Mike Fitzpatrick: Kicking goals for sport, medicine

Few can match the commitment of Mike Fitzpatrick to sport over the past four decades or so.

Businessman, medical philanthropist and sports administrator Mike Fitzpatrick. Picture: Aaron Francis

With the notable exception of his wife, few can match the commitment of Mike Fitzpatrick to sport over the past four decades or so.

Over that period, Helen Sykes has attended more than 600 AFL games with Fitzpatrick, the three-time Carlton premiership ruckman who parlayed his playing career into a 10-year stint as chairman of the AFL Commission.

“Occasionally when we’ve attended games and some obscure detail has come up, Helen has turned to me and said: ‘It’s just frightening I know that’,” he says.

“You don’t get to do what I’ve done without that level of support.”

Fitzpatrick has been awarded a Companion of the Order of Australia for service to Australian rules football, business and medical research.

It’s an award he will value highly, viewing it as recognition for “making a contribution that doesn’t involve payment”.

A Rhodes scholar, Fitzpatrick’s studies took him to Oxford University in 1976 before he took up an investment banking career in the US and Australia.

The foundation of his considerable wealth was the pioneering infrastructure asset management company Hastings, which he founded in 1994 and led until Westpac bought 51 per cent of the group in 2002.

By then, Hastings had become one of the nation’s biggest managers of infrastructure and alternative assets, including $3.8 billion of infrastructure businesses, high-yield debt, private equity and timberland.

The sale of Hastings freed Fitzpatrick up to again answer the call of football.

The game has always played a pivotal role in family life, with Fitzpatrick’s father umpiring a grand final in Western Australia well before the code went national.

His own decorated career, and the entree it gave him to the business world, nurtured a desire to take an active role in the sport’s administration.

“When you’ve played the game as long as I did and enjoyed the successes, there’s some obligation to give back,” Fitzpatrick says.

In 2003, he became an AFL commissioner, succeeding Ron Evans as chairman in 2007.

In a decade overseeing the code, Fitzpatrick fundamentally recast the league. Two new clubs were admitted — the Gold Coast Suns and Greater Western Sydney — and $2bn was spent on stadium upgrades. The women’s competition was also launched.

Fitzpatrick’s most significant achievement, however, is probably the sport’s six-year, $2.5bn broadcast deal, which was signed in 2015 and runs from 2017 until 2022.

“We wanted to make AFL the No 1 footy code in Australia, and I think it’s in pretty good nick.”

Less well-known is Fitzpatrick’s involvement in medical research and philanthropy. After serving on the board of the Walter & Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research from 2003-17, he says with some authority that WEHI is probably unequalled among the nation’s biotechnology institutes.