Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

On indulgence: to all of my colleagues in this place, I would say that many of them claim to have in their electorates a close association with St Mary of the Cross. That is because Mary belongs to no single part of Australia but to all Australians. As my friend and colleague the member for Reid has just pointed out, Mary’s earthly remains are in the heart of my electorate of North Sydney. In fact back in 1909 Mary was buried at Gore Hill cemetery. Even in those days, only just after her death, she was so venerated by so many Australians that people were taking soil from the site of her burial and quite appropriately the Josephites found a permanent resting place for Mary in the heart of the CBD of North Sydney.

The canonisation of Mary MacKillop was watched by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Australians. Apart from the 10,000 proud and happily boisterous Australians in St Peter’s Square as part of a crowd of 50,000, there were Australians all over the nation visiting places and happily celebrating the canonisation of Mary, our first saint. I think the Pope’s smile, which emerged during the canonisation in reaction to the boisterous support of the Australian people in the crowd, would have brought a smile to the face of Mary herself. We are immensely proud to have our first home-grown saint.

So many of my colleagues have outlined the history of Mary, who was born in Melbourne in 1842 and in 1866 opened the first St Joseph’s School in Penola in South Australia. In 1867 she took her vows to become Sister Mary of the Cross. Within just three years Mary had established 21 schools with 72 sisters. She established refuges for women coming out of prison. She established support facilities for the aged and orphans. She was the first Australian to establish an order and the first nun to leave the cities to educate and minister to the rural poor and the working class.

So much has been written about her excommunication back in 1871, which was of course a terrible aberration. The headquarters of the Josephite nuns were transferred to Sydney in 1833. In 1909, when Mary died, there were 750 sisters, there were institutes and houses sheltering over 1,000 people who were poor or in need and there were 117 schools attended by over 12,000 pupils.

Mary’s motto was ‘Never see a need without doing something about it’. I was very honoured to be invited to speak at a dinner at Sydney Town Hall with the Prime Minister during the election campaign to raise funds to support Josephite nuns travelling to Rome for the canonisation. It was on that day that I reflected on my own engagement with the Josephite nuns. Written in Latin above one of the doors of St Paul’s Cathedral is: ‘If you are looking for a monument, look around you.’ The great monument of Mary is the contribution of the Josephites over all that time since she founded the order back, effectively, in 1866 when she opened St Joseph’s School in Penola.

I was one of the many people educated by the Josephites. I attended what was St Kieran’s parish school in Northbridge; it is now St Philip Neri, named after the parish itself. There was a nun there—and I am sure she would not mind—who, all those years ago, I thought was probably 100 years of age but is still alive today. It was only a couple of years ago that I received a phone call from Sister Vincent. The phone call came through and my staff said, ‘A Sister Vincent on the phone.’ The only Sister Vincent I knew was the principal of that school and she had looked on me rather harshly during those years, usually with a weapon of mass destruction in her hand. She took to heart the motto ‘Never see a need without doing something about it’ and she had thought I needed excessive discipline from time to time, which was—

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