Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

It is an honour to be speaking in this condolence motion for Gough Whitlam. In doing so, I extend my sympathies to Gough and Margaret Whitlam's children and their extended family. There is obviously an enormous sadness that comes with death, but Gough Whitlam's life is a life to be celebrated. It was a huge and a long one.

On 22 July in 1967 the Corio by-election occurred in Geelong. Gough Whitlam had been the leader of the opposition for less than six months. The Labor candidate in that by-election was Gordon Scholes, a man who was 36 at the time, a train driver and the president of Geelong Trades Hall. The long-time Liberal member for Corio, Hubert Opperman, the very famous Australian cyclist—who was the Minister for Immigration in the Menzies and Holt governments—had retired to become the High Commissioner to Malta, and that triggered this by-election. It was the first federal election that Gough faced as the Leader of the Opposition, the leader of the Labor Party.

Gough came down to Geelong 10 days before the by-election and spent the full 10 days in Geelong with his whole office and campaign team, marking out the kind of electioneer which he would be regarded in the future as having been. Incidentally, I was born nine days prior to that event, which means that Gough arrived in Geelong before me. So, when I came to Geelong, I found Gough enthroned in my home town. The reason for Gough's effort in relation to this by-election was that Labor had suffered an enormous defeat in the 1966 election; this was the first test for Gough as the Leader of the Opposition. So it mattered.

What emanated from that effort was an 11 per cent swing to Labor. Gough was embraced by the people of Geelong, as was Gordon Scholes. Corio came back to Labor hands for the first time in a number of decades, and it can be argued that this was the first electoral step that Gough took towards that day in December 1972—when it was, indeed, time.

Gough retained an abiding affection for Geelong—as he did for Gordon Scholes, who played his own role in Gough's story, as a predecessor of yours, Madam Speaker, on the 11th of November 1975. In a glittering career, one of Gough's greatest achievements was that he became, as Prime Minister, the No. 1 ticket holder of the Geelong Football Club. He returned to Geelong on numerous occasions after that first by-election—indeed, part of the story I am recounting I heard from the great man himself when he was in Geelong in 1997 addressing the Geelong West Football Club on the 30th anniversary of the Corio by-election.

If Gough embodied anything, it was modernity. He inherited a party that had split a dozen years before he became the leader. Indeed, he witnessed that split. He rebuild the party after the split and dragged to Labor into the second half of the 20th century, making us a modern party that was competitive and able to win an election. But that was reflected in the way in which he also was the emblem of modernity for Australia itself. The country he inherited at the end of 23 years of one-party rule was perhaps a country that was going through the stalest part of its democracy. Indeed, there cannot have been a less active and more stale period in this place than in the term of office from 1969 to 1972, when there was no legislative program. In fact, the speech that was made by the then Governor-General outlining the government's program after the 1969 election lasted precisely for one minute and a quarter—by today's standards that speech, outlining that term in government, was a shortened 90-second statement!

That was the country that Gough inherited. But with that, he embodied a whole range of new initiatives: in relation to opening up our higher education system to a whole range of people who had never had that opportunity before; making sure that women's place within our society, our community and our economy was where it should be; seeking to recognise China and to have a more modern outlook in our relationship with Asia; and repairing, as we have just heard from the member for Hasluck—or beginning the process of repairing—the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. I could go on, and each of these achievements have been spoken of at length by those in this debate, as is right and proper.

But there is one aspect which I do want to focus on in relation to that legacy, and that is in respect of Gough's view of regional Australia. We have heard a number of speeches about Gough being of Western Sydney and understanding the basic importance of infrastructure in our suburbs and in regional Australia. It is often perhaps most embodied by the step that Gough took in establishing the Albury-Wodonga Corporation, but in Geelong Gough was utterly pivotal in ensuring that the next university in the state of Victoria would be based in Geelong, which is what ultimately occurred with the establishment of Deakin University. But for Gough, Deakin would not have been in Geelong.

Gough saw that regional cities should be places where there are universities, where there are public services and where there are regional economies in their own right, such that Australia grows beyond simply being a series of city states. This was a grand vision, which is absolutely embraced by regional Australia today.

So, for Gough, Geelong was the embodiment of the kind of Australia that he wanted to see. And as Geelong goes through difficult times today, Gough's vision remains for us a beacon of hope about the kind of prosperous future we can achieve.

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