If he weren't already gainfully employed in the Ministry of Sport, Anil Roberts might have made himself useful in the Ministry of the People, where there is a vacancy for a speechwriter.

Making his maiden speech in the Lower House on Friday, Mr Roberts began with a tongue-in-cheek commendation of his predecessor as minister, Gary Hunt, for commissioning an audit of the Sport Company.

Then he waded into a statement on the scandalous contents of the report. He combined outrage with humour, deafening volume and rough-and-ready style (if you overlook one or two off-colour jokes about the butt of the giant flagpole at the Hasely Crawford Stadium).

Mr Roberts occasionally waved the auditors' report, which was over 50 pages long, but didn't feel obliged to read it from start to finish. Instead he consulted it only occasionally as he gave what he accurately described as "a synopsis of the madness."

The Sport Company had never had a tenders committee. Contracts were awarded on the basis of a single quotation. The scope of contracts was cut without a corresponding drop in price. Executives leased BMWs for themselves, yet could not find money to buy $300 tracksuits for national cyclists going to compete overseas.

The bumptious Mr Roberts was blunt and down to earth, ending with a neat, vicious double jab at the former prime minister, whom he scornfully dubbed "the 12th man over there." Turning Mr Manning's own accusatory question against him, he wanted to know: "Where the money gone?"

He had plenty to say, but left his hearers wanting more, in complete contrast to the next new MP to speak.

Mr Roberts had several advantages, however. He's a radio talk show host and likes nothing better than public speaking. And he was attacking something that had taken place under the previous regime.

Dr Glenn Ramadharsingh, however, wasn't trying to uncover facts; he may even have been attempting to do the opposite, though it was impossible to tell.

Dr Ramadharsingh, the Minister of the People, piloted a bill that he said would implement the Government's campaign promise to reinstate and increase old age pensions.

The bill is only three clauses long—but Dr Ramadharsingh made up for that with a 34-page speech. After all, by his account this was the little bill that could: it will "close the gap between the haves and the have-nots," he claimed hyperbolically.

In fact the bill will mean that of citizens who "attain the pensionable age of 65," those who qualify will receive "a maximum allowable pension [of] $3,000 a month." That's not the $3,000 for everyone over 60 promised in the election manifesto, although Dr Ramadharsingh, naturally, wasn't anxious to advertise that fact. That was still to come, he admitted, somewhere in the folds and wrinkles of his vast, baggy speech, whose subject was not so much the bill as anything he could think of that could somehow be connected with old age.

Dr Ramadharsingh cited studies that revealed the unsurprising fact that old people worried about their health and finances. He spoke of barrel children, dietary grants, the oil-based economy, the Prime Minister's charisma, and Sicily in the fourth century BC. He redefined development and approved of Emancipation.

Sometimes he remembered his actual topic, but that didn't necessarily help. He aimed for poignancy but missed when he clunkily evoked a 65-year-old grandmother for whom an additional $500 "represents the ability to maintain an appropriate level of nutritional security in her household."

The sad thing was that huge amounts of work had gone into this speech.

There was a laboured, tired metaphor about the ship of state going off course ("askewed," as Dr Ramadharsingh put it) that went on for paragraphs. Had you received one of the sealed "media packages" containing a copy of what he said, you would have found it even included a colour print of a lush 19th-century painting, complete with nubile maidens, illustrating—heaven knows why—the story of the sword of Damocles. (Note to Dr Ramadharsingh: you don't pronounce the "w" in "sword," and "obsequious" has an "e" in the middle.)

As if that weren't enough, the wordy minister quoted Wendell Mottley, Alice in Wonderland, Oscar Wilde—the last writer an MP should quote; Parliament is no place for irony. He massacred an irrelevant quotation from Charlotte Bronte (the "blendness" and "spurrence" of youth?). He dragged in someone called Alphonse Karr, who turned out to have written, "The more things change, the more they are the same" (which Dr Ramadharsingh rashly attempted in French).

Until he can hire a competent speechwriter, there are a few useful rules that Dr Ramadharsingh can salvage from Friday's wreckage.

If you must use big words—in fact, any words—make sure you know how to pronounce them ("Damocles" comes to mind). If you have to look up suitable quotations to put into your speech: don't. And you can save yourself a lot of work by remembering that, as Mr Roberts so nimbly demonstrated, brevity is the soul of wit.