In a 1943 wartime broadcast on social security, Robert Menzies told the country that “there are amazing possibilities in every boy and girl”. The latest parliamentary recruit to the Liberal Party, Senator Lucy Gichuhi, is a striking testament to this great truism voiced by its founder. Born as one of ten children in a small Kenyan village outside Nairobi, the girl who spent her childhood on the dirt floors of a lowly bark hut today sits on the red leather of the Australian Senate.