Why ‘human headline’ Derryn Hinch is sick of ‘woke nonsense’ and plans to fight for you in ‘22

He’s been married four times, survived liver cancer, exposed paedophiles and gone to jail for his convictions but at 78 ‘human headline’ Derryn Hinch isn’t ready to just go away.

Derryn Hinch learned a big lesson decades ago. His father, Dick, retired at 62, then spent 32 years in “God’s waiting room”.

Dick Hinch didn’t craft wooden toys anymore. He didn’t volunteer. As Hinch puts it, his father did crosswords. And scuffed the carpet with his foot. And waited to go away.

Hinch got on well with his father, who was very proud of his son. Yet on some innate level, Hinch decided “that that’s not going to happen to me”.

This example helps explain what Hinch calls a “last hurrah”. He is applying for a new job – state politician – which would occupy him until he is 82.

The main reason? Hinch isn’t ready to go away just yet.

Hinch seems less puffed up these days. More contented. He still divides the world into right and wrong.

But Hinch appears to have shed that jumped-up energy which propelled so many flashpoints. His tabloid zeal, the tendency to divide the world into heroes or zeros, has softened.

Nor does he miss his unique bubble of righteousness and controversy that saw him dominate the Melbourne airwaves for so long.

Hinch may be 78 but he feels 50 and has no plans to slow down. Picture: David Caird

“Throughout my life, I’ve enjoyed doing what I’m doing,” he says.

“If I was offered a job on radio now working five-days-a-week, I wouldn’t take it. I’ve moved on and I suspect radio has moved on, too.”

Yes, Hinch will always hunt affronts to decency, such as paedophile rights and inadequate sentences.

He is most annoyed by anti-vaxxers right now – they’re dangerous.

He rails against unsafe cyclists and mechanised scooters.

Greens’ Adam Bandt’s treatment of the Australian flag was “disgraceful”. Woke “nonsense”? It’s gone too far, he says. What the hell is “chest-feeding”?

Yet Hinch has to be led to these trigger points, as he sips coffee in his preferred St Kilda Rd Italian restaurant.

His candour, as always, can be disarming, as he speaks of past relationship regrets and meeting the family of a liver donor who has spotted him an extra 11 years of life and counting.

Yet Hinch is no longer clamouring to be heard, as he once did, from a DIY soapbox.

The ‘human headline’, the label which he reluctantly accepts will go to the grave with him, has evolved. Hinch has settled on a ‘human sideline’, a thinker who seeks to build things up as much as tear them down.

He talks about life moments, such as reporting live on the Apollo 11 moon launch at Cape Kennedy in 1969 and choosing to go to jail for contempt of court instead of playing by the legal rules.

Yet he is not haunted by mistakes nor seeking to inflate the historical wins. He feels no grudges, describing hate as an “awful word”.

Instead, Hinch is just as likely to chat about the daily pleasure of Wordle and the benefits of a (mostly) non-meat diet. He describes goings-on around his apartment, where he tends to citrus trees in his balcony garden, as a kind of happy pottering.

Hinch hopes to harness the disenchantment for major parties expressed at the federal election in his political comeback. Picture: Lukas Coch

His mind remains sharp, but there are concessions to age. He always uses the rail now to walk down stairs. He has swapped the trademark RMs (with the Cuban heels) for comfortable walking shoes. He talks about long walks – if he smells the roses, he also photographs them.

Hinch once looked older than he was; now he looks younger than he is. He’s 78, but feels 50, and he still boasts more hair than most men of that younger generation.

He wants one more chance to pursue what he thinks of as a higher calling. His political slogan? “Fighting For You In 22”.

ON UNFINISHED POLITICAL BUSINESS AND LIVER TRANSPLANT

Hinch was elected to the federal senate in2016.He got some things done, such as a bar on paedophiles travelling overseas. He lobbied for nurse-to-patient ratios in aged care, and kickstarted aspects of the transgender debate.

He discovered, belatedly, that there is more power – and at times satisfaction – from working from within the system rather than huffing from the outside.

Hinch was the oldest federal senator to ever be elected. His electoral loss in 2019 hurt far more than any of the 16 times he had been sacked as a journalist.

Citing “unfinished business”, he wants to recapture the honour and privilege of being an elected representative when he stands in the state election in November.

Hinch will run in the western metropolitan region, where one of his Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party candidates won in 2018. Hinch and that candidate, Catherine Cumming, fell out soon after that election.

“It’s her job I’m after,” he says.

Hinch hopes to harness the disenchantment for major parties expressed at the federal election. Should he be elected, and his two current party representatives Stuart Grimley and Tania Maxwell re-elected, Hinch believes they would be “a force to be reckoned with”.

He decries a lack of transparency in the Andrews Government (his Justice Party members voted against changes to pandemic legislation last year).

Hinch announcing his resignation from radio station 3AW in 1987. “That’s Life. Goodbye,” will be played at his funeral.

He wants sex offender registries to be public and judges to be held to account by an oversight panel. As he puts it, if the Bourke St tragedy happened 15 years ago, you’d ask if the culprit was on bail. These days, you’d assume that he was.

Hinch is well qualified to speak about problems of ambulance ramping. A decade ago, gravely ill with septicaemia, he faced a hospital bypass.

He left the ambulance, rang for his hire car, and delivered himself to the emergency department of the nearby hospital, where he gratefully received a bed in the maternity ward. That way, he worked out, a hospital cannot turn you away.

Nature intended that Hinch would go away at about this time, when his liver was riddled with tumours. Hinch, an atheist, approached imminent death with an irrepressible optimism of one who has never lacked faith in himself.

He boasted almost no symptoms for his terminal illness. The shadow of death did not slow his skitter. Asked at a corporate lunch at that time what he was about to talk about on stage, he answered “me”, as if surprised by a silly question.

He probably had weeks to live when a transplant liver became available; later, as only Hinch would, he held his diseased liver in his hands for the TV cameras. He would later meet the family of his donor, a drug dealer who at 28 took his own life. Hinch learned of the family’s ad hoc decision, in the hospital, to donate the organs and save at least three lives.

For him, the meetings were “unreal” and “awkward”.

“You’ve got part of their family inside you, and for them it must be a very weird experience, so you’ve got to be very sensitive about it,” he says.

In prison, Hinch met a very close friend of the donor, a standover type, who Hinch recognised in a photo given to him by the donor’s family.

“I patted myself on the chest and said to him, ‘well, here’s the three of us together’, and this big, tough guy burst into tears,” he says.

ON WORDLE OBSESSION AND PLANNING HIS FUNERAL

Hinch wakes at 6.30am each day and starts Wordle before he gets out of bed. He is so fixated on the word game, which unites young and old, the bright and dim, that he wrote a book about it.

He has tips for players: use different vowels and consonants from the previous day’s answer; treat “y” as a sixth vowel. He has flunked twice in 134 attempts, he explains, but has also been “guilty of applauding myself alone in my bedroom when I get a clever one”.

He took to exercise almost three years ago, walking 5km, six days a week. He hasn’t eaten a steak in 20-odd years, preferring vegetarian or vegan food occasionally with chicken.

Hinch’s partner, actor and animal rights campaigner Lynda Stoner, influences his diet. They catch up when they can – she’s in Sydney – after reconnecting almost 40 years after she broke off their engagement.

“She’s wonderful,” Hinch says. “When you’ve known someone for so long it’s pretty comfortable. We know exactly where we stand on everything – and we don’t agree on everything either.”

Hinch will never live with anyone – he and ex-wife Chanel kept separate apartments in the same block. He’s too “selfish”, he concedes. He would rather disappear for hours into work, such as writing, than feel compelled to entertain a romantic partner.

Derryn Hinch and Jacki Weaver in 1983. The pair are still in close contact, many years after divorcing.

As he puts it: “My own company doesn’t piss me off.”

Hinch, who has been married four times, is proud to be on friendly terms with his significant exes (bar one). Yet among his romances lies his biggest (and perhaps only) life regret. He hurt some women, he says. Some of his break-up choices were “not very stylish”.

Hinch corresponds with ex-wife Jacki Weaver, who found belated Hollywood stardom in her 60s, almost daily.

“If you had a relationship then it must’ve meant something to you,” he says. “Things can run their course and people grow apart, but you can’t ignore that once you had a relationship, and you should cherish it.”

In answer to the question that people still ask, yes, he’ll have an odd glass of sauvignon blanc or pinot gris. But he shudders at the excessive boozing of his younger days. “We thought it was a badge of honour,” he says.
“We used to say, you know, we’re drinking for Australia. It was bloody stupid.”

If politically unsuccessful, he will fall back to other things which please him.

Hinch had a liver transplant after it was found the vital organ was riddled with tumours.

News TV appearances. And writing – there have been 15 books. And seeing if the screenplay he dabbled with over 20 years can be made into a film.

He’s a walking target for Covid, he laughs, given the immune system suppressants he takes for his transplant liver. He calls them his “Elvis pills”. As long as he takes them, he hasn’t left the building.

The recent loss of his sister turns the chat to Hinch’s own funeral. He recorded his signature on-air sign-off before departing 3AW. At the end of his funeral, the audio clip – “That’s Life. Goodbye” – will be played to the mourners.

Not that it will be anytime soon, he says. Well, he hopes not. “I mean what can you do?” he says. “You’ve gotta be realistic about it. If you’re gonna go, you’re gonna go.”