Derryn Hinch on turning 75, his new love interest and politics
On his 75th birthday, Australia’s oldest federal politician Derryn Hinch, reveals his desire to stay in politics until his 80s, his new love interest and his plan take his own life if his cancer returns.
Australia’s oldest federal politician Derryn Hinch turned 75 yesterday — and declared he wants to take his own life if his cancer returns.
Despite that vow, the former radio shock jock, cancer survivor and prisoner has hit the campaign trail ahead of the May election, running on the slogan of Unfinished Business, because, in his words, “there is a lot more to do”.
If Hinch is re-elected in May he will receive a six-year term, meaning he will be 81 when he next faces voters. It will make him one of the oldest Australians to ever serve in the Senate.
Yet he has vowed not to last that long if his liver cancer returns.
Hinch said he plans to use Victoria’s voluntary euthanasia laws to take his own life in that case.
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“When the quality of my life drops below what I accept as a standard I can wear, I am out of here,” Hinch said.
“I am a great believer that suicide is your greatest civil right.
“It can be selfish because of the people you leave behind, but I watched my mother die, she had no modesty, I don’t want that.”
Our 576th senator said he wants to make it easier for all Australians with terminal illnesses to end their lives.
Hinch will also campaign to overhaul the family court, improve foster care, ban live animal exports and improve the national redress scheme for survivors of sexual abuse.
Many of those who wrote off Hinch’s 2016 senate bid as just another stunt have long since acknowledged his success on the crossbench, where few manage to influence, let alone deliver policy outcomes.
A public register of child sex offenders, a ban on vaginal mesh implants and stopping child sex offenders travelling overseas have all been ticked off Hinch’s to do list during his first term as a Senator.
As with most experiences in Hinch’s life, his push to revoke the passports of convicted paedophiles came about by chance.
Shortly after he was elected, Hinch was asked to speak at a lunch in Melbourne where he was handed a handwritten note from Australian actor Rachel Griffiths via the event’s MC Michael Rowland, who had interviewed her that morning.
“She (Griffith) had scribbled this letter to me and I am reading it on the way to the dais, it said: ‘Derryn, how come if you are a bankrupt you can’t go overseas but if you are a sex offender you can?”.
So began Hinch’s campaign to ban sex offenders travelling overseas.
“On December the 2nd (2017), I got a phone call from the prime minister and he said ‘Derryn it’s Malcolm, I just want you to be the first to know they turned the first one back in Sydney today’.
“I stood and cried in my lounge room. I thought you can achieve stuff, you can get stuff done,” he said.
In many ways that anecdote is an illustration of Derryn Hinch’s life, one characterised by chance and circumstance. His former wife Hollywood actor Jacki Weaver — who he married twice between 1983 and 1997 — refers to him as Forrest Gump, in reference to his 75-year adventure that has seen him turn incidents and obstacles in to opportunities.
“Jacki used to say my life is crowded with incident,” Hinch said.
“I have watched Derryn Hinch go to jail; I have watched Derryn Hinch get shot at; I have watched Derryn Hinch have a liver transplant and I have watched Derryn Hinch get elected to parliament.”
“I spend my whole life feeling like I am sitting outside it watching. Perhaps it’s a way of coping.”
Love him or loathe him, it’s difficult to ignore Derryn Hinch. The New Zealand-born senator started his journalism career at New Zealand’s Taranaki Herald in 1959 at the age of 15, before treading a well-worn path to Australia.
In Sydney he worked as crime reporter on The Sunbefore landing a plum job at Fairfax’s North American bureau where he covered some of the biggest stories in the 1960s and early 70s including the death of Martin Luther King, the moon landing and Watergate.
“At 25, I stood metres from Armstrong, Collins and Aldrin as they walked out waving to their families heading off to the moon thinking they may never come back.” he said.
Of all Hinch’s tales, of which there are many, his memories of Martin Luther King’s funeral in 1968 at the Ebenezer Baptist Church has never left him.
“I had all the right accreditation to be in the church but as soon as Vice-President Hubert Humphrey was in the church they slammed the doors,” he said.
“We couldn’t get in.”
Never one to take no for an answer, Hinch and another Australian journalist saw the choir entering the church through a side entrance and snuck in among the singers.
After fumbling through the gospel songs during the Baptist service, Hinch exited the church alongside the mourners back into the streets of Atlanta.
“I found myself walking next to the singer Eartha Kitt and she was kicking her bare feet in to the stones, almost like flagellation, it’s as if she wanted to make her feet bleed. It was the most amazing thing.”
Walking in front of Hinch was Senator Robert F. Kennedy — brother of assassinated President John F. Kennedy.
“His shoulders were stooped like he was carrying all the worries of the world,” Hinch recalled.
A little over eight weeks later Hinch would be sitting in the bar of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles where Bobby Kennedy was fatally shot.
Perhaps it’s experiences likes these — of lives cut short — that have ensured Hinch has no fear of death. When he was diagnosed with inoperable liver cancer in 2007, brought on by heavy drinking, he said he simply “accepted it”.
“I mean, I want to be around, but I was realistic,” he said.
In July 2011, Hinch was given a second chance when he received a call to say a donor organ was available while awaiting sentencing after being found guilty of four counts of breaching a suppression order.
Hinch, and his new liver, ended up in jail in 2014 when he spent 50 nights locked up alongside some of Victoria’s most serious offenders. Inside he met a prisoner who had been a close friend of his organ donor.
“I said to him: ‘Come here the three of us are together again’ and he started sobbing,” Hinch said.
Despite swearing off alcohol following his operation, the self-confessed Human Headline has repeatedly come under fire for his decision to keep drinking wine, which he says he waters down.
“People have really been after me over it,” he said.
“But I made a decision, I want to live my life.”
Having interviewed every consecutive prime minister from Menzies to Turnbull during their time in office, Hinch admits he approaches his role as a Senator as if he were still a journalist. Demanding answers and action from those in power. But it’s that unwavering desire to expose the truth that saw him repeatedly sacked, jailed and led to controversies that have marred his career.
After a decade reporting in the United States, Hinch returned to Australia the early 70s as editor of the Sydney Sun before joining Melbourne radio station 3AW in 1979.
He went on to become one of Australia’s most popular shock-jocks with unprecedented ratings for a morning radio host. His on-air success led to a successful television career.
But in the 1990s Hinch lost his fortune, his career dried up and he went through his fourth divorce. At his low point Hinch had less than $10 in his bank account, was unemployed and drinking too much.
As recently as January, Hinch came under fire after tweeting graphic details about the attack that killed Arab-Israeli exchange student Aya Maasarwe in Melbourne.
“They tore me to shreds,” Hinch said.
“I know why I did it, I did it for the right reasons.”
Throughout his controversial career Hinch has remained unapologetic and insisted he has no regrets.
“My biggest lows have been personal,” he said. “Probably my lowest day would be when a former fiance who I loved (Prisoner actor Lynda Stoner) walked away.”
“I have done my bit of hurting but I have taken a few too. That hollow feeling in your gut when you can’t eat — a broken heart is the best diet in the world.”
With chance encounters dominating his life, it seems fitting that Hinch has recently rekindled his romance with Ms Stoner who he describes as the “one that broke my heart”.
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