Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I was 14 when Les Johnson resigned as the member for Hughes to take up the post of Australian High Commissioner to New Zealand. Until that time in late 1983, Les had been my local member. Of course, I knew him because I was already interested and active in the Labor Party at that time. But my first knowledge and experience of Les was at the many school events that he had attended throughout my childhood. He was the very nice man who used to turn up at speech days. I discovered much later that he was also the man that my parents voted for at election times. My family lived in Oyster Bay in the Sutherland shire. Les Johnson and his wife, Peg, and their three children, Grant, Sally—who is sadly now deceased—and Jenny, lived not far away in Jannali. Grant, Sally and Jenny attended the same high school as I and my brothers did.

Les Johnson saw both the hardest and the best of times in his political career. He was first elected in 1955, the year of the great split in the Labor Party, when the electorate was first hived off from the electorate of Werriwa, represented by Gough Whitlam. Les had been Gough's campaign director when Gough entered parliament in 1952. Les's first stint as member for Hughes from 1955 until 1966 was in the days when the infrastructure crisis was very real. Very few streets in the Sutherland shire were sealed or sewered, and waiting times for telephone connections exceeded two years. These were the issues which Les, as a first-class local member, took up with gusto.

The member for Berowra and I were very honoured to be at Les Johnson's funeral yesterday. We heard very loving tributes from his family and former colleagues about just what a great local member Les Johnson was—out every night of the week, when he was not in Canberra, at branch meetings, at community meetings. He was a patron of 60 organisations, to which he sent a guinea a year as his tribute. He was indeed a very active local member. He was the 'member's member', as I think they described him yesterday.

After 11 years in opposition federally, Les lost his seat in the Vietnam election of 1966, as did many of Labor's best and brightest. Les was a passionate articulator of the horror of the Vietnam War. Les was tough though. He grew up during the Great Depression. He had left school at 14 to help support his family, and it took more than an election defeat to knock him down. After a redistribution, he won Hughes again in the 1969 election with a large swing, so he was part of the Labor caucus that went into that great, historical 1972 'It's time' campaign. He became the Minister for Housing. The Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement he negotiated was one of the early achievements of the Whitlam government and saw a very substantial increase in Commonwealth support for affordable housing. He later took on the public works portfolio, becoming the Minister for Housing and Construction in late 1973.

The portfolio that gave him the most satisfaction, however, was Aboriginal affairs, an area in which he had a long involvement, including the establishment of the Kirinari Hostel for Aboriginal students—which he was largely responsible for establishing, with Hazel Wilson—in the Sutherland shire in the 1960s. He was the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs at the time of Gough Whitlam's historic returning of red soil into the hands of Vincent Lingiari, symbolically handing the Wave Hill station to the Gurindji people. Les, as minister, attended that ceremony, as did a large number of journalists, officials and other dignitaries, so many in fact that two VIP jets were needed to transport them—the Whitlam plane and the Johnson plane. When Les returned to his plane after the ceremony he saw an angry Prime Minister standing on the steps of the prime ministerial plane. 'What is wrong?' Les asked. 'What is wrong?' Whitlam fumed—I will not use the word that Gough used—'Your plane just blew the door off mine,' which it had when its engines had been started. Whitlam, who had an engagement in Western Australia, then commandeered Les Johnson's plane, and Les and his passengers had to cool their heels until a replacement plane arrived from Canberra.

More than 30 years after his retirement, Les is still fondly remembered throughout the Sutherland Shire and the Hughes electorate. During the 1950s and 1960s the personnel and resources Les had as a local member were one electorate secretary, one telephone and one typewriter. That was all Les needed to carve out a reputation that exists to this day of a first-class champion of his constituents. His slogan was 'always available', and, indeed, from the reports yesterday of his work, I think that must have been the case.

He served our party and our country well, over many decades, always firm in his belief in Labor values and the importance of Labor governments to make real change in people's lives. Our thoughts and sympathies are with his wife, Marion, his son, Grant, and his daughter, Jenny, their families, his friends and the many people whose lives he touched.

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