‘Long apprenticeship: Newbies ready for cut and thrust and federal parliament set to resume

Politics makes strange bedfellows and the 48th parliament is full of them.

After the May election, Canberra will welcome about 40 new politicians including one of its tallest-ever MPs, a former pirate negotiator and a few familiar faces.

At more than two metres in height, Matt Smith is a stand-out among Labor’s coterie.

The former basketball player wrenched the far north Queensland seat of Leichhardt from the coalition for the first time in almost two decades after years spent forging ties with the community during his time with the Cairns Taipans.

Mr Smith held the team’s record for blocked shots when the Taipans went into administration in 2008.

The news broke the players, he says, but locals’ efforts to save the team transformed his perception of community.

“At the height of the global financial crisis, people dipped into their own pockets to keep the team afloat,” he tells AAP.

He could have returned to his Victorian roots after retiring from basketball in 2018 but Mr Smith says he now belongs to Cairns.

“The Taipans, as we know them now, are a community-funded team because of the never-say-die attitude, because of the passion from far north Queensland,” he says.

“There is an obligation to give back to everyone who’s given so much and this is the best way that I can help and improve the community that I love and that has been so good to me over the last 20 years.”

The Queensland MP isn’t the only new politician with outsized life experience.

NSW One Nation senator Warwick Stacey dropped out of high school and headed to southern France where he worked as a handyman and English teacher before joining the British army.

He eventually settled into a job as a kidnap and response consultant, advising clients on ways to navigate kidnappings, and even planning and implementing a ransom delivery to Somali pirates.

Senator Stacey hopes his past can differentiate him from other politicians, who comparatively have “very little life experience”.

“(They’ve) gone from university into the union or into a parliamentarian’s office as a staffer and then they put their hand up for a seat,” he says.

“I’d like to bring my experience.”

But a few newcomers can lean on their extensive political experience to offer specific insights into their communities.

MP for Lyons Rebecca White has already spent 15 years serving voters in Tasmania’s parliament and even led the state’s Labor opposition for about half her tenure.

“I’ve had a pretty long apprenticeship,” she tells AAP.

Her federal electorate has the exact same boundaries as her former state seat.

But entering parliament as part of Labor’s significant lower house majority offers new opportunities.

“I’ve had the privilege of being able to represent my community for a long time in the state parliament but a really large part of that was in opposition, which has been frustrating at times,” she says.

“There are things we could have done if we were elected to government in Tasmania and we weren’t able to progress.

“I’m really excited about the opportunity to make change.”

Goldstein MP Tim Wilson is also no stranger to politics and will return to parliament as the only Liberal to win back their seat from a ‘teal’ independent at the 2025 election.

The contest in the inner-Melbourne seat was so close it took almost a month, and a partial recount, before Mr Wilson was officially declared the victor over independent Zoe Daniel.

But the Liberal Party’s broader defeat cast a shadow over his win.

“I always privately had this fear that I would be the only one who would defeat a teal but I never voiced that publicly,” he says.

“I had never imagined a scenario where I would be the only one to win a seat, the only liberal in a capital city and one of two in metropolitan Australia.

“So despite the excitement, I think that actually hit me with a sense of responsibility.”

Still, he’s not the only newcomer to defeat a well-known politician.

Experienced foster carer Sarah Witty beat former Greens leader Adam Bandt and took the seat of Melbourne back to Labor for the first time in 15 years.

It was one of the biggest upsets of the 2025 election and while she never expected to win, from her first day on the campaign, the appetite for change was clear.

“I knew there was definitely a swing away, I just wasn’t sure how far we would go,” she says.

Parliament will resume on July 22.