REX. RHYMES WITH

Rex Hunt. On Friday on 3AW, after Hunt was convicted of a road rage assault, I said I would wait until after sentencing this week before commenting and I wanted to see the reaction of both 3AW management and the man mountain himself. But, within hours of being found guilty of recklessly causing injury to a cyclist by breaking his finger Hunt was back calling the football and General Manager Shane Healy, in a soft, almost contrived, interview, gave him an opportunity to rewrite history.

Rex Hunt is good at that. Unchallenged, he described his thuggish behaviour as an ‘involuntary act’. In the witness box, under oath, he had called it self-defence.

It was obvious that was going to be difficult to defend. After all, Hunt is a six foot something, former walloper and footballer, a man mountain, driving a Toorak Tractor up against a nerdy, 95-pound weakling on a two-wheeler and probably wearing Lycra.

Despite Hunt’s colourful performance in the witness box, the magistrate didn’t believe him. Magistrate Peter Reardon said Hunt got ‘agitated, upset and angry’ and ‘decided to take matters into his own hands in an aggressive way’.

Since then, Hunt has fallen back on the crutch he always uses when he gets into trouble. Character building.

He said on AW:  (audio)

You know me Shane, I don’t reckon you become a citizen until you actually move on and you have things happen to you and it builds character. That’s why I try to get across to my children unless you have something go wrong in your life you can’t improve, OK, and when something happens to you later on it’s like water off a duck’s back.

How long do you spend building character? How many things have to go wrong? You’d think by the time you get to your Sixties your moral and ethical standards would be set.

But then Rex lives in an almost cartoon world of his own. He can justify anything and call it ‘character building’. A while ago the Herald Sun broke the story about Hunt paying women for sex over a period of years while publicly expressing on this radio station, and in his autobiography, his total devotion to his wife Lynne and his fidelity… while scathingly attacking other people he accused of sexual impropriety.

The Herald Sun claimed Hunt paid one woman $1000 a week and then a negotiated lump sum of $50,000 thinking he would get confidentiality.

In Rex-speak he said: ‘There have been three women and never have prostitutes been involved. It was an arrangement for money for sexual favours and as far as I am concerned that was it’. I said at the time, according to my dictionary a prostitute is a woman who takes money for sexual favours. But Rex has his own language.

Since Friday Hunt has tried to turn his latest transgression into some sort of a community service. He wants bike riders registered (which I agree with) and Beach Road cleared of cars at weekends.

Nowhere on 3AW, or in newspaper interviews, did I actually hear Rex say to Rodney Andonopoulos, the cyclist he attacked: ‘I’m sorry.’

Now, that’s real character-building Rex.

© Copyright Derryn Hinch 2009