June 22nd, 2020Vale John Madigan: July 21, 1966 – June 16, 2020

JOHN Madigan was born into a Catholic family and belonged to a youth group run by the National Civic Council founder, B.A. Santamaria, in Melbourne. He was a blacksmith and boilermaker from 1983 to 2011, self-employed in his own engineering workshop in Hepburn Springs.

He served as a Senator for Victoria from 2011 to 2016 after being elected to the Senate at the 2010 federal election as a member of the Democratic Labour Party. He resigned from the DLP to become an independent in September 2014, and later launched John Madigan’s Manufacturing and Farming Party in 2015 but failed to be re-elected at the 2016 double dissolution election, and the Manufacturing and Farming Party was voluntarily deregistered on September 13, 2016.

In December 2018 Madigan announced that he had cancer. After his death, former prime minister Tony Abbott eulogised Madigan as “a fine representative of a worthy political tradition” with an “old-fashioned sense of courtesy and respect for others”.

Mr Madigan was a friend of The Local, announcing in the Australian Parliament on November 27, 2014, that “The Local is the future of regional journalism…”

He is survived by his wife Teresa and two children.