Derryn Hinch five years on from liver transplant

AT 72 years of age, political aspirant and talkback radio legend Derryn Hinch is happy, healthy and busier than men half his age.

HOLD FOR SUNDAY HERALD SUN---Derryn Hinch on his life at the moment in Melbourne. Picture: Alex Coppel.

AT 72 years of age, political aspirant and talkback radio legend Derryn Hinch is happy, healthy and busier than men half his age.

The Human Headline survives on five hours of sleep most nights, a frantic pace for a man who came perilously close to death five years ago before a liver transplant.

“I saw the chief anaesthetist from my op at a function and he said, ‘Derryn, do you realise it was my decision to turn you on or off, and you know I came really really close to turning you off?’ I said to him, ‘I’m ­really thrilled you didn’t’.

“According to my surgeon, Bob Jones, I died on the table.

“I’ve held my own liver, I asked the doc, ‘Have you seen many as bad as that?’ and he said, ‘Usually at autopsies’.

“He said I had maybe two weeks left.”

Hinch is philosophical about his near-death experience and insists he has no plans to slow down.

“I just know now that I have got another chance,” he said.

“I’ll work till I die. My dad retired at 63, and then spent 32 years in God’s waiting room. And I always looked at that and said, ‘I’m never going to do that’.”

Hinch has launched the Justice Party, which will field candidates for the Senate at the federal election. The party’s focus is on law and order, traditionally a state issue, but Hinch believes that a national approach is needed.

He has called for a royal commission into the Family Court and child protection agencies.

“What happens with child welfare is horrific,” he said.

“The neglect and inconsistencies — kids being sent back to homes they shouldn’t be sent to and kids taken out of foster homes they shouldn’t be taken out of.”

Hinch has pledged not to succumb to the “dangerous Canberra bubble” and compromise his principles if he’s elected to the Senate this year.

“Neville Wran, after a bottle of chardonnay, once said: ‘By the time you get to the top you’re so covered in blood and s--- from all the deals you’ve had to make, you almost forget why you went there in the first place.’ That’s a very apt but terribly sad indictment on the system, I hope I just keep ­remembering that,” he said.

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