Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As the present member for Melbourne Ports, the seat that Frank Crean represented in this House for 26 years, it is an honour for me to rise in support of the motion moved by the Prime Minister and supported by the Leader of the Opposition. It would have given Frank Crean great pleasure to know that he was being farewelled in this place by a Labor Prime Minister, because he devoted his whole life to the service of the great Australian labour movement, as well as to his family and the people of Melbourne Ports.

When Frank was elected as the Member for Melbourne Ports in 1951, succeeding another great Labor titan, Ted Holloway, it was a very different area to the one I now represent. It extended from Williamstown to Albert Park, and its core was the working class stronghold of Port Melbourne. It was only 20 years since the Depression and most of the people of the area had vivid memories of the unemployment, hunger and poverty they had suffered in those terrible years, brought about by the failure, as they saw it, of the capitalist system. It was Frank’s job to speak for that community here in Canberra, and he never forgot why he was here or who he represented.

Other members have given an outline of Frank Crean’s career, which took him from Hamilton in the western district, where his father was a miner and a bicycle maker, to Melbourne University and then on to the office of Deputy Prime Minister. It was Frank Crean’s misfortune to be part of a generation of Labor politicians who were destined to spend most of their careers in opposition during the long rule of Sir Robert Menzies. These were the bitter years of division in the Labor movement between communists and groupers, and they often battled those groups in the Port Melbourne docks.

Although Frank Crean had been preselected in 1951 as a supporter of the Left, he was always at heart a realist. He stayed loyal to the Labor Party in the great split of the 1950s, but he was never part of the outlandish ideological debates that took place in Victoria and he always supported a realistic line on issues. He was a proud graduate of Melbourne High School. I have, since 1988, continued the tradition of association with Melbourne High and the students of the VCE who have such an abiding interest in politics.

Frank Crean was one of the first Labor members with a university education in economics, and he gradually steered Labor from its increasingly obsolete ideology of the Chifley era and helped lay the foundations for Gough Whitlam’s modernisation of the Labor Party in the 1960s. As many people have said, Frank was a modest and humble man. Frank and Mary Crean lived the whole of their married lives in Albert Park, and Frank was often seen riding the South Melbourne tram or shopping at the local market in Prahran. In fact, I often met him on the tram and/or at the Prahran market with my kids when they were little. He was always available to the working people of Port Melbourne, Albert Park and South Melbourne, which were not the gentrified suburbs they are today. He never thought he was better than them because he had a university degree or because he was an MP. In the days before MPs employed social workers in their electoral offices, Frank saw his electors himself whenever he could and did what he could to solve their problems.

In 1969 the boundaries of Melbourne Ports were enlarged to include St Kilda and Elwood, which were then largely middle-class and Liberal voting areas. On the new boundaries, Melbourne Ports became a notionally Liberal seat. It is a tribute to Frank’s campaigning skills and his rapport with people that he rapidly won over these new areas for Labor and made Melbourne Ports nearly as safe as it was before.

I think it is fair to say that when Frank Crean finally got to be a minister in 1972 he found the experience disappointing. Just as is happening now, the Liberals, having coasted for years on boom times, left Labor to cope with a crisis driven by overseas forces—in Frank’s case, the global recession that followed the oil shock of 1973. Frank Crean did not trust the orthodox economic advice he was getting from the Treasury but he sometimes lacked the support of his colleagues in cabinet for taking a different line. He was undermined by Jim Cairns and his supporters, and eventually Gough Whitlam shifted him from Treasury to trade. When Cairns self-destructed in the loans affair of 1975, Frank justly succeeded him as Deputy Prime Minister, an honour he fully deserved in view of his long and loyal service.

After leaving politics, Frank could have retired to the Gold Coast, but he and Mary stayed in Albert Park and continued to work for the local people and for the Labor Party. He took a particular interest in the welfare of new immigrants who had moved into the area since the 1970s. He continued to go to local branch meetings and every election day—the last time was in 2001, when I think he was 85—he stood like an old soldier handing out how-to-vote cards at the Middle Park polling booth. I would see him when I was going round the booths.

Frank was sustained by his strong Labor principles, his firm religious faith and the support of Mary Crean, the most loyal of partners. It was these things that gave him strength during the ordeal of their son Stephen’s death in 1985. He was very proud, and rightly so, of his sons Simon, our colleague in this House and our trade minister, and David, formerly a Labor government minister in Tasmania. The members and supporters of the Australian Labor Party in Melbourne Ports are deeply thankful for Frank Crean’s lifetime of service to them and to our cause. In their name as well as my own I extend my deepest sympathies to Mary, Simon, David and all members of the Crean family.

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