Brendan Nelson (Bradfield, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, I firstly thank you and the House for the opportunity to make some remarks during these valedictory speeches. The first thing is that we are about to celebrate Christmas, which is when Christians recognise and celebrate the birth of Christ. It is in many ways a time when we reflect on what has happened in the year that has gone and look forward to the year ahead with renewed confidence and hope, which is arguably the most fragile yet powerful of human emotions.

It has been an extraordinary year for our country. It has also been an extraordinary year for me personally and also for our party. I would like to start by thanking my wife, Gillian. A number of people on both sides of the House and around the country have said to me that perhaps I might have been more successful if they had seen and heard more of my wife, which I took as a compliment to her. There is no doubt that none of us achieves anything in our lives without people who love us and believe in us—families who make involuntary sacrifices to allow us to serve our nation, in this case through the parliament. Having said that, though, when I was asked by a young person a year or so ago when addressing a leadership conference how you stop politicians from becoming arrogant, I said, ‘When you find out can you let me know?’ However, I did explain that when you are my age and you have a wife you are pretty right. In explaining that, I relate that I was education minister in 2002 and I had been invited to deliver the Chapman Oration of the Institution of Engineers Australia at the Hyatt Hotel in Melbourne to a dinner audience of 500 or so engineers and their families. If you are one or you have them in your family, you know engineers are a pretty serious lot. So when I sat down, having done this, the very earnest chief executive leaned over and said, ‘Dr Nelson, I do apologise for continuing to eat when you began your speech, but your wife said I should enjoy something while you were talking.’

That is the nature of the relationship I have with Gillian. The Leader of the House earlier today said he had observed that in the press conference I was able to do after I had lost the leadership of our party my wife had said that she was looking forward to seeing more of me, and I can report after 2½ months that just before I came down here for this sitting week she said to me, ‘I think I am actually going to miss you.’ That was reflecting on the fact that she had seen so little of me that I had been home enough for her to miss me coming down.

I would like to make some remarks, in thinking about the year that has gone, about a person of whom little, if anything, has been said over the last year. A giant of a man, not physically but politically, who cast a very long shadow over this parliament and across our country, and that is John Howard. John Howard, as we know, served the people of this country in the parliament representing Bennelong for close to 34 years. He suffered the ignominy of losing his seat of Bennelong, as we know, in the election of last year, and it is to the enormous credit of the new member for Bennelong and her party that they were able to achieve that. But John Howard has left a great lesson, I think, for all of us, and that is the importance of conviction and belief.

For our party and for me as a person who began life as a person born and bred in Labor politics and had my own personal involvement with the Crean family, whom I greatly admire, John Howard has arguably been the greatest exponent of our beliefs since Sir Robert Menzies. I made the observation when leader at one of the dinners held in tribute of John Howard that Robert Menzies in his period of having lost the prime ministership of the country and then thinking about his own political future gave a series of speeches entitled ‘The forgotten people’. He spoke about the salary earners, the shopkeepers, the skilled artisans, the professional men and women and the farmers. Politically and economically he described them as the middle class—unorganised and unselfconscious, not rich enough to wield power in its own right and too individualistic to be organised for what he described as pressure politics. And yet Menzies observed that they were the backbone of the nation. Almost as an afterthought, he further said, ‘It is in their children they see their greatest contribution to the country.’ It was for that set of beliefs and for those people that John and his wife, Janette, committed their entire lives to the service of this country. Whether you agree or disagree with John Howard and his views—and I know those on the other side certainly do not agree in almost all cases—we certainly have an enormous amount of respect for what he has given to us.

I did not participate in the so-called The Howard Years but there is something I would like to say which is just one small window into John Howard that I would have said in that first episode. After the Port Arthur massacre, there was enormous pressure in our country to deal with guns and gun control. Equally, there were significant sections of Australian society who felt legitimately very strongly that what was being proposed should not happen, including within my own party. I will never forget attending the first party room meeting of us in government after the Port Arthur massacre. There were many of my own colleagues who were quite opposed to the idea of us embarking on national gun control. John Howard stood before us and said, ‘What I am about to say to you is contrary to everything I have ever believed.’ He said: ‘We are going to have to pass rules to control the lives of people who have never done anything wrong and never will. We are going to have to tell the states what to do.’ That is ironic when you think of what subsequently happened in the development of the government. He said, ‘Never in my 23 years in public life have I been more convinced that this is the right thing to do.’

Throughout his period in government as Prime Minister of the country, he showed that kind of leadership on a number of occasions. I think it is important as we finish this year that we reflect on his contribution and that made by his family to our country and in making us who we are and giving us what we have. From our side, naturally, we do argue that, amongst many things, he put this country in the strongest economic position that it could possibly be in to face the global financial crisis to which the member for North Sydney just referred.

I would also like to say that leading our party and being John Howard’s immediate successor was an enormous privilege bestowed upon me by my colleagues. It was not something that I had anticipated. I had, of course, like many here—not all—quietly harboured the possibility that at some point in my political life I might take on the leadership of the party, but I did not expect that. It was genuinely a shock for me, as it was for all of us, when the member for Higgins, for whom I have the highest regard, decided for reasons I now fully understand that he would not take on the leadership of our party. And I appreciate and respect the efforts made by our now leader, Malcolm Turnbull, in contesting the leadership of the party at that time. It was extraordinarily difficult for us and obviously a new experience for me to go from government to opposition and at the same time be the leader of the party when our putative next leader had quite reasonably decided that he would prefer not to take it on. It was a major life event for many of us. We lost our leader, John Howard, we lost our putative leader, we lost our foreign minister and we effectively also lost our Deputy Prime Minister.

Whilst we were extraordinarily proud of what we had achieved, there were some things that we had to change. We had to support the ratification of the Kyoto agreement, and we made a mistake not having done that in government. I felt morally and practically that we must support the apology to the forcibly removed generations of Aboriginal children. I was ridiculed and criticised for the way in which I went about trying to make sure that the very conservative members of our party understood that I knew and respected their views. I was also criticised for the way I spoke to the apology. On those apology matters, I have yet to receive an apology from one particular person for the behaviour of some people who worked for him. I have been asked whether I regret what I said. I do not regret a single word of what I said that day—not a single word—because an atypical, more than usual number of Australians were actually tuned in to Aboriginal issues that day and if it were just about us saying sorry and being deeply sorry we would have achieved nothing. Everyday Australians who work hard and live relatively comfortable lives needed to be confronted with the state of Aboriginal Australia as it is today. Our progress as a nation, in my view, will be judged not only by the economic indices with which we are so understandably concerned but by the extent to which we lift Indigenous Australia from what is largely existential despair and appalling conditions, which still exist notwithstanding the enormous effort and goodwill of governments of all persuasions.

I would like to thank the member for Curtin for the support which she gave me through my period as the then leader of the opposition. I would also like to thank the member for North Sydney, who has been a wonderful friend and always reminds me—he doesn’t say it—that you have got to have a sense of humour as you go through this job. Yes, the cardboard cut-out was something that came to me. We were not happy about the idea of sitting on Fridays without a question time and we had decided that we would take a very strong, principled stand on this. I said: ‘Joe, we’ve got to have something that cuts through’—no pun intended—‘We need to make sure that the average bloke looking for footy results in the Herald Sun knows that, basically, the Prime Minister is wagging school.’ As you, Mr Speaker, had very helpfully agreed to props only the day before, I thought, ‘We need one of those things you see at the movies, like a cardboard cut-out of Russell Crowe.’ Needless to say, when Joe and our federal director presented it to me—I had specifically asked for a very nice image of the Prime Minister, and that is indeed what it was—I was so excited. I thought, ‘This is going to work.’ In fact I did suggest to the member for North Sydney that you could contemplate bringing in the cardboard cut-out with a Father Christmas hat on, but his judgement is obviously sounder than mine and we decided not to do that.

I would also like to thank all of my colleagues, frontbench and backbench, for all of the support they gave me through what was a difficult period. The leader of any opposition in the period that we have just been through always has someone else and there are always others who would prefer to be higher up the tree and their obvious skills have not been recognised and all of those sorts of things. But I am very proud of what we have achieved as a team in opposition this year. It has been very difficult, with an ascendant government and an extraordinarily popular Prime Minister. I also am very proud of the fact—and I hope it is the case—that I have not ever hit below the belt when it comes to dishing it out to the government.

I would also like to record my thanks and gratitude to the Prime Minister for the personal courtesies extended to me during my period as opposition leader. I had several meetings with him on a personal basis. He was particularly generous to me when I lost the leadership of the party. I would also like to express my admiration for his wife, Therese Rein. You see people in public life and sometimes you are disappointed when you meet them; you find that some people exceed your expectations and some never meet them. I must say that the Prime Minister’s wife is particularly impressive. There was that incident where she had the Aboriginal children come to the Lodge for the literacy awards and a young girl was struggling with her poem. The Prime Minister’s wife said, ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ and started reading the poem, about the child’s mother, and only halfway through it realised that her mother had died; to then become quite emotional about that says an enormous amount about her. Nonetheless, in two years time I look forward to Malcolm and Lucy moving into the Lodge! So please do not read anything into that, if you know what I mean. Gary, please write that down.

I would also like to thank party members, members of the Liberal Party throughout the country. My observation is that the morale of our party was actually lower after we lost in 1993 than it has been over this past year. That is not to suggest that we were not disappointed about losing government last year, but this is a democracy and we respect the decisions that people have made. The belief of everyday members of the party who do not seek political office, who just want to see the nation shaped in Liberal values, is something which sustains all of us on our side.

I would particularly like to thank and recognise Alan Stockdale, in taking on the presidency of our party, and Brian Loughnane and our directors throughout the country for the enormous amount of work they have done. I would also like to thank not only my current staff but also the staff that I had when I was Leader of the Opposition, led by Peter Hendy. The sacrifices these people made is something that will be understood only by people that are here in the chamber. I would particularly like to record my gratitude to them.

In concluding I would like to say two things. The first is that I do believe that Malcolm Turnbull and his wife, Lucy, are a formidable couple. I agree with Joe’s sentiments about the member for Wentworth’s enormous intellect and strength of personality, certainly an engaging personality. I do believe that as time goes by we will see that the public will come to better understand and certainly respect and support him. I wish him and his family a wonderful Christmas.

Before I finish I want to say that amongst the life-changing events for me was to spend two years as the nation’s defence minister. You come out of that job a different person from the one that you were when you went in. Today the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition and many others have been to the funeral of Lieutenant Michael Fussell. In relation to Sean McCarthy, Jason Marks, David Pearce, Matthew Locke, Luke Worsley and Andrew Russell, those men who have given their lives in our name in Afghanistan, wearing our uniform and under our flag, and in relation to what has happened in Mumbai over the last week, we should not forget that our generation is engaged in a struggle against fundamentalism. We will celebrate Christmas in this country. Christians and non-Christians will observe it in different ways, but we will celebrate it and do so in peace and do our very best to love one another in the year ahead. That is not the case in many parts of the world and it is not going to happen by accident if we live in a world where, ostensibly, that is what happens everywhere.

I think that we should remember—and we have said generous things about one another here today—that we are living in many ways in a world that is characterised by fundamentalist intolerance. We live in vast ignorance of the long-term consequence of the decisions that are made by us and made on our behalf. We are certainly living in a world of close to unprecedented economic uncertainty. The thing that we should never forget is that what we are going to need most is one another. The member for North Sydney said that people make derogatory remarks about these valedictories and so on. I have thought a bit about that over the years. As you know, Mr Speaker, some people call them ‘hypocriticals’. Sometimes I must say that I have felt that some of the things that are said are a little bit hypocritical, but the truth of it is that beneath the difference of philosophy and political opinion on different issues there is genuine belief and respect for people across this chamber, and that is something that is very precious in our country and something we need to work very hard to not only understand but also defend and support.

Finally, Mr Speaker, I meant what I said when you were appointed to that position. You are a man of extraordinary—I am not trying to get favours from you, by the way!—generosity and humility. I am a very strong believer that what goes around comes around. What went around when you sat on this side was that you were always there for all of us. It did not matter where we were—where we sat in the chamber—or whether we were gifted or not so gifted, or whether we knew standing orders or not, you were always there to lend all kinds of support and help. None of us on this side forgets it.

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