Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

The death of Gough Whitlam is mourned across the nation as the passing of a great Australian, a leader who changed this nation for the better and left us a magnificent legacy that continues to enrich our lives today. Like many in this place—on all sides, it seems—I treasure memories of my meetings with Gough and Margaret. In my case, it was during their visits to my electorate of Ballarat.

Gough first came to Ballarat as Prime Minister in 1973 to unveil the restored Eureka flag at the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery. I know that he was pleased to hear that it had eventually gone back to where the Eureka Stockade had occurred. It now sits within the Museum of Australian Democracy at Eureka. In a landmark speech in 1973, at the time of the unveiling, he noted that:

It is a truism, perhaps, that the importance of an historical event lies not in what happened but in what later generations believe to have happened.

Gough was a great champion of the spirit of Eureka, attending numerous functions in Ballarat to mark what he believed to be both an event of great significance in the evolution of Australian democracy and a true symbol of a proud, independent nation. So, as the member for Ballarat, I particularly wanted to contribute to this condolence motion to thank Gough on behalf of the people of Ballarat for your faith in us and your continued belief in the spirit of Eureka.

Whenever I had the pleasure of meeting and talking to Gough, I was always struck by his incredibly cheeky sense of humour. In fact my very first meeting with Gough came shortly after I was elected as the federal member for Ballarat. We had our annual Eureka walk. I had worn a pair of Blundstones because the walk was quite lengthy. Gough had been brought to the event in a car. I had met him the day before. I was sitting on the podium with him and he looked down and peered most curiously at my footwear. He beckoned to his staff member, Stephen, in a very loud voice and pointed so that everybody in the audience could see him pointing at my boots, and said, 'Look, Stephen, she's got Stott Despoja boots on.' I always thought it was a difficult situation—how do you deal with someone as great as Gough suddenly taking the micky out of you? It was quite a funny experience.

In 2004, my husband and I, together with about 25 guests, hosted Gough and Margaret at our house in Ballarat. It was an enormous privilege to experience for a few hours their shared passion and extraordinary knowledge of history, culture and travel. I will never forget a young girl who since has subsequently gone on to work in politics, Susan, who I remember spent a lot of time talking to Gough. Gough was incredibly kind, generous and engaging with her. There he was in his 80s, frail, but still wanting to know about her and her aspirations for life. He encouraged her to continue her engagement with politics.

Gough not only loved Ballarat's history but also our architecture. He considered the streetscape and buildings of Ballarat to be some of Australia's finest, and Lydiard Street, where my electoral office is located, to be one of Australia's truly great preserved streetscapes.

Gough's passing has been the trigger for many of us to reflect on his legacy and his achievements. All of us who were fortunate enough to be elected to this place come here because we want to make a difference. But few politicians in this nation's history, if any, can point to a legacy as great as the one bequeathed to this nation by Gough Whitlam: ending conscription, recognising China and tearing down the last vestiges of the White Australia policy to make us a truly multicultural nation. Whitlam's government recognised land rights, introduced no-fault divorce, pursued equal pay for women and made the dream of many parents for their children to become the first in their family to go to university a reality. He introduced Australia's first consumer protection and trade practices laws and promoted the arts in all its myriad forms that today so proudly reflect our national identity. And, of course, what will come as no surprise for anyone to hear me declare is that his finest achievement was universal health care.

These are the achievements of a true political giant, a leader with a sweeping vision who saw this nation as a place that could, and must, be better than it had been; a nation that should be a fairer, decent and more inclusive society, where its rich natural resources and great wealth were shared with all of its people; a nation which pursued a vision of itself every bit as great as the continent it inhabited; a nation where we stood tall on the world stage, proud of who we were, and no longer able to be dismissed as a British outpost at the far end of the earth.

Critics often dismiss Gough's achievements as reforms that were going to happen anyway, suggesting he just happened to be the one around at the time. One only has to look at the struggles to this day to give Australia access to decent universal health care to know that this argument is false. Without Gough showing the way, demonstrating that universal health care was an idea which could be delivered, it would have been so much harder for Bob Hawke to have fought and won that battle once more. Forty years after those tumultuous times of 1975, it is now clear the Dismissal only ended Gough's time as Prime Minister, not what he sought to achieve during that brief time he was in office. His far-reaching reforms to make Australia a more modern, open, inclusive and fairer nation endure.

'If you seek his monument, look around you,' reads the epitaph of Christopher Wren in the magnificent St Paul's Cathedral. So too does Australia stand today as that monument to Gough. His monument is all of us. This nation was fortunate to have had such a great statesman in Edward Gough Whitlam. We mourn his passing, but we celebrate a life that has left us all the richer for his time among us, and we thank his children for sharing him with us during what has been a very important time in our history.

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