8 times Sarah Ferguson totally smashed it out of the park on 7.30.

At the start of this year, there was a distinctly Leigh-Sales-shaped hole in our nightly-news-watching hearts. But, over the past six months, a Sarah-Ferguson-shaped plug may well have filled it.

After making the temporary move from Four Corners to 7:30, Sarah Ferguson has proven that she is willing to take anyone and everyone to task. Her ability to ask the hard questions was highlighted after she made Clive Palmer storm out on the program recently:

Here are 8 other times Sarah Ferguson smashed it out of the proverbial park.

1. She artfully taught Joe Hockey the meaning of the word “promise”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPDBi3o3WQw

2. And respectfully managed Christopher Pyne, when he definitely did not afford her the same respect:

3. She took Bill Shorten to task about union corruption:

4. She runs a damn good Twitter account.

Where else can you get insightful retweets of foreign policy cheat sheets, clarifications of ABC stories, Australian news as it happens… and this:

CAPTION?! @guardian: Kim Jong-un on a submarine – in pictures http://t.co/qJExFwGft4 pic.twitter.com/KHXwpdFMRw”

— Sarah Ferguson (@FergusonNews) June 16, 2014

Seriously, follow her here.

5. Still worshipping her social media presence, this is her Twitter picture:

Damn right, bitchez.

6. She proved that Palmer United Party senator Dio Wang kind of didn’t really know anything about, well, the Palmer United Party:

SARAH FERGUSON: Part of these allegations also include a very specific allegation from CITIC, the Chinese company, that money from the fund it’s set up with Clive Palmer’s company was being used for work on another project run by your company, Australasian Resources. Is that what happened?

DIO WANG: Sometimes I’m not really across that specific invoices, but sometimes when the engineer – engineering companies do the work, they forget to change their invoice, the recipient of the invoice and the name of the recipient of the invoice. So, it could be that they made a mistake putting my company on that invoice.

SARAH FERGUSON: Given how public those allegations are, have you not checked whether or not those invoices properly belong to Australasian Resources?

DIO WANG: No, I haven’t checked, but I did talk to my accountant and company secretary. They don’t believe the allegations are right.

SARAH FERGUSON: Do you know what the invoices were for?

DIO WANG: From what I read, it’s about port engineering work, and from memory, we didn’t ask the company to do any work on the port.

SARAH FERGUSON: Shouldn’t you be pursuing this matter with a lot more energy than you seem to be?

Read the full transcript here.

7. The following three lines opened her Fairfax profile last week:

“That’s my tomato!” cries Sarah Ferguson, journalist and Caprese salad enthusiast, as the waiter tries to clear plates in preparation for the next course.

“I didn’t think it was a special tomato,” the waiter replies.

“It’s special to me. And so is this basil,” she says sweetly, and dispatches both.

Read the whole thing here.

8. And she gave this answer to the Walkley Foundation’s Storyology Summit website:

Who or what inspires you to get out of bed in the morning?

I don’t need inspiration to get out of bed but pioneering female journalists would be the source of inspiration if I needed urging. I hope I would have been as brave as them.

You can read the rest of her Q&A here.

Are you loving Sarah Ferguson on 7.30?