Alexander Downer (Mayo, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to join with the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition in this condolence motion for Reg Swartz. The reason I do so is that he was a friend and a colleague of my father’s and a friend also of my mother’s. He was  therefore somebody who was close to our family so, as a family, we very much grieve his passing.

Reg Swartz and my father had a good deal in common. They were born within one year of each other—Reg Swartz being one year younger—and both of them were members of the AIF during World War II in Malaya, in the retreat down the Malay Peninsula to Singapore, and were incarcerated in the Changi prisoner of war camp. As you have heard from the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, Reg Swartz also went to work on the infamous Thai-Burma Railway, something my father managed not to do.

Reg Swartz was a man of enormous courage and determination to have survived those simply indescribable and appalling experiences, and I think it is important that we all acknowledge the great courage he showed through that time. He was also elected to the House of Representatives on the same day as my father in 1949. My father was one of the ‘Forty-niners’, a generation of Liberal politicians—or coalition politicians—

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