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Palmer United Party Senator Jacqui Lambie has declared that Clive Palmer is not her "boss", while calling on her leader to be more honest and spend less time "clowning around".
As well as revealing her occasional tensions with Mr Palmer in a profile for the ABC'S Australian Story, the Tasmanian senator reflected on her time as a military police officer and her attempted suicide after she was medically discharged from the armed forces.
While saying she is in "awe" of Mr Palmer, Lambie said she had clashed with him over whether the party should support the abolition of the $820 a year schoolkids' bonus.
"I think Clive Palmer needs to be a lot more honest across the table with me and stop clowning around at times, because that really annoys me," she said.
"I'm a person of action and I want it done and I want to know what's going on.
"I don't back down to Clive Palmer and I shouldn't have to. Even a billionaire needs to be told every now and then.
"Clive Palmer might be my leader but Clive Palmer's not my boss. The Tasmanian people are my boss and that's it, full stop."
Although independent MP Andrew Wilkie told the ABC that Senator Lambie had already outgrown her party, Lambie said she planned to remain in the PUP.
"I definitely can see myself staying," she said. "I think we're established.
"I need to keep Clive Palmer off the Tim Tams so I can keep him alive long enough to keep mentoring me."
The daughter of a truck-driver father and factory shift-worker mother, Lambie spent her teenage years in public housing and did not complete high school.
She became an army driver, before moving into the military police - an experience she says she loved. But she said some of the male officers were "arseholes" who tried to break down the female recruits.
"They just were not going to break me," she said. "I did take a swing and, at somebody and he was the same rank that I was. The problem was that it was a time and place and I should have done it out the back.
"Um, so, when I had a second chance, not at him, at somebody else, it was done out the back."
After 10 years in the armed forces, Lambie was medically discharged following a back injury. The Department of Veterans Affair put her under surveillance, accused her of malingering and eventually terminated her compensation payments.
Lambie - a single mother with two sons - said she suffered six years of depression, including drug and alcohol abuse.
"Most days you'll wake up and think I've really got to take my life," she said.
"I'm of no benefit to my own children let alone anybody else. I'd written a letter to the boys each and left them in my drawer and I just said, 'Right here's a perfect opportunity'. I had a few drinks and off I went.
"I walked out in front of a car, I'd had enough, I'd had a gutful. That was it, I was finished, I was gone."
Lambie said she got her life back on track after 18 months of therapy and decided to enter politics to advocate for veterans' rights. She joined the PUP after writing to Mr Palmer about her frustrations with the bureaucracy.
"We realised the quality of her character and what she stood for, that she was a genuine person and we thought it was important to have a, a woman of, of her strength and character in the team," Palmer said.
