Unfinished Business by Derryn Hinch

Author:Derryn Hinch [Lake, Marilyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

ON THE ROAD AGAIN

12 September 2018

On the road again. And we are. Again.

At an aged care centre in Horsham, in country Victoria, I interrupted an afternoon bingo game between eight elderly women. One quiet one, at the end of the table, suddenly said: ‘Is there anything you haven’t done, Derryn Hinch?’

(I did tell the bingo squad that I was old enough to remember when the game was called ‘housie, housie’, and was also politically smart enough to exit quickly and not delay the caller’s first shouted number.)

Back in 2016, in the months before (and during) the Turnbull marathon federal election, I took the Jayco Justice Bus all over Victoria and parts of NSW. We covered 11 250 kilometres. I know every DFO in those states and every Beechworth Bakery in Victoria—there are now seven. I’d promised (myself) that, if elected, I would visit a country town every month. I’d talk to the mayor, councillors, the police chief, and go to the local RSL before 6 p.m. for the Ode. It’s been fantastic. I was even invited to recite the Ode over the loudspeaker at Horsham.

Recently, we went to Bendigo, Swan Hill and Mildura. The mayor of Swan Hill is also the police chief. He told me he’d been mayor for eight years and I was the first senator to ever walk into his office. (It’s been funny on these meet-and-greets because mayors and senior coppers seem to expect me to walk in with a cameraman over my shoulder. Old habits die hard.)

When I visited the Ballarat RSL, about fifty veterans were there to ask me questions about the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. I told them bluntly that they had to treat the department like the enemy, because ‘they treat you like the enemy’. Cruel but true. The DVA spends millions of dollars hiring outside lawyers to fight cases brought by returned servicemen and women. Outside lawyers who are hired to win. That’s what lawyers do. Therefore, they are earning taxpayers’ dollars to drag cases out and, ultimately, to destroy diggers.

We had a case that we ultimately won by humiliating the department and the defence minister in the Senate chamber, because I flushed out that the DVA had spent $603 000 on outside lawyers (as well as doctoring documents to hurt this vet’s case) fighting a paratrooper who had broken his back in a jump six years into his service to our country.

But back to country campaigning. On my first foray into a country market (I suspect it was Berwick), I went with my volunteer campaign manager, Ruth Stanfield, who used to work for Carmen Lawrence, federal Labor MP and former premier of WA. It was a local Sunday market and I bought a lot of candles and some marmalade from the stalls. When we got home, Ruth copped a call from my former HINCH producer and volunteer media adviser, Dermot O’Brien, asking how our first foray had gone.

‘Dreadful,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t speak to anybody. He avoided eye contact.’

O’Brien pointed

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