Recap: What Bob Day told Advertiser journalist Craig Cook before he entered the Senate
WHAT does Bob Day stand for? Advertiser journalist Craig Cook talked in depth with him before he took his Senate seat in 2013.
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WHAT does Bob Day stand for? Advertiser journalist Craig Cook talked in depth with him before he took his Senate seat in 2013.
BOB Day doesn’t have firm ideas about what constitutes a family.
“I don’t define a family as the nuclear family with mum and dad and two kids, it’s a lot more complicated than that,” the 61-year-old said. “Families supporting each other, that’s the important thing.”
If the numbers are right, the 10 pound Pom who grew up in a Housing Trust home in the northern suburbs will be a new Australian senator for the Family First Party next week.
Making sure families are “a lot more self-reliant” will be a priority when he enters Federal Parliament.
Family is important to Day, married with three children, and so is housing and the plight of the homeless.
Building houses with his national company, Home Australia, formerly Homestead Homes, has made him a wealthy man but the absolute cost of housing is something he will campaign to see lowered.
“We’ve got to get back to being able to buy a house on one wage,” he said.
“You shouldn’t need mum and dad both working full-time just to pay the mortgage or the rent on a house - that’s real bad stuff. We should look for an optimum of everyone having a job and being able to buy their own home.”
Despite little family money, he claims an “idyllic childhood” on the dirt roads and almond groves of the developing region of Gilles Plains.
Chemistry was his standout school subject and his proficiency helped him claim a job with the Highways Department as a lab technician at Pooraka.
After six years he knew he wasn’t cut out for the Public Service. A chance meeting with an old school friend saw him quit his job and study to become a plumber at night school, working on building sites to pay for it.
“I took to the building industry like a duck to water and built my first house in 1979,” he said.
“I registered the name Homestead Homes in 1983 and by 1990 we were building a thousand homes a year in Adelaide.”
A talented musician, he met his wife Bronte, a teacher from Ardrossan, during rehearsals for an amateur play.
They married in 1980 and still live in the same brick veneer house, at Houghton in the Adelaide Hills, he built during their courtship. They have three children - John, 25, Stephen, 23, and Joanna, 21 - who are similar ages to Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s daughters, Louise, Frances and Bridget.
“Tony and his family have been to our house and we’ve been very firm friends for some time,” Day said.
“I did once ask Tony if he believed in arranged marriages, thinking of our teenage boys, but he didn’t get back to me on that one.”
Day is expecting to catch up for a cosy chat with the Prime Minister soon but he never imagined it would be as members of different parties.
He was a dyed-in-the-wool Liberal, raising millions for the party, before he had a heated disagreement with Alexander Downer just after the former Australian Foreign Affairs Minister resigned from his federal seat of Mayo in 2008.
“Alexander told me that he would be the person who decided who would be the next member for Mayo,” Day said.
“That’s just not how I saw a plebiscite of around 600 members working.”
The same day the Downer- backed Jamie Briggs won the Liberal preselection for Mayo, Day resigned from the party.
The day after that, former Liberal Party president, and new Family First patriarch, Bob Randell, rang him to commiserate.
Within days, Day was announced as the Family First candidate for Mayo. The by-election was won by Briggs but Day won 11 per cent of the primary vote in another signal of the growing political influence of Family First.
In 2010 he failed in his first attempt to win a Senate seat, but with almost 93 per cent of the vote counted following the 2013 poll he stands to enter the halls of power almost a decade after Victorian Steven Fielding became the party’s first representative in Federal Parliament. Clem McIntyre, Head of the School of History and Politics at Adelaide University, believes the party won’t be over for some time.
“With their stress on family policy and a degree of social conservatism, Family First appeals to a particular group of voters who will remain loyal,” he said.
“In South Australia, with a quota to get elected to the Upper House of around 8 per cent I think they can expect to get one person elected at each election and I would expect Dennis Hood (current MLC) to be re-elected (at the state election) next year.”
McIntyre said Family First benefited from a “quirky” election flow in the federal election.
“They are very much a minor party, not a micro-party,” he added. “That’s why they are well placed, although I don’t see their primary vote ever getting much higher than 4 or 5 per cent.”
South Australian Family First MLC and another former Liberal, Robert Brokenshire, believes that with Day in Canberra Family First will have a stronger platform to take pressing state issues to a national audience.
“Bob’s an impressive individual with outstanding qualities to be a senator,” he said.
“I believe Bob will be listened to in Canberra and that can only be good for South Australia.”
Day, who claims his life has never been about “accumulating wealth”, says he has never been more comfortable in his political skin than he is with Family First.
“I’ve got a lot too thank Alexander (Downer) for,” he added with a laugh.
In Canberra he will hold firm his party’s line on controversial issues, such as same sex marriage. “We believe in traditional marriage which has stood the test of time,” Day, whose eldest child John gets married today, said.
“We’re a conservative party so we don’t believe in any changes to the Marriage Act.”
But there is one hot topic his party could see itself disagreeing with the Abbott Government.
“There is so much heat in the asylum seekers debate but Family First has a compassionate view towards the world’s poor,” the Senator-elect said.
“Our policy is to increase Australia’s contribution to foreign aid to 1 per cent of GNI (gross national income) up from 0.5 (per cent) currently which is in direct opposition to the new government’s approach.”
Day’s political hero is Bert Kelly, minister in the governments of Holt and Gorton, who fought a long but successful battle to remove Australia’s trade tariffs.
“Bert Kelly was the greatest politician of all time and he did it on his own,” Day, who is chairman of the Bert Kelly Research Centre at Fullarton, added. “My plan in Canberra is to do a Bert Kelly. He’s written the play book for me.”