High-stakes game as Wilkie sticks to his principles

FOR such a mild-mannered man, Andrew Wilkie is pretty colourful. And now very powerful. He first came to national attention when he walked out of the Office of National Assessments in 2003, just before the Iraq War, saying the conflict was ''totally unrelated to the war on terror''.

In 2004 he ran as a Greens candidate against John Howard in Bennelong. He won a Tasmanian seat as an independent in 2010. If getting into Parliament wasn't enough good luck, the failure of Julia Gillard to win a majority gave him a share of the balance of power in the House of Representatives. In the negotiations over who he'd support, he declined a Tony Abbott offer of $1 billion for the Hobart hospital, deciding to back the Labor government.

On certain conditions. A main one is that there should be an attack on problem gambling, with legislation to have people commit to a limit on what they can lose on pokies.

Wilkie says if his demand is not delivered he'll withdraw support for the government. That doesn't mean he'd want Abbott in - rather, his vote on potential confidence motions would just become unpredictable.

Delivering to Wilkie on pokies is proving hellishly difficult.

Wilkie has a second government feeling the heat, and this time there's much more at stake.

But when you play the game hard, you become vulnerable. In 2003 Howard government sources spread gossip about Wilkie's marriage troubles. Wilkie now believes he's being targeted because of his anti-pokies campaign.

He said last week that he'd had a death threat, a threat about compromising photos and his past at the Royal Military College, Duntroon, was being trawled through. Within days a former Duntroon cadet, there at the same time as Wilkie, accused him of making cadets salute the 50th anniversary of Hitler's rise to power. Wilkie can't recall that but admitted, as he'd done in his book Axis of Deceit, that he'd behaved badly at Duntroon, including being involved in bastardisation.

He wrote that among his sins were ''roughing up the anti-uranium protesters' camp site outside Parliament House, souveniring flags for the cadets' bar, giving junior cadets a hard time, smothering an instructor in shaving cream and getting caught with a woman in the barracks''. He adds laconically that ''eventually, though, I was deemed officer material''.

Wilkie said he had always been ''open and honest'' about his involvement in bastardisation, regrets it now, and has ''grown up since then''. Given he has previously been upfront over his past bad behaviour, it is relevant now only as a historical note to the current debate about the military.