Nigel Scullion knows what he's ordering.

"No need to continue with the rest of the specials," he tells our waitress with a grin. "I'm going to have the leftover bones."

The waitress giggles girlishly. Scullion has ordered an entrée of bone marrow, though it's been given some euphemistic name to gloss over the fact it will indeed consist of little more than some leftover bones. As he will tell me later in the evening, Nigel Scullion has "a pretty good bullshit filter".

"How do you think the election's going?" I ask.

"Well, I honestly don't really have much of a clue," he concedes. "I wouldn't say my political brain is the best one to pick on that matter."

I tell him it is refreshing to receive such a frank and honest answer from a politician.

"You don't know me, Matthew," he says. "But let me tell you, I'm one of the most ordinary buggers you'll ever meet."

This, however, is categorically untrue. Nigel Scullion, Country Liberal Party Senator for the Northern Territory and Minister for Community Services, would have to be one of the least ordinary buggers in the Australian parliament.

Scullion was born in England in 1956 but was there for less than a month. He spent his childhood in Malawi and moved with his parents to Australia at the tender age of thirteen. The family was initially based in Brisbane, but eventually wound up in Canberra.

"Pretty much every school holidays I'd run away somewhere," he remembers now. "Hitchhike, go to Queensland. I was very lucky to have parents who let me do what I wanted. I was into the bush, I suppose. I was a keen shooter and fisherman, and later in life made a living out of it."

But Scullion was also a troubled young man and was done for drink driving in the late seventies.

"I had a bad accident on a motorbike which involved the police and all that. The best thing to do in those days was basically just to leave," he says.

"I was sitting there in the causalities with a copper, because I'd had an accident, and he just sort of said, 'I think you should just leave. You should just go and do something.'"

And so that's what Nigel did.

I dip a piece of bread in olive oil and shuffle quickly through my notes. "You've went through quite a range of careers," I begin.

"I'm sure most of them aren't on there," he says.

"Tour operator, safari guide, mining industry…" I offer.

"Yeah, all of that."

"Fisherman."

"Mm." He sips at a glass of water. "All great lives. All great journeys. Never one journey, though."

"I've been very lucky to have those opportunities. I mean, those jobs were just unreal. It's great having actually done those jobs, because you've got a pretty good bullshit filter, and that's important.

"I think a good background in life, and having done a lot of things, is important."

Scullion was elected to the Senate in 2001 and was made Minister of Community Services in February 2007.

"Were you gunning for a ministry?" I ask.

Two large, roasted bones have arrived with a small stack of charred bread and a relatively ornate silver spoon.

Scullion looks at the spoon for a moment as though he doesn't quite know what to do with it. Bone marrow on toast is about as rustic as it gets and the inexplicable inclusion of fancy silverware seems to have taken him by surprise.

He shrugs and plunges the spoon into the hollow of the bone.

"Not at all," he answers as he digs.

"I got a call. It was late at night. It was [National Party leader and Deputy Prime Minister] Mark Vaile going through all the different positions that he'd given and the rationale for those positions. And then he did the little pregnant pause at the end and said, 'And I want you to be the Minister for Community Services.' I couldn't believe it. I was in the Amazon at the time."

The Amazon?

"Mm. It was four in the morning and I was still up. I wasn't too clever."

"I thought, 'Oh, yeah, Community Services. Right, what does that involve?' I wouldn't have picked it originally, simply because I didn't know that much about it."

I ask if his opinion of the portfolio has changed in the eight months since he took it on. He nods vigorously.

"I know a fair bit about fishing and forestry and all that stuff, but I'd much prefer this. This is really challenging."

"Because it's about people. And people who really need help. It's fascinating."

He continues. "Youth, for example. You know, I'm responsible for youth. But factually, if I'm fair dinkum about it, I'm really more responsible for youth at risk. The youth don't really care. They don't give a rat's arse what Nigel's doing, really. They just want to get on with life."

It seems like a good a time as any the wade into the waters surrounding youth issues.

"A number of the minor parties believe sixteen year olds should be given the vote," I venture.

"Do I have a philosophy on that?" he replies. "Not really. I suspect many people—not all people, not all people by any means and I don't want to go and be offensive about that, because I just wouldn't know about the percentage—but I expect an awful lot of people would be extremely easy to affect. People are just doing what their told at sixteen and many people at seventeen. But look, I think it's an issue we should continue to debate."

He tells me about the National Youth Roundtable, a project he has come to love.

"I just hope that it grows," he says. "And I can see the direction in which it's growing and I think it's very positive."

I ask how he would respond to claims that other avenues for youth participation have been neutered or shut down under the Howard Government, with the Roundtable remaining the only real opportunity for young people—and a very limited number of you people at that—to access power directly.

His trademark moustache bristles at the suggestion.

"I just think it's a good process," he asserts. "I haven't had articulated to me an alternative. And until I'm provided with a genuine alternative, I'm unlikely to change the status quo."

"With this notion that, 'Oh, you're not consulting with enough people,' it's just a false notion. It's just a lunacy, to say that I only listen to the Youth Roundtable and nobody else. Well, what's the other view? What do you want to put to me? And there's a silence. There's a deafening silence."

I ask him whether he thinks there should be a portfolio dedicated exclusively to young people. He shakes his head.

"The most sensible way of approaching a process," he says, "is not to say that youth are so different that we need to somehow take … responsibilities off everybody else. I just don't think it's practical."

"The Minister of Youth will have to be in charge of youth education. They'd have to be in charge of young people's health, so you bring health into it. You'd have to somehow work out how to deal with them separately because of a chronological difference. What are the other areas you'd have to deal with? Every portfolio."

"Education takes those education processes because that's the smartest way to deal with them. Health takes those health processes away because that's the smartest way to deal with them."

Well, maybe having a Minister for Youth would serve a certain symbolic function, I suggest.

He scoops out the remaining contents of a bone and spreads it across a piece of toast.

"Who is the Minister for Youth?" he asks. "Senator Nigel Scullion is the Minister for Youth. Make no bones about that."

ElectionTracker, 22 October 2007