliamentary attacks of the time on Kelly and Keating to rip to shreds any defence McKenzie and Morrison might try.
The scripts are all there in dusty volumes of Hansard:the damaging censure motions;the pitiless late-night inquiries;the fusillade of unanswerable questions in Parliament.
Smith in the early 1990s was a young staffer of a young shadow finance minister named Peter Costello.