Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I came to know John Wheeldon in the late 1980s, by which time he was a writer and commentator, but he was all the better at that thanks to his experience of parliamentary and ministerial life. He would sometimes lament that, as a member of parliament and minister, he had read millions of newspaper articles but not a single book. It was not true of John Wheeldon, of course, but it was certainly an illustration of his awareness of the danger of drawing down too much on your intellectual capital. He also used to say that, in government, people who had studied issues for years never made decisions and the people who did make decisions tended to have studied them for about five minutes—again, a caricature, nevertheless a revealing one, and a warning against the danger of decision making on the run.

As both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition have pointed out, John Wheeldon was something of a political pilgrim. He was a former president of the Western Australian Young Liberals. He was not the only lefty to be a Young Liberal president, but I am told it is not as common these days! By the late 1980s, he certainly was a partisan for good people and for defensible principles and not for any particular party. In my experience his passion was to see people treated humanely—that was his great passion and he was quite pragmatic about how that might best be done. He happened to believe, for instance, that Australia’s role in the independence of East Timor righted a great historical wrong and he thought it was one of the proudest moments in our history.

In 1998, along with Peter Coleman, another distinguished former member of this House, he was prepared to lend his name to a campaign to expose the undemocratic nature of the then One Nation Party. I was particularly touched by the faith he was prepared to place in me in this regard, and I hope it was not misplaced.

In my experience, John Wheeldon was loyal without being blind to people’s faults; he was committed without believing that any particular side had a monopoly on wisdom and virtue; he was ferociously opposed to political correctness in all its forms because he believed it defied commonsense. He was a man of high intelligence, of broad culture and of rare moral courage. There are too few such men in our public life, but certainly he served his country to the best of his ability in parliament and in public advocacy. We rightly honour his life and mourn his passing.

In conclusion, I should point out that he was very sick for several years before his death. He was devotedly nursed throughout that long illness by his wife, Judith, who, as the Leader of the Opposition said, is an absolutely brilliant woman in her own right—a former headmistress of Queenwood School in my electorate and of Abbotsleigh College in Wahroonga. We certainly should honour her as we honour him.

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