A BALLARAT lawyer who spent at least 20 months in prison for drug and white-collar-related offending is running for the Senate in May’s Federal election.
Jordan Dittloff, 38, was in Mildura on Friday and Saturday, 13 months after being endorsed as the Libertarians’ lead Senate candidate for Victoria.
The former Young Liberals president was jailed in 2016 for stealing $277,993.58 from 47 clients of his Colac-based travel agency, and for trafficking drugs in Melbourne.
Court reports at the time revealed that at the height of his drug dependency, he would use hard drugs including ice and cocaine three to four times a day at least once a week.
Mr Dittloff said heading to prison was the rock bottom experience from which he started to rebuild his life.
“I completed part of a business degree when I was in prison, I completed that degree on parole,” he said.
“I then ran small businesses very successfully for the Beechworth Bakery in Bendigo and Ballarat, managing their bakeries there, leading a team of 30 people.”
While at the bakery Mr Dittloff studied postgraduate law full time and finished a law degree, and was recently granted a compliance certificate after meeting the threshold of admission to legal practice.
“That was a really hard threshold to pass with my past criminal record,” he said. “They really made me run the gauntlet, as they should have.
“I’m really, really proud of what I’ve been able to do in the last 10 years, I’ve repaid $40,000 to victims of my offending at the time.
“People who were clients of my failed travel agency business, I’ve still got debts to repay, but I’ve repaid about 15 per cent of what was owed to those people, so that’s been a really important part of my rehabilitation as well.”
Mr Dittloff has experience from what many would consider a traditional political apprenticeship.
He first joined the Liberal Party in 2009 assisting with now Victorian’ Senator Sarah Henderson’s election campaigns in the Federal seat of Corangamite in 2010 and 2013.
He said he left the party in 2014 after being disillusioned by what he viewed as tribalism between the major parties.
“How a proposed piece of legislation or policy was judged, it was based on who proposed it rather than what the merits of the idea were, or what the outcome would be,” Mr Dittloff said.
“For a great many people involved in major party politics it was all just a political football, it was all tribalism, red team bad, blue team good.
“That wasn’t something I was interested in putting my energy and involvement into.”
Mr Dittloff said Canberra needed people with real life experience, people who have made mistakes but learned from them, people interested in policy and principle, and people who were solutions-focused rather than outrage-focused.
“The Libertarians see ourselves as being able to almost be the Greens of the centre-right,” he said.
“We aim to try to influence the decisions and policies of any government, in the case of a Liberal government we have the ability to compete with them and to, through the forces of competition, influence their policy positions.
“I also am very passionate about Federal issues and I think that at the Federal level we have a lot of really, really poor decision making, a lot of short term policy thought, a lot of pushing hard decisions down the road.
“I see our country as really heading down the path of short term thinking, of lack of political leadership, lack of vision, and I think that at the end of the day our kids and grandkids are the ones that are going to pay that price.”
