Why is Dick Smith on a one-man campaign?
At 74 and super-rich, he could be kicking back but instead he travels the country spruiking his manifesto. What makes Dick Smith tick?
Kate Middleton should quit making babies. That’s the thrust of the question posed by an old man in the audience. “Have we reached a tipping point on our ever-expanding world population?” he says to the room of 200 aviators seated before a bespectacled, silver-haired millionaire car radio installer in the downstairs hall of Wagga Wagga RSL. “Wouldn’t it have been nice if the Duchess of Cambridge could have kept her family to two children as an example to the world?” A local pilot behind the old man’s seat whispers to her friend: “What’s this got to do with aviation?”
Everything, says Dick Smith, the aforementioned wireless-nerd-who-could, standing at a lectern holding a fistful of papers detailing the decline and fall of Australia’s general aviation industry. In Dick Smith’s world, it’s all connected. Overpopulation is connected to the demise of Dick Smith Electronics just as it’s connected to general aviation and government red tape and risk aversion and greed and tax avoidance and self-protectionism and pitchfork-and-torch riots in the streets of Sydney, circa 2050.
The richest one per cent of Australians has the equivalent wealth of the bottom 70 per cent. “In history, that’s normally when you get a revolution,” he says. A trigger point. A moment. “A Hitler-walking-into-Poland moment,” he says. It’ll all be too late by then and Aussie kids in their city slum shacks will read about this defining moment unfolding right here in this room — The Dick Smith Oration — and wonder why Australians kept shrugging their shoulders at the business and adventuring icon when, all along, he saw how it was all going to end. Or not.
The Dick Smith Oration. The crowd laughs and applauds. Smith, 74, gives a wry smile. He knows the title is too grand; too wildly ambitious. He’s in on the joke. He always has been. When he was a boy, a teacher at Roseville Public School on Sydney’s north shore asked young Dick to stand up and introduce himself to his class. “My name’s Dick Miff,” he squeaked. The schoolkids howled.
“Say it properly, Dick,” the teacher demanded.
“Dick Miff!” he said again and his classmates howled some more and this felt good to the spindly son of Herb and Joan.
“Say it properly, Dick,” the teacher demanded.
“My name’s Dick Fish!” the boy smiled and the classroom erupted.
He was marched to the principal, who promptly called the boy’s mother. “He has a speech defect,” Joan Smith said. “He can’t say ‘S’ correctly.”
As a kid he was impatient and restless to the point of hyperactivity. He was academically hamstrung, perhaps by undiagnosed dyslexia, consistently finishing last in exams. He wasn’t good with girls or sports or books and words.
“I’d describe him as having a continually restless, inquiring mind and energy,” says John Leece, a boy-scout mate going back to the late 1950s. “They’d probably describe him these days as ADHD but he just had a thirst for knowledge. He’d go grab a snake by the neck just to look at it.”
“I loved radio and electronics,” Smith says. “When I opened Dick Smith Electronics it was really because I was a salesman selling two-way radios for taxi companies and I had the chance of fixing all the Manly Cabs radios so I thought, ‘I’ll start a small business’.” His then-fiancee, Pip, was only 18 and Dick was 24. “I said to Pip, we’ll start this business and maybe it could be like Howard Car Radio, Chatswood, who had three people working for him. That was going to be the ultimate. Within five years, Dick Smith Electronics was making an absolute fortune and I was suddenly good at something: making bloody money!”
Fifteen years ago, he was taking a stroll with his solicitor, Mark O’Brien — savvy and seasoned representative of Kerry Packer, Alan Jones and Rene Rivkin — when he asked the defamation specialist what the highest defamation payout had been to that point. O’Brien said it was roughly $300,000.
Smith pondered. “Wow. I can afford that.”
“You’re right, Dick,” O’Brien said. “You can.”
“I can say anything!” Smith exclaimed.
He then vowed to speak his mind publicly, no matter the cost to his deep hip pocket, on a range of pet peeve topics. Overpopulation. Immigration rates. Tax avoidance by the super-rich. A general aviation industry squeezed to death by high-cost safety regulation. “I’ve been trying to say it how it is,” Smith says. Last year he read about the historic defamation payout won by actress Rebel Wilson. “$4.5 million?” he told himself. “I can afford that!”
So he flies across the country in his helicopter packing RSLs and knocking on the doors of politicians to badger them about population policy. He calls his millionaire friends out in the press, demanding they pay more tax. He flies to his friend John Singleton’s house north of Sydney and verbally squirrel-grips him into recognising the fact the national park Singo looks out on from his deck will one day be filled with concrete towers. He makes public shout-outs to one of the richest people in Australia, developer Harry Triguboff: “How about setting up a billion-dollar charitable foundation and doing it openly? You’ll hardly know the difference to your living style.” (Triguboff countered that he privately donated to many charities, and accused Smith of baiting him for having an opposing view on population growth.)
Here in the Wagga Wagga RSL, Smith reloads his 100 per cent Australian-made tell-it-like-it-is spud gun. Self-absorbed string-pullers in the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, he says, have turned general aviation — which includes all civil flying, except scheduled commercial services and major charter operations carrying passengers or freight — into a ghost industry “with the most complex and expensive rules in the world”. He shows graphs and charts: general aviation jobs going down; CASA wages going up, up and away. He can turn between rants on a coin. “Reduce immigration and have a population policy,” he hollers. “Is it selfish? It sure is. Borders are for self-interest. We should be [directing] our overseas aid … raising the standard of living of women and that will bring the population growth down. Because if that doesn’t stop, we’re doomed as a species.”
The audience applauds. He’s a rock star here. A young pilot attending with his mum approaches Smith. He’s here because Smith inspired him to fly; inspired him to follow his dreams; showed him that in Australia, anything is possible. The kid wants to know how he can get a job flying but the kid doesn’t realise he and his hero were raised in vastly different versions of Australia. “I’m sorry,” Smith says, gravely. “There aren’t any jobs.”
“G’day Dick, nice to meet you,” says Simon Kinnersly, 45, a shower screen installer and hobby pilot who flew here from Ballarat in a plane he built in his backyard. “You were my hero from when I was a little dag going down to Dick Smith Electronics with my dad and we’d buy all the kits.”
Smith smiles, presses through the crowd, shaking hands. “I’d get all the pieces and make electronic stuff,” Simon tells me. “Then Dick starts flying around the world solo. Just a legend who started out repairing radios in his backyard. And now he’s trying to save general aviation because the industry is dying. We’re too risk-averse. Australia made it to the top and now we’re too fat and the hungry nations are comin’.” And by Simon’s reckoning there’s only one Australian standing in their way.
Dick Miff with the speech impediment. He emerges from the RSL crowd. “Let’s go for a walk,” he says.
At precisely 5pm each day in Wagga Wagga, a giantwave washes down the Murrumbidgee River that has been known to push surfers all the way to the town of Narrandera, 80km downstream. This, locals say, is the Five O’Clock Wave. It’s a town myth, of course, that has long sent the more gullible of the city’s many visitors down to the river at sunset to wait for an inland hydrological phenomenon to appear before their hopeful eyes. It’s a lend, a hoax, the kind of lark that saw the words “Dick Smith Electronics” spread across the world in 1978.
“I started Dick Smith Electronics and we only had $610,” he says. “No money for advertising. I had to think of ways to get free publicity. My first stunt was hopping around on a petrol-powered pogo stick and that got me on television. I then towed the iceberg into Sydney Harbour.” The papers lapped it up. A curious Sydney tech-head was promising to tow an Antarctic iceberg into town and turn it into ice cubes for the cocktail set. “For 10 cents you could have real Antarctic ice in your drink,” he told the papers. “Absolutely pure, guaranteed over 20,000 years old.”
“Dicksicles!” Smith howls today. One glorious dawn around April Fool’s Day he had staff members phone the morning talkback shows saying they’d just witnessed a giant iceberg being towed towards the Opera House. Hundreds lined the harbour to see the surreal sight of Dick Smith towing the “iceberg” — in fact, a dodgy mountain of plastic, shaving cream and firefighting foam — into the finest harbour on Earth. “For $1200 I got publicity around the world, including the front cover of the Chicago Tribune.”
The cheap stunts turned into epic adventures. First solo helicopter flight around the world. First helicopter flight to the North Pole. A flight around the summit of Mount Everest. First balloon flight across Australia. As recently as 2008, Dick and Pip completed a two-and-a-half-year drive around the world. “I’m just a car radio installer,” he shrugs.
A tree-lined street in central Wagga. Wheelie bins on the footpath. White utility vehicles. Vivid blue sky between the hanging tree limbs. A wireless playing songs above a kitchen sink. Australia before afternoon tea. Smith looks along the street and in his mind for a moment he sees the sum of his darkest visions. “The Australia we love so much will be destroyed,” he says. “We are going to take it from this lovely, open, trusting society with free-range kids and affordable housing and we are going to turn it into a concrete jungle like Shanghai and only the incredibly wealthy will have a backyard and a pool. Everyone else will be living in 100-storey high-rises, jammed in like termites.”
These are the sort of chipper thoughts he shares with his millionaire friends over waterfront coffees. “I’ve got some really wealthy friends who are completely obsessed with not paying tax,” he says. “When I say, ‘Pay more taxes’, the right wing goes berserk.” He quotes the US billionaire entrepreneur Nick Hanauer: “There is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn’t eventually come out.”
Smith’s latest stunt has been decades in the making. He’s become the immovable thorn in the side of Australia’s one per cent. He’s the rattle in the Rolls-Royce, the fly in the Cristal. He knows his mates are laughing at him but Smith keeps loading the spud gun and packing RSLs and the casual observer keeps wondering what it is that’s deep, deep down inside him that keeps making him do all this at 74 because it sure as hell can’t be for kicks.
Smith looks at a map on his smartphone. He’s following a blue dot to a coffee shop he’s been told about. A man in a flannelette shirt with a well-nursed beer belly passes by. “G’day!” the man says, extending his hand. “G’day!” Smith says, smiling. “Pleased to meet you, Dick. Keep up the good work.” Smith nods and that’s a wordless promise he’s made a thousand times. One might assume his tireless agitation of the über-rich would make him the darling of the Left but the Left hates him for his immigration stance, publicly supporting Pauline Hanson’s calls to reduce the annual intake from 190,000 to roughly 70,000, though not supporting her stance on Muslim immigration. The Left calls him everything from a racist to a nationalist to that brilliant uncle who they loved as kids but who got too much sun and lost his marbles.
“I’ve never been a nationalist,” he says. “I’m not ridiculously patriotic. The only people who annoy me are extreme people. The typical Lefty links it all to xenophobia and racism. That’s the Left’s view so they don’t have to discuss it. One of my good friends is [former Greens leader] Bob Brown. I said, ‘Bob, why don’t the Greens have a population policy, and he said, ‘Oh, you’re right, but it will be linked to racism,’ and I said, ‘No, there’s too many people in the world, every race, colour, creed, religion, everything’. He said, ‘I agree’. He said it’s a failing and that’s Bob Brown. But to move the Greens and the Left into having a sensible debate about it is impossible. It’s like a religion.”
Brown recalls that discussion. “What I did say was food consumption is the second-largest problem we face in the world and that’s based on growth,” he says. “We had a population policy but nobody took any notice. Dick and I haven’t agreed on everything but he has been a fearless part of public debate and has contributed enormously to the environment.” Brown says Smith should be enjoying more time with his grandchildren but finds himself drawn back to public debate because “he’s too bright for his own good”. It’s the grandkids who drive it all, Brown believes. “He keeps asking himself, ‘What are they gonna think if I left it all up to them?’”
Smith follows the blue dot on his phone and stops for a moment outside a Woolworths supermarket. He recalls when he made his first million from Dick Smith Electronics. “I felt guilty because the staff were getting wages of $50,000 a year and I was making a million dollars a year,” he says. “It was embarrassing.” He vowed soon after to give $1 million to charity and pay at least $1 million in tax each year of his life, a vow he’s kept for more than four decades. In 1982, he sold his business to Woolworths for $25 million. “Never had to work again,” he says. “I put that money into commercial buildings. People think I’ve made my fortune out of electronics and publishing after I sold Australian Geographic to Fairfax for $41 million. I’ve made far more money by just buying commercial properties close to Sydney Airport and on the Pacific Highway and I’m embarrassed by it. I don’t like it because you’re not doing anything. I just make all this money and any fool could make money in Australia, which is why one day it will get corrected.”
He won’t confirm his net worth. “I honestly don’t add it up,” he says. He wants to give it all away, be penniless, before he dies. “The hard part is I don’t know when that’s going to be,” he says. Business Review Weekly once informed him he was about to be splashed across their magazine as one of Australia’s 200 wealthiest individuals. He promptly phoned BRW and asked how much he had to give to charity to ensure he fell off the list. That same day he instructed his CEO, Ike Bain — “the man who made me all my money” — to write a cheque for $4 million to the Salvos. He tosses his hard-earned into his range of Australian-made and owned foods — OzEmite, OzEhoney, OzEchoc — and the profits are dispersed across more than 100 charities, from Aussie Helpers to Care Australia to Parkinson’s NSW to Youth Off the Streets to the National Centre for Childhood Grief. He gave almost $50,000 to the legal fight to bring former terrorism suspect David Hicks home.
“People used to write in to him all the time with genuine hard luck stories and he would leave all these notes for me on the letters: ‘Send 2K’, ‘Send 5K’,” Bain recalls. “He could be very tight when it came to turning the lights off, then you’d get a note saying, ‘Give 4 mill’.”
He’s not the easiest bloke to work for. Staff writers in the early years of Australian Geographic were stunned by his leadership style. “Confrontationalist, abrupt, blunt and rude,” one staffer told this newspaper in 1999. He admits today to regular strip-tearing of staff back then. “Did I ever,” he says. “I wanted a standard.”
“An attention span of five seconds,” explains Bain. “He can be very impatient at times and that comes across to some people as rude.” The staffers who called him blunt and rude, however, were the same who called him exhilarating and honest — and honesty, says Bain, is valued above all else. He had a neon “NO” sign on his office wall that would flash when he rejected staff ideas. Some days he’d hit a taxi meter when staff stepped into his office. Time is money. Simple. Staff knew where they stood with Dick Smith. None of the Machiavellian ruthlessness that he sees infecting big business today.
“Australia’s had 150 years of easy growth and now, as we get to the limits, people have to be absolutely ruthless,” he says. “They’re destroying each other so they can keep a job. And how I know this is I was taken aside by one of the Woolworths executives. He said, ‘We once had an edict that said everyone has to be able to make a dollar — the farmer, the processor — and that’s all gone and now we have to have never-ending profit increases or the board will get the sack.’”
Two young women at a set of traffic lights in Wagga Wagga recognise Smith and smile. “Excuse me,” he says. “Can you direct me to the Trail Street Coffee Shop?” Something about the way he squints at his smartphone, like the technology betrayed him somehow, makes the young women giggle. If there’s a god he believes in then it’s the god of microchips and circuits. “Thanks so much,” he says.
In 2013, Dick Smith Electronics was floated by a private equity firm and went into administration three years later, resulting in the closure of 363 stores across Australia and New Zealand. “When it went broke it fulfilled everything I’d been saying,” he says. “I said, ‘It’s a shop that sells to electronics enthusiasts, you can have about 100 [stores]. Why the greed?’ And they said, ‘We’ve gotta grow’. It all allowed me to do hundreds of interviews just to rubbish them.”
He walks in silence for a long moment. “The really wealthy will always be quite OK. And they’ll be isolated from the reality of young people never having a proper job. And the young people can just sell coffee. Just about every problem we have today is harder to fix with more people. The driving problem behind the whole issue is that our system of capitalism requires perpetual growth. It’s a giant Ponzi scheme! It’s a system that requires enormous waste to keep everyone employed and I don’t think it’s going to be fixed until something drastic happens.”
He opens the glass door of the cafe. Two handsome young people behind the counter. “Hello, is this the Trail Street Coffee Shop?”
“Hello Dick Smith!” says a bearded man at the counter. “We’ve come for an unbelievably expensive lunch,” Smith says. The men at the counter laugh. He peruses the menu. “Oh, smashed avocado!” he sighs. “I’ve never had a smashed avocado in my life and I’m never going to.” He’s talking loudly, with bluster; it’s Dick Miff in the classroom holding court. “You should treat yourself,” one of the men says. “No, I just want a sandwich.” He peruses the display filled with Turkish breads and sourdoughs and roasted capsicum strips and olives and feta cheese. “Can you just make a typical Aussie sandwich?” “OzEmite sanga, maybe?” I suggest. “Ha!” he says. “Do you know what? All this stuff from Turkey and Greece” — his hands waving at the sandwich display — “this is what they came here to get away from. Now we’ve got their food.”
We sit outside at a table. “What was that in there?” I ask. He smiles, shrugs his shoulders. “I’m acting,” he says. He’s done that for years, effortlessly changing gears into the Dick Smith he thinks the public wants him to be. He says the face that beamed off all those shopfront signs for all those years wasn’t really him in many ways. The exuberant entrepreneur on the pogo stick, even the fearless adventurer dodging mountains in blinding storms. “I never thought that Dick Smith was me,” he says. “I’m a loner, really. I love being by myself. Since a kid I’ve been a loner. I’d come home from school and disappear into the bush.”
Some days, when he was about 12, he’d come home and find his father, Herb, lying in a heap of nerves and worry on his bed. Dick grew up in the Australia his father had fought for in Bougainville in World War II. Every Anzac Day he thanks marchers for giving him that Australia, stands for hours by the barriers holding a large sign that simply says, “Thanks”. Herb Smith is somewhere deep inside all his tireless agitation for change. It was Herb who told his son about the importance of paying taxes. “He said, ‘Never complain about your tax, that’s why our country is so fantastic’.”
It was Herb who taught him the power and peril of business; how success and failure, good luck and bad luck and the uneven distribution of both can change a family. “My dad started a printing company and it went broke,” he says. “And I saw all that as a kid.” He leans in, brings his hands together. “He had a nervous breakdown. He lay in bed for 12 months. My mother …” And he chokes on that word. “My mother …” Tears flood his face. No performance in it, just a sudden and jarring 10-second assault of emotion where he weeps between words that come out in gulps. “She never worked … in her life … and she … went … and got a job … she had no qualifications.”
Then he shakes his head and snaps instantly out of the deep emotion, as if he has just found a drawer inside his cluttered mind to file it away. “And I come home from school and Dad’s in a complete mental breakdown because he’d borrowed this money to start a printing business and he lost everything.” He pauses to think. “I don’t know why. I just think he wasn’t a good businessman. I don’t think he was ever tough enough for business. He lost everything, but he paid it all back. Over the next five years, he paid them back.”
He’ll think on this subject tonight, and tomorrow he’ll send me an email: “By the way, when I mentioned my dad and said that I thought he probably wasn’t a good businessman, there is one redeeming feature — he was honest. He had a lovely nature, looked after our family and was always helping others. That is far more important than being a good businessman!”
His ham and cheese toastie arrives with a strawberry milkshake. It’s a hearty toastie but the cafe boys have modernised it somehow, hipsterfied it. Smith shrugs. It’s not his Australia anymore. It’s sure as hell not Herb’s.
He brings a picture of his wife and daughters up on his phone. It’s his favourite photo. It’s 1982 and his girls, Hayley and Jenny, are not yet teens, dressed in clothes that Pip made herself. Smith’s about to take off on a solo flight around the world in which he’ll cement his status as a legend and nearly kill himself at least five times in the process. “How could I be so stupid,” he says. “I had this beautiful wife and daughters. What was I thinking?”
He’s got so much out of this country and those three women in his life were always the pot of gold at the end of his rainbow. He’s looking into that image and he’s going somewhere deep inside himself towards some new knowing but he’s pulled back out again by a couple of Wagga lads.
“Sorry, Mr Smith,” one says, “sorry to interrupt.”
“G’day,” Dick says, leaning back in his seat.
“We love your work. Keep it up.”
“Oh, aren’t you great. What particular thing do you like about what I do?”
“Awww, just how you support the Australian workers, keeping it in-house.”
“What do you do?”
“I’m at uni and I’m a youth worker.”
“Wonderful,” Dick smiles.
“Can we get a selfie?”
“Certainly.” Click.
The boys walk away, beaming, and Smith slowly finds his way back to the Dick Smith Oration. His beautiful country. The future for that youth worker and his kids. “The most common thing I get stopped on is people wanting me to become prime minister,” he says. “I walk down the road and they yell, ‘Dick, we want you to become prime minister!’ and I say, ‘Only if I’m a dictator’. I can be dictator for a couple of years and make the changes needed and then they can shoot me. I’d have something to offend everyone and everyone would hate me.”
Immediate clamps on immigration. Full disclosure of taxes paid by Australia’s wealthiest one per cent. Overseas aid boosts to assist population stabilisation. Ham and cheese toasties made from plain bloody white bread. “Dick Smith the dictator,” he roars. He raises his fist, always the first in on the joke. “The Dick-tatorrrrrrr!”