08/09/2026
He was clinically dead for seven minutes.
He came back, and the first thing he did was pick a fight with the tax office.
The second thing he did saved strangers' lives for decades afterward.
His name was Kerry Packer, Australia's richest man, owner of the Nine Network, a man famous for treating tax as something other people paid.
In 1990, playing polo at Warwick Farm Racecourse in Sydney, Packer's heart simply stopped.
For seven minutes, by every clinical measure, he was gone.
Here is the detail almost nobody would have predicted mattered. The ambulance that reached him happened to be carrying a defibrillator, a piece of equipment that, at the time, most New South Wales ambulances didn't carry at all.
That one detail brought him back.
Paramedics got his heart restarted. He was rushed to St Vincent's Private Hospital, where cardiac surgeon Dr Victor Chang performed bypass surgery to keep him alive.
Packer later described what those seven minutes felt like, in words that became famous in their own right.
"Son, I've been to the other side, and let me tell you, there's nothing there."
Most people who survive something like that go quiet, grateful, private. Packer did the opposite.
He worked out, fairly quickly, exactly what had saved his life.
Not luck. Not fate. A piece of equipment that most ambulances in his own state didn't carry.
Think about what that actually meant.
Somewhere in New South Wales, right now, someone was collapsing with the same kind of cardiac arrest Packer had just survived, and the ambulance reaching them had no defibrillator on board at all.
Packer decided that gap should not exist.
He went to the New South Wales Premier at the time, Nick Greiner, with a blunt proposition: "I'll go you 50/50." Packer would personally cover half the cost of putting portable defibrillators in every ambulance in the state, if the government covered the rest.
Here is where you'd expect the famously combative businessman to walk away once the headline photo was taken.
He didn't.
Packer's contribution came to roughly two and a half million dollars of his own money, real cash, not a pledge dressed up for a press release. Every ambulance in New South Wales that didn't already carry a defibrillator, got one.
Paramedics on the ground nicknamed the devices "Packer Whackers," half joke, half tribute, and the name stuck for years.
Now sit with the irony for a second.
This was a man publicly notorious for saying that anyone who didn't aggressively minimise their tax "wants their head read," a man who fought the Australian Taxation Office for decades and rarely lost. Critics were quick to note the contrast: a billionaire who resisted funding public services through tax, personally funding a piece of public health infrastructure instead, on his own terms, when it suited him.
Whatever you make of that contradiction, the defibrillators went in anyway.
Portable defibrillators became standard equipment across New South Wales ambulances from that point on, a piece of everyday emergency medicine that barely existed in the state before Packer's heart stopped on a polo field.
Here is where it reaches you.
If you or someone you love has ever gone into cardiac arrest anywhere in New South Wales in the decades since, and an ambulance arrived carrying the equipment to restart a stopped heart on the spot, that is a direct legacy of the seven minutes Kerry Packer spent clinically dead in 1990.
He didn't build a hospital wing with his name carved into marble. He didn't hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony.
He looked at the exact machine that had brought him back from nothing, worked out how many other people in his state didn't have access to one, and wrote a cheque to close that gap.
Two and a half million dollars, spent so that strangers he would never meet would get the same second chance he did.
He came back from the other side once.
Because of him, plenty of other people got to come back too.
