Who is Nick McKim? Green warrior with a penchant for punch-ups

Nick McKim’s attacks on supermarket CEOs have catapulted him to a broader public awareness, but the veteran Green has a long history of walking into stoushes, with mixed success.

Nick McKim in his younger days, outside Parliament House, Hobart.

Nick McKim’s clashes with supermarket CEOs have catapulted him to a broader public awareness, but the veteran Green has a long history of walking into stoushes, with mixed success.

A Tasmanian senator since 2015, the 58-year-old was in 2019 deported from Papua New Guinea after its immigration officials accusing him of placing “undue pressure” on a junior officer and ignoring protocols.

Visiting Manus Island asylum seekers detention facilities, the senator denied any disrespectful conduct and stood by his conduct.

“I will never stop fighting to expose the truth about the humanitarian calamity of offshore detention,” he said at the time.

He last year stole headlines pushing for the removal of then-Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe over Dr Lowe’s infamous prediction of a stable interest rates outlook, before rates were hiked on 13 occasions. At the same time, Senator McKim called on the government to use its powers under the Reserve Bank Act to prevent the bank’s board triggering a recession.

Before entering the Senate to fill the casual vacancy left by former Greens leader Christine Milne, Senator McKim was a ­Tasmanian state Greens MP.

He was a key force behind, and minister in, the 2010-14 Labor-Greens power-sharing state government, serving as a minister for education and corrections. In these roles, he also demonstrated a lack of fear of conflict, waging an unpopular and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to shut 20 schools.

Senator Nick McKim questions Woolworths CEO Bradford Banducci at the Senate select committee on supermarket prices.

As a minister, he alienated left-wing unions who had donated to the Greens by calling in Tasmania Police as “scab labour” during industrial action by prison officers.

In the same period, he angered some in the green movement by publicly calling for activists to stop protesting in forests, to avoid destabilising the 2012 forestry “peace deal”.

A former copywriter, advertising and PR man once known for his ponytail, Senator McKim has been seen as a “light green”. However, in recent years he has become passionate about tackling the excesses of the big end of town. On Wednesday, he blamed the refusal of Woolworths chief Brad Banducci to answer questions about his company’s return on equity for their altercation, in which he threatened the businessman with imprisonment for contempt of the Senate.

McKim in 2010.

“I gave Mr Banducci ample opportunity in a very respectful way to answer the question I was putting to him – someone counted I asked him 39 times,” Senator McKim told The Australian.

“He chose to respond in what I thought was a way that was disrespectful not only to the Senate but to the Australian people, on whose behalf I was asking the questions. He needed to be taken down a peg because of the attitude that he brought into the committee hearing.”

Then-Mr McKim was hand-picked for politics by former Greens leader Bob Brown, after developing ads for Dr Brown’s 2001 election campaign, entering state parliament in 2002 and serving as state Greens leader from 2008 until 2014.

Like most of the older Tasmanian Greens, he has been arrested in forest protests, falling foul of the law as a university student protesting against logging at Farm House Creek in the mid-1980s.

London-born, he moved to Australia when he was five. He spent part of the 1980s travelling overseas, working as a fruit-picker, a shepherd in Scotland and a garden worker in Switzerland.

Before moving into copywriting, advertising and PR, his varied curriculum vitae also included a stint as a gold prospector on Tasmania’s West Coast.