By Tony Wright
Derryn Hinch is telling a rollicking story about breaking his back while cycling down a mountain in New Zealand when his mood suddenly swerves and he gets pensive.
"You know the word nadir?" he inquires.
Derryn Hinch is on the campaign trail in his Jayco mobile home. Credit: Justin McManus
"It means your lowest point, the depths of despair. I reached mine just up the street there, years ago."
We are sitting outside a bakery in the small town of Woodend in the shadow of the Macedon Ranges, about an hour north-west of Melbourne.
Hinch in Castlemaine, persuading the locals that he needs their votes. Credit: Justin McManus
Every few moments Hinch is approached by a passerby wanting a cheery word or a photograph with him.
Hinch happily obliges.He's on a road trip, and on the make. He's campaigning in a campervan for a seat in the Senate.
Of all candidates in Victoria, he is almost certainly the most recognisable face. The problem is - and it happens all around the state - those approaching him almost always express surprise when he tells them he wants their vote for the Senate.
They know Derryn Hinch, but they don't know he wants to be a politician. Attempting to convert fame to votes, Hinch has been on the campaign trail for several weeks now, travelling 7000km in his borrowed campervan emblazoned with the name of his party - Derryn Hinch's Justice Party - and the Hinchesque slogan "It's just common sense".
Hinch's Justice Party has just eight policies, all heavy on law and order.Credit: Justin McManus
Today, he has found himself in a melancholy outpost of his personal history. He hasn't stepped foot in Woodend for more than a decade, though he once lived on a farm a few minutes away up on the slopes of Mt Macedon.
In the late 1990s, in what he calls his "Grizzly Adams period", with his health, his finances, his marriage of the time and his prospects of employment all in various states of ruin, he came down from the farm to withdraw a few dollars from the bank.
Hinch visiting his old farm and vineyard near Woodend.Credit: Justin McManus
When he slid his card into the Commonwealth Bank's Woodend ATM, it delivered him unwelcome news. He had, he says, exactly $6.49 in his account. He needed $20 in it before he could withdraw anything. He was broke.
The experience seems seared into his memory. He related it in the opening pages of his 2004 autobiography, The Fall and Rise of Derryn Hinch, and here in the main street of Woodend, he points out the exact ATM where he reached his depths all those years ago, before he rallied, gave up the grog and prospered.
Hinch has been on the campaign trail for several weeks, travelling 7000km in his borrowed campervan.Credit: Justin McManus
Hinch finishes his coffee and declares he wants to see his old farm before continuing on his election campaign. He hasn't seen it since shortly after his episode with the ATM, when "the bank decided it needed the farm more than I did".
The latest owners of the property aren't home when Hinch turns up. The vineyard he planted back in the 1990s is still there and the view from its heights very nearly takes the breath away. Mist hangs in a valley and Hanging Rock rises in the middle distance.
Derryn Hinch is campaigning for a seat in the Senate.Credit: Fairfax
Hinch mooches around for a bit, lost in his memories, shakes himself out of it, climbs back in his motorhome and returns to his latest escapade.
He says he doesn't have a clue whether he might be elected to the Senate. His campaign, he says, is being funded by his superannuation and he can't afford polling.
Derryn Hinch, the Human Headline, arrives at to face charges of contempt over the naming of a sex offender.Credit: Justin McManus
Even the motorhome has been donated by Jayco. Hinch, ever the optimist, takes heart from Fairfax Media reports that the so-called "preference whisperer", Glenn Druery, thinks he is a strong chance to replace motoring enthusiast Senator Ricky Muir at the July 2 election.
Druery's complicated preference algorithms helped Muir win Victoria's12th seat in the the Senate with just 0.51 per cent of the vote in 2013.
Mike Gibson, centre, with cartoonists John Jensen and Pat Oliphant, and Acting Editor of the Sun, Derryn Hinch, 17 March 1976.Credit: Scott Whitehair
Changes to Senate voting rules mean such a bizarre result is almost impossible at the coming election. Ballot papers that require voters to do no more than number their six preferred candidates "above the line", or 12 "below the line", mean that labyrinthine preference deals involving dozens of minor parties are not worth the effort.
The only (slight) ray of hope for micro-party candidates like Hinch and his Justice Party is that the 2016 election is a double dissolution. With every seat in the Senate up for grabs - rather than only half of them, as would be the case in a normal election - the quota required for a successful candidate is 7.69 per cent, rather than14.29 per cent.
Hinch concedes it's still a mountain of votes - about 300,000 - for candidates outside the major parties. This, of course, is the point of the new voting rules.The big parties want to get rid of the restive and unreliable micro-party and independent senators, and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull made clear, in engineering an early election, that he wanted to do so as quickly as possible.
Ricky Muir, thus, is considered to have all but signed his own political suicide note by voting (with fellow independents) against the government's legislation to re-establish the Australian Building and Construction Commission. Turnbull used the rejection of the Bill as a pretext to call the double dissolution election, and has barely mentioned the construction commission since.
Muir, who would have had another four guaranteed years in the Senate if there had been no double dissolution, simply shrugs and says he's blue-collar all the way through, and couldn't bend his principles on the government's legislation.
Hinch is amused that independent Nick Xenophon and The Greens, once outsiders themselves, supported the government on the new rules.
"They're inside the ship now and they've pulled the gang plank up after themselves," he says.
"But I think Turnbull's made a mistake. While he's trying to get rid of eight pesky independents, he might end up with 12 pesky independents, including me.
"If that's the case, there won't be another double dissolution for 50 years."
In other words, Derryn Hinch is taking what he believes is the last best chance to get his voice and his views into the most important sound booth in the nation - one where he can say what he wishes under parliamentary privilege, which means he no longer needs to fear jail.
It would be a singular reinvention, but Hinch's life has been a long series of personal reinventions. Since 1960, when he became a cub reporter aged 15 at the Taranaki Herald in New Plymouth, New Zealand, Hinch has risen to stardom - and periods of considerable wealth - numerous times before being sacked and starting again.
He has edited newspapers, hosted top-rating radio and TV programs, been jailed for contempt of court and has been married five times - twice to the actress Jacki Weaver.
He's made the news so many times he happily calls himself the Human Headline, and has made it his Twitter handle. He's been a drunk, got sober and very nearly died before he was granted a liver transplant in 2011.
And now, aged 72, he's registered a political party with - inevitably - his own name the major part of it, and hit the road.
The campervan is the catalyst for his story about breaking his back. He and his then girlfriend Natasha Chadwick, a former detective who is 36 years his junior, were on a campervan tour of New Zealand about 18 months ago when they went "heli-riding" - flying to the top of a mountain by helicopter and riding down by bicycle.
Hinch crashed and broke a couple of vertebrae in his back and several ribs, though he was relieved to discover he hadn't injured his new liver.
After being patched up and tightly strapped, he and Chadwick decided to continue their motoring tour. But Chadwick couldn't drive a vehicle with manual gears, and Hinch was required to jockey the camper, relating how he found himself in exquisite agony every time he changed gears.
He doesn't have to mention how his relationship with Chadwick turned out: the end of the story made typically soap-opera Hinch headlines in March last year when Chadwick announced by Facebook post that "'I have a sad announcement to make. Derryn Hinch and I have ended our relationship after two years and have separated."
Hinch doesn't have to change gears as he motors around Victoria,seeking votes: he has a driver, Peter Radford, who has been part of Team Hinch since the broadcasters' 2014 Jail to Justice Walk from Langi Kal Kal prison in western Victoria to the steps of Victoria's Parliament House.
The idea for Hinch's Justice Party can be traced to that walk. It was in the cause of demanding a national public register of sex offenders - an issue that has been firing up Hinch and getting him into trouble with the law for years. It was also in protest at what Hinch considers lax parole laws for criminals.The last stage of the walk started in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, close to the spot where Jill Meagher was murdered by Adrian Bayley in 2012.
Bayley was on parole at the time. Hinch spent 50 days in prison - most of them in Langi Kal Kal - for breaching a judge's suppression order by publishing on his website details about Bayley, including his extensive record of rape and violence.
Hinch finds dark irony that at one point he was incarcerated two cells away from Bayley, "the bloke who put me in jail in the first place".
His Justice Party has just eight policies. Unsurprisingly, they are heavy on law and order. The policies, which sound a lot like Hinch's radio and TV editorials over the years, are listed on Hinch's campaign material, which he hands out to everyone in his path: justice in sentencing, a public register of convicted sex offenders, domestic violence reform, bail reform and parole reform. Equality, animals rights and voluntary euthanasia rounds out the platform.
Peter the driver fires up the motorhome, heading north to Kyneton,Castlemaine and Bendigo - wherever there might be a crowd. If this former jailbird with the familiar beard is to have a chance of bellowing his messages about justice, law and order from the safety of parliamentary privilege, he's going to have to persuade those crowds that he needs their votes. He's experienced his nadir, and doesn't want to revisit it.