Death of a journalist

Sad news in Melbourne today with the death of Tim Colebatch, a journalist with the Age for more than forty years and more recently a regular contributor at Inside Story. The Age‘s report says he died yesterday, his 75th birthday, following “a long illness.”

I didn’t know Colebatch personally, although we corresponded a couple of times, but I was an avid reader of his work. He was one of our best journalists when it came to electoral matters; he understood the importance of democracy and was always willing to make cross-country comparisons. We sometimes disagreed about the interpretation of the numbers, and I found his views on economics often wrongheaded, but he was scrupulous about his facts and rarely got a statistic wrong.

He also wrote a fine biography of Dick Hamer, subtitled The liberal Liberal, which was not uncritical but showed their common affiliation with that typically Victorian sort of left-liberalism of which the Age was for many years the mouthpiece. It was a movement that I had (and have) some serious quarrels with, but we are nonetheless poorer for its recent decline.

Below I’ve picked out ten of Colebatch’s pieces that present the range of his work, or at least the part of it mostly likely to appeal to election watchers; they’re well worth revisiting. Rest in peace.

July 2005: Explaining the introduction of proportional representation for Victoria’s upper house.

April 2007: A slightly sarcastic account of treasury’s intergenerational report.

October 2013: One of the last pieces he wrote at the Age, covering the election of David Leyonhjelm and other weird results of that year’s half-Senate election.

October 2017: An evocative report on Italian politics, displaying his great knowledge and love of that country.

December 2017: An analysis of One Nation’s preferences in Queensland, pushing back against News Corp’s mythology; discussed by me here.

February 2018: A look at the changing pattern of Greens support, which prompted an analysis of my own that ended up telling a somewhat different story.

September 2018: A prescient look at the shaky state of Indonesian democracy.

March 2019: A preview of that year’s federal election in Victoria, discussed by me here; the result surprised both of us, but the analysis turned out to be relevant for later developments.

December 2021: A long but very sensible read on the politics of Singapore and options for its future.

April 2023: A nice comparison of Victoria and Queensland electoral behavior in the wake of the Aston by-election.

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PS (30 January): Peter Martin now has a long and very interesting tribute to Colebatch at Inside Story.