Dennis Jensen (Tangney, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have to say that it has been a sad couple of weeks in this place. We recognised the loss of Don Randall last week and now we are recognising the loss of another of our colleagues, Alby Schultz. There was a certain amount of similarity between Alby and Don, in that both were quite happy to call it the way they saw it and they were both very strong advocates for their constituents and very good grassroots campaigners.

I first met Alby when I came to this place in 2004. Alby was a very interesting looking character in those days because he had the black eyepatch on. He had recently lost his eye due to a swimming pool acid accident. He told me that as soon as he got the acid in his eyes he shouted and Gloria came and got the hose on him. He said, 'How does it look?' She said, 'You have one eye popping out a bit.' He said: 'Forget about that one. It's gone. Do the other one.' He went on to say that Gloria blasted the hose at his eye and he felt it going around behind the eyeball itself. He was actually comparatively annoyed with her for blasting it so hard but he said in retrospect that she had actually saved his eye. When I first knew him Alby would have been a very suitable character, in terms of appearance, for one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. He would have fitted the part very well.

The member for Forrest spoke about Alby's bipartisanship. It was probably just as well she was talking about bipartisanship because Alby was not particularly forgiving about us being in a coalition. He had a very strong view of the National Party—he certainly was not a coalitionist. He had some very strong things to say during Liberal party room meetings, let me tell you.

Another thing that I thought was great about Alby was that he was very forthcoming with his opinion. Quite frankly, there are too many who are not forthcoming with their opinion when it runs counter to what any particular group might think. There was mention of Alby being not politically correct, and that is exactly correct. It is one of the things that I very much respected about Alby because it takes guts to run against the crowd.

Sometimes Alby's dislike of the Nats would colour his judgement. If there is one particular piece of colouring of judgement that Alby regretted ever after was when we got the news that Rob Oakeshott had just won Lyne as an Independent and Alby said, 'That Rob Oakeshott is not a bad bloke.' I think that the only basis for that was that he had beaten a Nat, and I think he really came to regret that statement afterwards.

Alby represented in this place a significantly broad diversity, having coming from a background as a meat worker and not having had anything like a privileged background. This is something that we are starting to lose too much of in this place. We are getting too many professional politicians, where politics has been the lifeblood that people have had ever since school days, then going through university, then becoming staffers and then becoming politicians. There is too much of that and Alby was very much the antithesis of that. Alby was someone who had worked very hard for a living and then he came to work in this place to do what he saw was in the best interests of his constituents. He used those significant life experiences that he had.

Alby had some views that I agreed with. He was against the hard renewable energy targets and saw them as hugely costly to people in terms of the price that they paid for electricity. He was also no lover of wind farms. He felt very personally affronted by the fact that he had a very large wind farm imposed on his electorate of Hume. In my view, like Alby's, you have to have a situation where electricity is affordable and your alternatives are affordable. Alby was very much against people having to pay large amounts of money for other people's ideology. He was also an anthropogenic global-warming sceptic, which is something that I agree with, as people here would know.

He was an extremely strong local member and, as I have said, when people talk of white-bread politicians, Alby was anything but. He certainly made his presence known. There are quite a few people on our side of politics who came to know it—never mind those sitting on the opposition benches. One of the things that has not been brought up enough in this place and one thing he felt particularly strongly about and fought for was—and it is something that I mentioned in my first speech—the issue of fathers who had separated from their wives having to pay child support, as well as the access they had to their children and the very significant health problems they suffered. Indeed, as Alby would point out, significant numbers of those men—lonely, with no or completely inadequate access to their children, having to pay out a fortune so they were left very short of money and then committing suicide. Alby fought very hard for them, and I was very pleased with some of the changes that we managed to initiate while in government in 2006 to bring about the view that parenting post separation should be a mutual obligation—that there be a 50-50 shared parenting presumption, not the immediate presumption that the ex-wife got the custody and the ex-husband was meted out scraps of access. There is still a lot of work to be done in this area, and that is something that Alby was championing in this parliament right until the time he left.

What has been said is that Alby was very committed to his family, and that is something we all knew only too well. He certainly spoke of Gloria a lot and he saw them as a very strong team, and indeed they were. To Gloria and the family, I would like to express my deep sympathy for the loss of Alby. Alby is someone that I will miss, and this place will miss greatly.

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