Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a short contribution to this debate about the death of Phillip Hughes. I do so as a member of parliament representing my 100,000-odd constituents but also as a proud board member of the Western Australian Cricket Association and as a person who has had a lifelong love of the game, inherited from my grandfather and fostered obsessively by my mother. Last Friday after returning from Canberra, watching my wife digging through a grey nicks bag—for an old bat to place next to a tattered Greg Chappell wide brim hat at the front of our house in tribute to the loss of a fine young cricketer—was a deeply sombre experience.

Even when middle age reduces playing to the odd social game, the opening of a cricket bag on any other occasion is just a simple joy. The cricket bag is one of those needle-hooks of experience that drags the mind back to wonderful things. The smell of zinc stained whites, usually unwashed from the last rare match, ignites the summer corner of the brain. The mere sight of the strange artefacts in a cricket bag revives a collage of memories that are better than the best of dreams. The cricket bag is the treasure-trove of youth, of summer, of friends and of the pursuit of simple and beautiful things. Cricket is the greatest game on earth. Everything good about sport and life is to be found somewhere inside cricket. So the opening of a cricket bag in mourning, rather than joy, was something that hundreds of thousands of Australians would have done for the first time in their lives last week. Opening a cricket bag in sadness rather than joy is something that none of us would ever have thought we would do.

Phil Hughes, by every single account, was just one of those guys, one of the few who embody all the best things about the pursuit of a great game at the very heart of Australian life. Cricket is not a skill that just happens; it is a craft that only a handful of completely brilliant people can master over decades. Even then it is only mastered if they are willing to offer the sport itself their complete and utter dedication. Sometimes the sporting personalities who can combine natural talent with the single-mindedness the game requires can be as difficult as they are admirable, but the picture that emerges of Phil Hughes is very clear and very simple—that he was one of those diamonds of the game, a combination of amazing athletic skill and personal discipline wedded together to produce a rare optimism and a redoubtable person.

In losing someone like this, Australia is confronting one of those singular events that forces us to withdraw briefly from the busy swim of our lives and sit just for a while on the bank. I recall the biography of the greatest ever Scottish sportsman, the heroic Eric Liddell. In that biography, the author in the preface felt compelled to make the point that, after the endless interviews and research for the biography, they were astounded by the simple fact that not a single person in the hundreds that they had interviewed had a single bad thing to say about the great runner. The same can clearly be said of Phillip Hughes.

To be so good at something so great, to have so loved his cricket, and at the same time to be the best of teammates, of friends and of people, is the rarest of things. To lose the best of us doing something we all love as much as he did is why our mourning is so profound. To Phillip's family, I extend today every conceivable sympathy.

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