Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to be speaking on our longest serving monarch—63 years, seven months and four days. Queen Elizabeth II has certainly given a great service to the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth and Australia. We are very lucky to have a monarch of such good character and of such longevity, and it has given Australia a great sense of stability and certainty as we have gone about our own democracy to have a monarch such as the Queen.

In the electorate of Wakefield we have a great deal of affection for Queen Elizabeth, because the city at the centre of my electorate, the City of Elizabeth, was named after Her Majesty. I have some affection for that city, having been born in the local hospital. My father came from the United Kingdom and my parents lived there for the first years of their marriage and the first years of my life. So Queen Elizabeth will always have a very special place in my electorate and in the City of Elizabeth.

The parliamentary library was good enough to get this front page from The Canberra Times, which records Queen Elizabeth's visit to Elizabeth in 1954. Interestingly enough, the subheading is '500 treated at rallies for Queen' and underneath that is 'Heat tolls'. It must have been a very hot day there in Elizabeth. It does get very warm. There were children from Goolwa, the Barossa Valley and Elizabeth at the Ridley Road reserve waiting for the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. The article talks about 3,000 members of the choir being in a very confined space at the front of the dais and waiting in anticipation—some of them fainting, succumbing to the heat, and ambulance men treating children with aspirin, cool drinks and ice-filled towels. The affection for the Queen was such that people were prepared to put up with a very hot day in South Australia. We do get some scorchers, and the further north you go, the hotter it gets.

This story also talks, very importantly, about the highlight of the visit, which was the unveiling by the Queen of a commemorative fountain on Windsor Green, a three-acre park built by the South Australian Housing Trust. It is very interesting. The history of this park was that it was just next to the council chambers and the Elizabeth shopping centre. People, often, fondly recall to me having had lunch there under the trees and in the park when they were at work or out there shopping. It is a great sadness that this park is now a car park for the shopping centre, covered with bitumen, and now only cars and people race to the shopping centre. Windsor Green is now a distant memory.

Interesting enough, the commemorative fountain with the golden tap was lost for many years. The mayor and the City of Playford played some role in finding the fountain. It was found at SA Water, away in storage. They were desperately trying to get this fountain reinstalled in an appropriate place in what is now the city of Playford—it was the City of Elizabeth—so the Queen could return to reopen the fountain, which she opened in 1954. Sadly, they could not get the building and construction in place in time for the most recent visit.

It tells you a lot about not just the history of my electorate but the history of Australia and the history of the Queen's long reign as our constitutional monarch. I am a republican, but I do recognise that this long period of certainty and stability in our constitutional affairs is something to be treasured and admired. It is, in many ways, a tribute to the character of the Queen herself. These are human affairs, monarchies and governance around the world, and so they rely on people being of good character and good judgement. We have been very fortunate in Queen Elizabeth II to find that good character and good judgement. We can only hope that future presidents of Australia look to her as a guide on how to undertake their roles, with an eye to stability and certainty in our constitutional affairs and in the role of head of state of our nation. With that, I would like to echo the previous member, the member for Moore, and say God save the Queen and long may she reign over us.

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