Hard to know exactly who coined that phrase, but it pops up everywhere in any account of Senator Jacqui Lambie, including in the publicity material for I'm A Celebrity. Lambie was voted off the island, or whatever happens to you on that kind of reality television; pretty sure it's not the failure to properly brulee your crème.

Senator Lambie grew up in a housing commission in regional Tasmania. She had her first child at 18 and her second three years later. One of her kids experienced a serious drug addiction. Lambie is a former army corporal who struggled to get proper compensation for the back injury she acquired while serving. She's instantly recognisable even with your eyes closed.

Lambie decided to go on celebrity television as part of her campaign to get re-elected after yet another citizenship debacle. As she said at the time of her abasement to reality TV: "We can't pay for this stuff. We can't pay for the advertising, and any bit of TV I can get... it just opens doors, mate, and I can't ask for anything else. Just give me a fair go, give me a run, listen to my opinions. It seems to be working."

Listen to my opinions, it seems to be working. Yet it only worked because Australians believed Lambie's account of herself as open and honest, transparent and humble, as a battler who'd experienced the worst of it. The peak of her connection with voters happened in August 2015 when she revealed her son Dylan was addicted to ice. She said, in an attempt to convince other senators, that Australian parents should have the right to put their kids in involuntary detox.

"I have to say that down there in Tasmania we have a massive ice problem. I am a senator of Australia and I have a 21-year-old son that has a problem with ice, and yet even with my title I have no control over my son. I cannot involuntarily detox my own son. I am not talking to my son anymore; I am now talking to a drug. And I can tell you I am not the only parent out there; there are thousands of us."

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This of course was compelling. Any Australian could empathise, the "thousands of us" and the rest of us. Even if we didn't have children who were substance abusers, we had the fear, the niggling anxiety as parents that we can't always defend and protect.

Lambie went on to ask senators to consider the impacts of the Social Services Legislation Amendment Bill 2015. "Think more broadly about the issue of mental health and how injuries and harm are caused in individuals. I ask you to do that because the way that ice is affecting these kids is phenomenal and it is a very, very bad result. These kids will have three or four choices in their lives. They will either end up on a slab, end up in a mental institution or end up killing somebody else because of their actions, because they do not have control of the drug."

These were all sentiments with which we could get on board. A single mum, a sick kid, lack of help and nowhere to turn. I struggled to reconcile this person with the woman who wanted to ban the burqa, an utterly reprehensible campaign which ultimately failed, or with her reluctance to fund foreign aid. But this was a woman who was prepared to take risks, linking up with Clive Palmer, failing on celebrity television, promoting herself as a Rebel with a Cause, checking out war-torn Syria in her spare time. She was also hugely critical of this government's plans for the Family Court.

We don't often get a woman prepared to be a larrikin. The party system - and gendered expectations - knocks it out of them. Earlier this year, David Crowe described Lambie as an outsider in the comfortable world of the Senate. But now she's an outsider no more. On Wednesday, when she voted to repeal the Medevac laws, she did what every single insider would do. That is, she made a deal. She made excuses. And her staked claim to be honest, transparent and authentic is null.

We must now acknowledge that Lambie sees herself as a dealmaker, someone who can rein in the government and get an agreement on asylum seekers. But in the short term - and probably even in the long term - she's consigned people as sick as her son was to no prospect of reasonable help and no top quality care. Her son eventually got the support he needed to get off drugs, but ill asylum seekers won't. That's the deal insiders make. I'm unconvinced by her tears. She was stoic when sharing the story of her son. Why would she be more emotional now? Is it the knowledge she has just burned the respect of an entire country?

Lambie has been an on-again-off-again type of woman. First she's Palmer United, then she's not. First she's an Australian and then she's not. First she displays empathy and then she doesn't. Jacqui Lambie is not the politician she pretended to be. Australians who trusted her should do so no longer.