'A true original': Former DLP senator John Madigan dies, aged 53
John Madigan, a Ballarat blacksmith who led the Democratic Labour Party out of the wilderness in 2010 by winning its first Senate seat in three decades, has died after a long battle with cancer.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott led tributes to the 53-year-old who died on Tuesday morning at a palliative care home near his home in Hepburn Springs, north east of Melbourne.
John Madigan, left, pictured with Nick Xenophon who called him "a man of enormous integrity".Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
Mr Abbott called Madigan a "very decent man" with an "old-fashioned sense of courtesy and respect for others".
"John Madigan was a fine representative of a worthy political tradition. The DLP sought to be the Labor Party at its best: strong on Australian values and determined to get working men and women a fair go," he said on social media.
Madigan won the sixth and last Victorian Senate seat at the 2010 federal election, taking office on July 1, 2011 as the first DLP senator since Frank McManus and Jack Little were both defeated at the 1974 double-dissolution election.
He quit the party in 2014 amid fierce internal bickering and started his own manufacturing and farming party but failed to retain his seat at the 2016 double-dissolution election.
In 2013 Madigan rejected a $44,000 pay rise handed to federal parliamentarians and instead started his own grants scheme to promote Australian manufacturing and farming, mainly to small businesses and schools in regional Victoria and suburban Melbourne.
He announced in a 2018 Christmas message he was fighting bowel and liver cancer and was "forever grateful" for the care from the nurses, surgeons and medical staff at the Ballarat Base Hospital.
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger and I found myself back in the BBH for 22 days over the past month and once again the staff at BBH excelled," he said.
"And I pray that I will recover and kick this cancer to the kerb, so far so good."
Senator John Madigan quit the DLP in 2015, becoming an independent and then starting his own farming and manufacturing party.Credit:Andrew Meares
Madigan was a strong advocate for refugee protection conventions, voting against the Coalition's temporary protection visas, and campaigned for West Papuan independence, gambling reforms and against foreign ownership and wind turbines.
Former senate colleague Nick Xenophon, who remained in close contact with Madigan after pair left Parliament, said he was "genuinely sad" about his friend's death.
"It was a man of enormous integrity ... a true original," Mr Xenophon said.
"He was genuinely passionate about Australian made industries and jobs and was talking about it long before it was fashionable
"In an era of career politicians he was the absolutely antithesis of a career politics. He had a fantastic BS detector."
Despite acrimonious exit from the party, where he used parliamentary privilege to accuse a person employed in his office of a systematic campaign to damage the party, he was earlier this year welcomed back and made an honorary member.
The anti-communist DLP was formed out of the split in the Labor Party in the 1950s arising from disputes over the infiltration of trade unions.
DLP federal secretary Stephen Campbell, who worked as Madigan's chief of staff, said his former boss never felt he belonged in Canberra.
"He didn't feel he deserved to be in the Senate, but in fact he was one of the best representatives the Australian people could have asked for," Mr Campbell said.
"He wasn't a confident public speaker but he was an honest, decent man who would never compromise a principal."
He is survived by his wife Teresa and two children.