Stuart Robert would take meetings with people during parliamentary sitting days while deliberately starving himself. The then minister for government services and the National Disability Insurance Scheme was proud of it, actually. He told anyone who would listen that he ate nothing, sometimes for days in a row, while the nation’s MPs were in Canberra working their longest hours. “Do you know why?” he said to one person with whom he was meeting in late 2019, before taking the liberty to answer his own question. “Because I can.”