Former National Party senator Ron Boswell details near-death experience

Former National Party senator Ron Boswell has actually died twice - both times a medical team managed to bring him back to life. This is what he remembers as he was almost “dragged across the line”.

Then Senator Ron Boswell calls former prime minister John Howard in 2004 to inform him that he now has control of the senate. Picture: Liam Kidston.

He always swam against the tide, even as it was taking him out, and now the elder statesman of Queensland politics is trying to convince others to do the same.

Ron Boswell, businessman, National Party senator and Queensland political operative for nearly half a century, was dying in a Brisbane hospital in November 2019.

More to the point, he had actually died, twice. The medical team had revived him – but he remembers how he felt as death approached.

“I could feel myself being dragged across the line, and I remember being determined I wasn’t going to go,’’ he recalls.

As he lay in intensive care after complications arose after he went in for a simple knee replacement, he could observe his own body tied by tubes to electronic boxes with flashing lights and beeping sounds.

People with shower caps drifted in and out of view and a parade of distinguished visitors to his bedside underscored the gravity of his situation.

When he told hospital staff that former prime minister John Howard was coming to visit him, they thought he was delusional.

Former politician Ron Boswell at his home in East Brisbane. Picture: Liam Kidston

The then-79-year-old was a retired 30-year veteran of the Australian Senate and felt like a knight back from the crusades, “weary, wounded and about to be carried out on his shield”.

While he was willing to fight death, he doesn’t remember being particularly afraid of it, and he recalls three people trying to talk him out of it.

One was former Senate colleague Barry O’Sullivan, another was Queensland Supreme Court judge Tom Bradley and the third was a young Kingaroy dairy farmer, Damien Tessmann.

Each of them was insistent that he had more to do in his earthly life. And so, after declining to cross the River Styx, Boswell spent around four more months recuperating and pondering what his final mission was before it finally dawned on him: “I’ll write a book!’’

Ron Boswell: Not Pretty But Pretty Effective is the result.

Written by Boswell and beautifully edited by speechwriter and adviser Joanna Newberry, it takes the reader on a fast clip through nearly half a century of state and federal political life, from the “Joh for Canberra’’ push to the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party in the last part of the 20th century.

Ron Boswell walking past a protester wearing a Pauline Hanson mask as he enters the LNP campaign launch of Tim Nicholls at Brisbane’s The Triffid during the Queensland Election campaign in 2017. Picture: AAP Image / Darren England

The title is a nod to one of the nation’s more successful political campaigns when Boswell launched an all-out bid to retain his Senate seat, competing directly with Hanson and One Nation.

The homely looking Boswell, who always carried a little heft and whose persona could best be described as one of “genial bellicosity”, was successfully sold to the Queensland electorate as a man whose workmanlike approach to politics transcended his lack of cosmetic appeal.

In the 319-page tome, Boswell makes three crucial points. Firstly, more people with experience in small business and ordinary working life should enter politics. Secondly, politicians can still make positive change in the nation if they are willing to swim against the tide. And, thirdly, the often-troubled marriage between the Nationals and the Liberals is crucial to the success of both parties in fighting the Australian Labor Party.

On the last point, the man who stood up for small retailers against supermarkets, for fishers and farmers against onerous regulation, and for the family-run licensed post office receiving paltry pay when Australia Post was making profits of more than $300m a year, has never worshipped at the altar of the free market.

. Ron Boswell and wife Leita. Picture: David Kelly.

The Liberals, he says, have every right to represent free enterprise, but it’s the Nationals who are concerned with private enterprise.

He notes that a small grocer battling to stay afloat while a giant supermarket opens nearby can be a positive both for the consumer and the wider economy, but few small grocers win that battle.

As he explains in his book: “The Nationals have traditionally believed in government intervention in imperfect markets characterised by an imbalance of market power which we call private enterprise.’’

On the first point, he is evangelical about the need for working people and small businesspeople – who he still believes are the foundational rock of both our economy and of our culture of egalitarianism – to put their hand up for public office.

“It is hard to put your head above the parapet and maybe get shot at,’’ he acknowledges, while also conceding the rewards for a political career are not what they once were.

When then-Labor leader Mark Latham successfully pushed for an end to the generous parliamentary superannuation scheme two decades ago, forcing the hand of then-prime minister John Howard to do the same, Boswell was in the party room warning the nation would pay a price because the quality of politicians would decline.

Terry Nolan and Ron Boswell at Nolan's Gympie abattoir.

Bodies such as the Integrity Commission also have the power to investigate politicians’ lives in minute detail and could easily become the “puppets of ambitious individuals with their own agendas and integrity deficits who persecute from on high and destroy people without just cause”.

And yet for Boswell, who will be 84 at the end of the year, a career in politics for someone determined to both maintain their personal integrity and do something positive to assist their fellow human beings, is worth all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune so often flung at politicians.

“I’d do it all over again if I could,’’ he said.

Ron Boswell Not Pretty But Pretty Effective is published by Connor Court Publishing and available in most book shops.