Michael Madigan: Tim Fischer was generous, witty and whimsical — that’s why we adored him

Whimsical, charming and humble — Tim Fischer wasn’t just a political leader, he set an example of how to live an inspiring life. We will never experience an Australian politician like him again, Michael Madigan writes.

He was thoughtful enough to donate windsocks to regional airports that had become dear to him, entertaining enough to set a table roaring with an off-the-cuff witticism, generous enough to raffle off his trademark hat to raise money for charity and odd enough to write an entire book on steam trains.

“We won’t see his like again’’ is not just another cliche to throw about in the wake of Australia’s loss of Tim Fischer.

Never again will the Australian political class throw up a man so magnificently aberrant, so determinedly yet so unselfconsciously original, so unabashed about that endearing naivety he somehow combined with extraordinary political sophistication.

We will never again see an Australian politician like Tim Fischer. Picture: News Corp

Federal political reporters of the 1990s such as myself who never quite made the A team were assigned to “Two Minute Tim’’ when federal election campaigns loomed, panting along behind him as he reinvigorated the “Wombat Trail’’ first brought to life by National leader Doug Anthony in the 1970s.

In the 1998 campaign he managed 14 different destination from Canberra to Perth in five days, swooping from a ship moored in Darwin Harbour to a Karratha pastoral conference, taking in abattoirs and sale yards and bakeries and back paddocks where men on battered Massey Fergusons looked up startled to see the Deputy Prime Minister, waving his hat wildly and lunging along a newly ploughed drill because he wanted to talk to them.

He was genuinely at home in the Australian regions among the people and the memorial halls and sheep sale yards and those isolated airstrips where livestock have to be shooed away before take off.

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Once during a campaign his gaze appeared to linger wistfully out the window as he sat in a light aircraft before take off at a regional NSW airport, his demeanour troubling enough for me to ask if he was getting a little fatigued from the campaigning.

He shook his head and pointed to a windsock, explaining that he had once donated it and always looked for it when he visited the airport, but was concerned that it was becoming a little frayed around the edges.

The 1998 campaign was GST election and on the Wombat Trail he could deliver long, complex and economically sophisticated dissertations on the GST’s expected impact on rural dwellers, veer sharply off subject to deliver a commentary on the prospects of rain at his beloved Boree Creek farm, then swiftly return to the complex machinations of macro economics.

Tim Fischer playing pool at a Rockhampton pub in about 1993. Picture: News Corp

Rural audiences would gaze at him during these rants in state of utter bewilderment before smiles would appear, almost involuntarily, around mouths, and the irresistible charm of a man who seemed to me to make no real little effort to charm won them over, utterly.

To reporters he was a walking quote, to photographers a living, breathing photo opportunity.

I once told him directly that he appeared to me to be more a regional newspaper chief-of-staff than politician, and I suspect he took it as a compliment.

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I still have vivid memories of him at sundown in a remote part of north Western Australia, sitting down hunched up on the concrete floor of one of those old Telecom phone boxes with the receiver glued to his ear.

He was there partly because he genuinely needed to make a phone call, partly because it presented photographers with the perfect photo opportunity.

He once admitted that, just before being formally sworn in as Deputy Prime Minister in 1996, he had something of a panic attack when the full extent of his looming responsibilities dawned upon him.

National Party leader Tim Fischer and Liberal Party leader Alexander Downer sit with stony silence between them in 1994. Picture: News Corp

It must have been one of the few occasions he found his courage wanting.

The former army officer who saw action in Vietnam and hardly spoke of it also showed extraordinary political courage in selling John Howard’s gun laws to the bush after the Port Arthur massacre.

He stood shoulder to shoulder with National Party Senator Ron Boswell in seeing off the One Nation threat in the late 1990s and helped usher in economic reform to rural industry despite strong resistance in the bush.

Beyond his public and political service, (and political cunning) beyond even perhaps his most cherished role as husband and father, it was his fundamental decency and kindness which were his defining characteristics.

Tim Fischer with his dog Larry on his property in Mudgegonga, Victoria. Picture: David Geraghty/The Australian

That was no meanness of spirit in him, no rancour, no desire for vengeance when wronged. There was no real capacity to diminish, demean or denigrate his fellow human beings even in the forum of politics where so many insist “the mongrel’’ is an essential character trait for survival.

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When he was leaving parliament the one time Labor leader Kim Beazley noted that there were few people in the Australian parliament who were actually “loved’’ yet Fischer was among the select few.

“You are going to be missed very much by us,’’ Beazley said.

He will now be missed by the nation.

We must say farewell to this whimsical, funny, endlessly charming man who not merely led us, but showed us by humble example exactly how to live a worthy, cheerful, helpful and truly inspiring life.

Originally published as Michael Madigan: Tim Fischer was generous, witty and whimsical — that’s why we adored him