Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I thank you, Mr Speaker, and I thank the House. All Australia is jubilant today at the safe rescue of Todd Russell and Brant Webb. Can I say at the outset of my remarks that I look forward enormously to joining with the Prime Minister and making certain that this huge community effort in their rescue is properly recognised in this place. I look forward to that opportunity, as I am sure all members of parliament here today do.

This is a rolled gold miracle. It is an epic Australian story. It is a celebration of those great Australian values of mateship, courage, community, family, resourcefulness and skill—all the things that we believe are significant in the Australian character and are demonstrated by incident after incident, which go together to create the Australian legend. This at Beaconsfield has now been added to that list. It was an extraordinary event.

We meet as a parliament today in the shadow of the sad side of this epic story, and that is the sorrow that we all have at the death of one of the miners, Larry Knight, and our sympathy with the family and with what they must now be going through. Indeed, we meet and discuss these matters here today probably at the same time as the conclusion of the private funeral that is being held for him. I do understand that Todd Russell and Brant Webb managed to make it to that funeral. The generous act by the Knight family to hold off the funeral until they came out of their cage has been honoured by the fact that they have been able to make it in that time.

The thing that we do need to recollect here, as the Prime Minister said, and what has been demonstrated to all Australians, is what a very dangerous profession mining is. It is an enormously lucrative industry from the Australian national point of view but enormously dangerous for those who participate within it. It requires resources of courage to go down to such depths every day in circumstances where you are not absolutely certain that all the day’s proceedings will be conducted in a way that preserves your safety. But, just as it takes extraordinary courage to go down daily in those circumstances, much more courage is required to go through that process to rescue your mates in what is a destabilised deep mine. It is important for us as a place to reflect both on the courage of those entrapped and on the massive courage of those engaged in the rescue activity—the courage it took day after day to go into a destabilised mine at its depths in what has been a largely experimental process of working a way through to the entrapped miners. The courage of the individuals who performed those tasks and those who supported them—the paramedics and other volunteers who were down there providing aid and comfort to the entrapped miners—is something that must be noted and registered with the whole community.

I appreciated enormously an opportunity Bill Shorten provided me to talk this morning to two of the miners who were amongst those volunteers, including the one who made, as I understand it, the initial breakthrough into the cavity in which the cage with the entrapped miners was contained. They were just laconic Australians. There was, as you would expect, no sense of heroism—just doing a job for your mates, just doing your business, just doing what you are trained to do and getting on with it and achieving outcomes. But there was that absolute determination that the outcome would be good. We should place on record our appreciation not only for the courage of the entombed miners but also for the courage of those who were at the rock face, so to speak, of the rescue.

We also ought to pay tribute to the skill of the engineers who worked their way around the engineering problems associated with this and in that regard to the mine manager, Mr Gill, who was mentioned by the Prime Minister in his remarks. They were the ones who had to make the decisions as to what help would be brought in and what assistance sought from elsewhere from their knowledge about the character of the mining industry—that knowledge that would enable them to call for the right sources of help from state government level, other state government level and the private sector and the like to provide them with the capacity to make a judgment on which of the many alternatives they should take.

The epic character of this is enhanced further by the fact that these miners were discovered by somebody ‘allegedly’ performing a rogue act—going where he ought not have been but determined to try to find out whether there was any chance of anyone else left alive and, when all had largely given up hope, hearing those voices. Imagine the horror of the four days of hearing nothing of the two persons before he arrived on the scene and then hearing their voices in the dark—nothing but a destabilised rock face, a destabilised tunnel a mile below the earth’s surface.

It is an extraordinary tale. There are all the other issues of community resilience: the marvellous unity of the Beaconsfield community, the effectiveness and the commitment of those in the different community organisations, from the religious groups and the churches through to the local government, all absolutely determined that this epic tale would have a successful conclusion. Along with the Prime Minister, I pay tribute to all of them.

I also appreciate and note the Prime Minister’s statement about the preparedness of the federal government to play a role in the economic recovery of the community. This is obviously a dangerous mine at the moment and there will be issues determined in the various inquiries proceeding as to how it got into that situation. But one thing must be absolutely clear for all of us in public life who have any influence over these proceedings: nobody should mine that mine again until we are absolutely certain it is completely safe. If that means it is shut for a time, it must be shut for a time. Should the community be decimated and destroyed as a result of an essential, sensible safety decision? Obviously not. The federal government has a role to play there and it is important that the Prime Minister has offered that role.

Can I also pay tribute to Bill Shorten, the AWU official who was frequently the person who conveyed information to the rest of the public as to what was going on in the mine. Of course, apart from the public explanation, he also explained it privately, working closely with the miners to make sure that they were happy and satisfied that correct judgments were being arrived at in relation to the rescue effort. There was a side to his activity and the union’s activities that was an explanation to the public of what was going on. There was another side that was representational, in circumstances of great doubt and difficulty in determining what the correct and safest course was. The fact that the miners were so prepared to go after their mates may well have had something to do with their level of confidence that their interests and the security of the rescue effort were being properly watched by those who spoke on their behalf more generally in the community. So I pay tribute to Bill Shorten there.

It is of course a time of mixed emotion. We mentioned that with regard to the terrible losses suffered by the Knight family—made worse, I am afraid to say, by the fact that there was so much activity around them when what they really desperately needed was privacy for grief, reflection and reconstruction of the family. They were caught up, in their grief, in what was the wider inspection, if you like, of the community by all the rest of us as we watched the saga unfold. They have had a terribly difficult time.

But we can also note and share in the enormous joy of Brant’s and Todd’s families, the enormous joy that they displayed so obviously before us all this morning, and as a parliament—and we should have this opportunity, as the Prime Minister said—we express our solidarity with them. This is an epic Australian story of great Australian mateship that has reached a successful conclusion, and we should all take joy in it.

Very briefly, the Prime Minister mentioned the family of our first casualty in Iraq, Private Kovco; the first casualty himself; and the funeral of Private Kovco that took place recently. All Australia shared the grief of the Kovco family in the circumstances of his passing. Their thoughts would have been with him at the time that that funeral took place. The event is a brutal reminder that Iraq is a dangerous place—that those who go in harm’s way find themselves at risk, whether that risk is a product of accident or a product of events on the battlefield. The War Memorial here makes no differential between those who are killed as a result of a bullet, as a result of disease or as a result of accident. That War Memorial is for all our honoured dead. Private Kovco joins them.

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