John Howard (Bennelong, Liberal Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House expresses its deep regret at the death on 24 May 2006, of the Honourable John Murray Wheeldon, former Federal Minister and Senator for Western Australia and places on record its appreciation of his long and meritorious public service, and tenders its profound sympathy to his family in their bereavement.

John Wheeldon was born on 9 August 1929 in Subiaco, Western Australia. He attended the esteemed Perth Modern School and later the University of Western Australia. After graduating in arts and law, he went on to practise as a solicitor and around this time John Wheeldon’s political life began in his role as President of the Western Australian Young Liberals. John Wheeldon was elected senator for Western Australia in 1965, representing the Australian Labor Party, and he remained in the Senate as a Labor Party senator until 1981. John Wheeldon had a deep and abiding interest in, and extensive knowledge of, international affairs. He was a very fierce opponent of the Vietnam War from very early on. He visited North Vietnam in the mid-1960s when the war was at its height and in 1967 he visited the United States, campaigning against the war in Vietnam. In parliament he served as a member and chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee and the joint committees on foreign affairs and defence matters. John Wheeldon was a minister in the Whitlam government as Minister for Repatriation and Compensation from 1974 to 1975 and later, in 1975, he also took over the ministry of Social Security. Later, as a member of the opposition shadow ministry, in 1976 he was spokesman on repatriation, compensation, media and films.

John Wheeldon believed his greatest achievement in parliament was his involvement in a report on human rights in the Soviet Union which gave exposure to a range of significant humanitarian issues. In his last year in parliament he was made Parliamentary Adviser to the United Nations General Assembly in New York. After he left the Senate, John Wheeldon was approached by Rupert Murdoch and offered a position on the Australian newspaper. As a senior writer with the Australian, he specialised in foreign affairs and politics and he will be remembered there for his vast knowledge of world politics, his dry and incisive wit and his remarkable writing capacity.

After he left parliament, I got to know John Wheeldon rather better than I had known him when we both served in parliament between 1974 and 1981. He was a very interesting person in a political sense. He commenced membership of a political party as a member of the Liberal Party in Western Australia, he then left the Liberal Party—no doubt in part because of the Vietnam War—and became an active member of the Australian Labor Party. My recollection of him as a member of the Australian Labor Party is that he progressively adhered to some of the more left wing causes in the Australian Labor Party and he found himself in company with the late Dr Jim Cairns and a number of others—the late ‘Diamond Jim’ McClelland and many others—in the Labor Party who held strong views which might broadly be typified, certainly on international relations, as being on the left of the Australian Labor Party.

After he left parliament, I think it is fair to say—and I do not think I do any injustice or reflect inaccurately on his memory—that his views then began to return not all the way but some of the way back to the views that he had held as a younger person. One of the interesting things about John Wheeldon was it was impossible to typecast him. He was a very fierce opponent of the war in Vietnam, he was a prodigious critic of the Soviet Union and the totalitarianism involved, and he was a very fierce opponent of the acquiescence of the Whitlam government, the Fraser government and the Hawke government in the incorporation of East Timor into the Republic of Indonesia. I remember that on one occasion, when I interviewed him for a radio program in the early 1980s, he gave me a memorable blast, collectively speaking, in relation to the incorporation of East Timor into Indonesia. So he was not somebody whom you could put in a pigeonhole and say, ‘This is how John Wheeldon would react.’ He was a person who absolutely scorned pomposity and he was—and this is something that endeared him to me very greatly—a fierce and unrelenting critic of political correctness. Some of the more memorable diatribes that I have heard against political correctness were delivered in conversations that I had with John Wheeldon.

His journalistic career brought him into contact with many people who had not previously known him, and he displayed a remarkable intellect. He was somebody whom I grew to like very much when we saw each other in different circumstances after he left parliament. I recall those occasions with great warmth. He was a likeable character. Although I have no first-hand knowledge and nobody in this parliament has first-hand knowledge of 1975, he is reputed to have argued in the federal parliamentary Labor caucus that, when the Senate failed to pass the budget, the then Prime Minister should have immediately advised the holding of an election. That is what the record suggests. As I say, I was not present at that meeting and there is nobody opposite who was present at that meeting, so we will have to accept that as an accurate version of events. If indeed that is true, then he, along with the late Ken Wriedt, displayed remarkable prescience in relation to the events that unfolded in 1975.

He was in every sense of the word an independent intellect. You could not predict him. Although I naturally did not share all of his positions on the issues on which he spoke, he took what can fairly be described as a very intellectually honest position. His great passion was foreign affairs. I remember him as a warm, witty and engaging personality. To his wife, Judith, and his sons, Andrew and James, and his daughter, Miriam, on behalf of the government I extend my deep sympathy and condolences.

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