WHEN some wag set up a fake Twitter account called DoogiehowserMP in an attempt to lampoon new Queensland MP Wyatt Roy, the young Mr Roy had to do a little quick research.
He didn't know who Doogie Howser MD was. He wasn't born when the improbable comedy about a 16-year-old prodigy and medical doctor first hit the world's TV screens in 1989.
Mr Roy is 20. He looks as if he's been shaving for two years and cut himself both times.
At an age when plenty of young men might be surfing, chasing girls and getting thrown out of late-night bars (or, it ought to be mentioned, getting shot at by the Taliban in Afghanistan), Mr Roy was striding into Federal Parliament yesterday to attend his first meeting as a member of the opposition.
Was this youngest-ever member of an Australian parliament fazed by the moment?
Not a bit of it.
''I'm excited to be in for the first time, as everybody is, and I'm excited to take what I did through the campaign to Canberra,'' he said with disarming poise. Parliament, he added, was a very inspiring institution.
With that, he set off to take a seat in the Liberal Party room next to Philip Ruddock, 47 years his senior and the longest-serving member of Federal Parliament. Perhaps it was an instinctive thing for the boy MP: Mr Ruddock has been Father of the House of Representatives since 1998, when Mr Roy was eight years old.
Peter Costello, someone pointed out later, had predicted during the election campaign that Mr Roy would be prime minister by 2035.
''Well, I didn't challenge today,'' said the whippersnapper, exhibiting the sort of cool that dissuaded any further attempts to reel him into a conceited howler that might haunt him for years. Indeed, no one challenged anyone in either the Coalition or the Labor Party as a swirl of suits herded through the halls of Parliament to ruminate en masse upon the most peculiar federal election result in history.
With Labor forming government with the barest numbers possible thanks to its alliance with a cocktail of independents and a Green, and the Coalition greedily eyeing that precarious arrangement, a facade of unity and discipline was crucial.
''This is a great team - a band of brothers and sisters,'' enthused Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, quite ignoring that he'd had to head off an attempt to topple his deputy, Julie Bishop, not 24 hours previously.
Prime Minister Julie Gillard tenderly placed her hand on the backs of new Labor MPs as they signed the caucus book, clearly aware each of these pitifully few numbers was as precious as a drop of water in a desert.
The Axis of Ego, Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, took care to remain mute on the edges of the fizz of their respective party meetings, content for now, perhaps, in the knowledge they will both begin their rehabilitation with senior frontbench jobs.
You had to cross the entire island continent to witness a properly unleashed storm of fury, although the sound of Wilson Tuckey's anguish could be heard clear from his home in Perth to Canberra.
Mr Tuckey, you might be sure, is not happy to have been unseated by the independent National Tony Crook.
Mr Crook, he roared, ''is a nobody''. ''I await his vision in his maiden speech when I think he believes the entire Parliament will turn up to listen to him. Well, he'll be lucky to have others there than his relatives.''
Tuckey ranted for three-quarters of an hour.
You could only hope that Mr Roy did not hear any of it, for fear it would horrify him to know this is how it can end and put him off politics forever.
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