Derryn Hinch, the veteran radio and television broadcaster and former Australian federal senator known as the "Human Headline", has died aged 82. His longtime colleague and personal assistant Annette Philpott confirmed that he died at home in his sleep on Thursday night following a lengthy period of ill health, telling the Daily Mail that the cause was being attributed to old age after repeated hospital stays and that she assumed "his heart just gave out".

New Zealand-born Hinch spent four decades on the airwaves before moving into television, and in April had acknowledged on social media that he "was not very well" while remaining upbeat, saying he might have "one more year or 10". In late May he told the Daily Mail he was "improving daily", had undergone a leg operation and was finishing an updated autobiography due out at Christmas. Married and divorced four times, he was a prominent campaigner on child protection: he served 12 days in jail in 1987 for contempt of court after naming a paedophile priest, received five months' home detention in 2011 for breaching suppression orders, and after his election to the Senate in 2016 spent three years pushing for a national child sex offenders register. In 2017 he revealed he had himself been molested as a nine-year-old boy.