Veteran journo is used to sackings

By Helen Harvey
Stuff
October 27, 2014

http://www.stuff.co.nz/taranaki-daily-news/news/10665395/Veteran-journo-is-used-to-sackings

Controversial Aussie broadcaster Derryn Hinch was sacked from the Taranaki Herald the day after a big rugby match was on in New Plymouth.

At the weekend he was back for a reunion marking 25 years since the paper closed.

In 1965 the big game was a Ranfurly Shield match that Taranaki lost, and now veteran Taranaki journalist, Jim Tucker, then 17, had to take the match report over the phone, because all of the senior staff had gone to the pub with Hinch.

Hinch started the night doing the police calls and on the way back to the office, he called in to the Royal Hotel for a drink with a journalist friend who had come up from Wellington, he said.

Several hours later a reporter came looking for him and never went back to work.

A while later another colleague came looking and he also stayed. Then the assistant editor arrived at the pub and, like the others, never left.

"The next day I got a call from the editor Rash Avery - I think you are a bad influence, so don't come back tomorrow. I said I have never been sacked by a nicer person."

Tucker said he had been on the job three or four weeks, so he was a bit nervous when the chief reporter, Richard Long, phoned in with the rugby story.

Long dictated it over the phone to Tucker who said his typing improved on the spot.

Hinch's sacking was one of many stories shared at the reunion over the weekend, which was attended by more than 65 former staff members including Tucker, Lance Girling-Butcher who was editor of the newspaper when it closed, and Oscar Kightley of Bro'town and Sione's Wedding fame.

Hinch started at the Taranaki Herald in January 1960 aged 15, when he left New Plymouth Boys' High School. He quit in 1961 to work on other newspapers before returning to the Herald in 1965.

In a career spanning 54 years he had been sacked 16 times, he said.

While at the Herald he spent a night in jail for a story, an experience that might have prepared him for what would come later.

During a long media career in Australia Hinch has become known for taking a stand.

"I go to jail a lot," he joked.

He first time in jail was in 1987 for naming a paedophile priest, he said.

"I wasn't being a cowboy. Before I named him I went to the police. I went to the police minister. I went to the premier. I went to the church. They said he was going to be facing court - leave it."

But the man was running a camp for children, so he felt he didn't have a choice, Hinch said.

"If I stopped one parent sending their kids . . . I couldn't live with myself if I didn't do it. Since then I've become a bit of a lightning rod for it I guess."

His latest stretch was earlier this year when he spent two months in jail, including two week in solitary confinement, after being found guilty of contempt of court for breaching a suppression order by revealing details of Jill Meagher's killer's criminal history.

"He was put in same jail, the same floor, two cells from me . . . I thought it's a weird world."

Hinch had no plans to retire and works for Channel 7 in Australia, is involved with a programme called Sunday Night, does a morning breakfast programme a couple of days week, works in radio and writes a daily blog.