Unfinished Business

Life as a Senator

Derryn Hinch

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780522873535
• eBook ISBN:
  9780522873542
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Derryn Hinch made headlines in 2016 when he went from media personality to Victorian Senator at the head of a new political party and made a lasting impact on the political landscape. This is an unflinchingly honest account of his last two years as a senator, before he lost his seat in the 2019 election. Hinch's diary exposes Canberra's inner workings and details on his professional successes and failures with trademark frankness.

SENATE DIARY

THE DUAL CITIZENSHIP FIASCO

11 November 2017

PM Turnbull hardly covered himself in anything close to glory this week when he tried to hose down the dual citizenship debacle. Not that he has exactly been showered with plaudits over any policy pronouncements lately.

His bluster about the ‘non-audit’ sounded confected and a tad sad. I will concede, I was touched by his defence of Josh Frydenberg and the holocaust reference to Frydenberg’s mother fleeing Hungary as a persecuted, displaced, stateless person. But he lost me when he started talking about witch-hunts not being ‘the Australian way’ and how we shouldn’t badger MPs to show proof of sole citizenship.

‘We must not be dragged into a lynch mob, witch-hunt, trial by innuendo and denunciation.’ Yeah, right.

Didn’t I see the same PM, in full flight, in the House of Reps the other day, demanding opposition leader Bill Shorten produce written proof of his Australian citizenship? And to the government’s chagrin, he did.

The government could have handled all of this so much better because, even now, with the PM’s wimpish ‘self-declare’ formula, there will be, as Barry Humphries would say, tears before bedtime.

Three times, in recent months, the crossbench, led by the Greens and yours truly, tried to get this constitutional knot referred to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee. They (we—I’m a member) would then install an independent auditor. Could have been done and dusted quickly and cheaply. Most of the crossbench voted for it. The Libs, Nats and Labor voted against it.

My anger and frustration about the government’s dithering (and, I suspect, deceit) was reflected in a series of tweets I sent out on this issue over the weekend. To paraphrase them, I said: Why didn’t Parry, Alexander and Hawke put their hands up four months ago? This is a disgrace. Turnbull, O’Dwyer, Morrison don’t get it. After president Parry’s deception, the voters don’t believe dual pollies tell the truth. Neither do I.

And the cheek, The Hanson attacking Turnbull over section 44 citizenship flaws. Didn’t she ‘hand on heart’ defend that fraud ‘senator’ Roberts?

By this week, even Pauline was being asked about possible dual citizenship from that time in 2010 when she denounced Australia and said she was getting a British passport and going to live in self-imposed exile.

I had a long talk with Greens leader Richard Di Natale this week. When the Senate resumes next week, I will support him, again, in a push to get this issue to a Senate committee, to have an independent auditor appointed. As I said, it wouldn’t be expensive and would kill this issue, once and for all.

In the meantime, the punters think politicians are liars and don’t believe self-reporting is viable. They don’t trust us.

If it weren’t so serious, and such a serious threat to the Turnbull government’s tenure, you’d have to consider the Monty Python aspects of all this.

John Alexander, now under threat in John Howard’s old seat of Bennelong, gets the Greek JP in his local chicken shop to witness some papers. The chicken burger king says they were about citizenship. The former tennis king’s staff now say it was ‘about finance for a car’.

And what happened to all that smug talk about Labor’s sophisticated checks and balances? Two of their reps in ‘the other place’ (the House of Representatives)—Justine Keay and Susan Lamb— could be up Barnaby’s creek without paddles if it turns out their renunciations of British citizenship, through their fathers, weren’t processed by 7 June 2016, the date nominations closed. Under the strict interpretation the High Court used to banish five of the munificent seven, just setting renunciation in train might not be enough to avoid a by-election.

In talks to Year 11 and 12 students about the media, I always tell them to ‘keep the fire in your belly’ and often finish by describing my past life as ‘having a seat on the aisle of history’. I felt a bit like that yesterday, in my new job. Not a seat on the aisle but one in the pew behind.

At the state funeral for former governor-general and High Court judge Sir Ninian Stephen, I was sitting just behind former governors-general Sir William Deane, Dame Quentin Bryce and Peter Hollingworth. Nearby were former prime minister John Howard and the current governor-general, Sir Peter Cosgrove.

Former High Court judge Michael Kirby and former Hawke minister Gareth Evans delivered clever, entertaining eulogies.

Dunno about you, but at most funerals, after a touching tribute, I often lead the applause. In Melbourne’s soaring St Paul’s Cathedral, there was just an awkward silence as the speakers resumed their seats.

The South Australian senator Don Farrell was listed on the rundown to represent opposition leader Bill Shorten at the funeral. But Bill turned up at the last minute to sit near his mum-in-law Quentin. Don was relegated to sit next to me.

As Turnbull got up to deliver a reading from the Song of Solomon, Farrell whispered: ‘Song of Solomon. He’ll need the wisdom of Solomon to get out of the dual citizenship mess.’ He was right.

FINALLY, THE RAINBOW VICTORY

16 November 2017

Last week, I had one of the most touching, most humbling moments of my (long) life.

A man sought me out when I was standing outside St Paul’s Cathedral after Sir Ninian Stephen’s funeral. He shook my hand and thanked me for my crucial vote which scuttled the government’s same-sex marriage plebiscite in the Senate. That man was former High Court judge and marriage equality proponent Michael Kirby. I was genuinely chuffed. There had been a lot of ignorant flak when we ‘robbed the people of the right to be heard’.

The plebiscite didn’t go ahead, but a postal ballot did, so flash-forward to yesterday when the YES vote was announced as 61.6 per cent. In the office sweep, I predicted 56 per cent to 44 per cent. I thought the unscrupulous NO campaign had gained ground in the final weeks. Senators and staff gathered in a conference room to hear the AEC spokesman ‘do a Rob Oakeshott’ and drag out the result for what seemed like an eternity.

In the minutes before, I was standing with Senator Penny Wong, and her personal tension was almost palpable. I told her it was a disgrace that we were even there—waiting to see what total strangers had decreed as to how gay people would be allowed to live their lives.

Her tears of relief weren’t the only ones.

So now it is back to us, the politicians, to formalise and vote on legislation to bring us into line with so many other countries—as we should have done last year. Or even earlier. And we could have saved more than $120 million.

As I have written before, and argued in the Senate, as the prime minister, John Howard was specific about who should, and who could, tamper with the Marriage Act when he changed it in 2004 and when Labor went along with it. That was the amendment that defined marriage as ‘the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others’.

Howard said he wanted to make that definition ‘very plain’, and also make it ‘very plain’ that the definition of marriage ‘is something that should rest in the hands ultimately of the parliament of the nation … [It should] not over time be subject to redefinition or change by courts, it is something that ought to be expressed through the elected representatives of the country’.

During this year’s marriage equality debate, the former PM said: ‘What we didn’t want to happen in 2004 was for the courts to start adjudicating on the definition of marriage because that was a real threat in 2004, because some people who had contracted same-sex marriages in another country had the capacity to bring their issues before courts in Australia.’

Yesterday, with Senate the only chamber in session this week, the Libs’ Senator Dean Smith introduced his private member’s bill, proudly co-sponsored by eight other senators (me included) from Labor, the Greens, the Libs and the Nick Xenophon Team. The only impediment, and it is a big one, is the rival spoiler of a bill— with a plethora of amendments—put up by NO campaigners (the Eric Abetz brigade) using the new Senator James Paterson as a naive stalking horse, with the bill a cynical Trojan horse.

I did say in the Senate that Senator Paterson’s bill would ‘take us back to the dark ages by legalising homophobic discrimination’.

As I said to Attorney-General George Brandis in question time: ‘What does it say about your government that, in 2017, your party room would even debate legislation that discriminates against gay people and could even open the door to discrimination against black people or Jews or some other people on religious grounds?’

When it does get to a conscience vote (and it will be before Xmas), remember that then–prime minister Robert Menzies allowed a conscience vote in parliament in 1958 when he introduced ‘no fault’ divorce—which surely was a bigger threat to traditional marriage than letting some gay people in love make that commitment official.

With no offence intended to the gay community, my office decided to run a sweep on the postal vote outcome, with the $5 entry fee to be donated by the winner to the Wintringham homeless project in Melbourne.

As I said above, my guess was a pessimistic 56–44. The most optimistic was Labor’s Senator Katy Gallagher’s 68–32. The closest was the NXT’s Stirling Griff’s 62–38.

The prime minister’s office was very diplomatic. They gave us $50 for the charity with the notation ‘Donation only. Awaiting the people’s verdict’.

At the first party whips meeting for this session of the Senate last Monday, the government whip, Senator David Bushby, filled us in on how, later in the morning, the governor-general would swear in three new senators, replacing three dual citizen casualties. Then he made, to me, a strange suggestion that to save time, we just applaud new senators Bartlett, Anning and Steele-John and not go on to the floor to congratulate them.

Asked why, Senator Bushby said the G-G had somewhere else to go.

I asked: ‘What’s more important than doing official business in the Senate?’ After all, that’s a fairly major part of his job.

Somebody whispered that he ‘has a plane to catch’.

Thankfully, Labor agreed with me and the swearing-in went ahead in the traditional fashion.

I TOOK MY HARP TO A PARTY . . .

23 November 2017

One of my mother’s quaint, favourite sayings was: ‘I took my harp to a party and nobody asked me to play.’

I was reminded of the quote this week when the opposition, and the House of Reps crossbenchers, started posturing about turning up for the listed session of parliament next week, even though the government had postponed it.

What were they planning to do? Kick the front doors in like those union thugs tried to do a few decades ago?

It was always a Twitter- and headline-grabbing piece of nonsense. Only the government of the day can instigate a session of parliament and the posturers knew that.

But the postponement also confirmed for all of us that this is a government on the run. Too scared to risk the numbers on an overdue bank royal commission, still mired in the dual citizenship mess, and with PM Turnbull conceivably now scared to face a party room in case there’s a challenge. Interesting times. And there are by-elections to come.

To be honest (something the voters don’t think any politicians are these days), when the proverbial hit the fan over Hinch and Scott Ludlam way back in July, I thought the Greens senator would probably be the only casualty of the dual citizenship brouhaha. Five months later, it’s starting to look like I could almost do a political Steven Bradbury—be the last man standing.

This truly has become a political Noddyland. A few days after Ludlam called a presser to announce his resignation, the other deputy leader of the Greens, Senator Larissa Waters, followed suit. Since then, the dominoes have just kept toppling. John Alexander one day, Jacqui Lambie the next. Watch this space. There’ll be more.

Led by the Greens, some of us tried to get a tougher audit amendment through the Senate again last week to add muscle to the government/Labor compromise that still includes the ‘Malcolm Roberts defence’: I believed I was Australian.

Under the weaker version, an errant senator is not automatically referred to the High Court, but if a senator knowingly provides false information of their heritage, they ‘shall be guilty of a serious contempt of the Senate and dealt with by the Senate’.

I don’t believe that is tough enough—especially the way some members have played with the truth in recent months. At least Labor and the crossbench got the ‘moment of truth’ deadline pulled forward to 1 December, when both houses are still sitting, and not pushed away for twenty-one days—as PM Turnbull wanted—until we’ve adjourned until February. Even that 1 December...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—Updated
• On This Day …
• Senate Diary
• Still Unfinished Business