Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I wish to associate myself with the remarks of the member for Isaacs, as I am sure I will with the remarks of all the other people who speak on this motion about Shimon Peres. I will not repeat much of the information that was provided to the House by the member for Isaacs; suffice to say that Shimon Peres was one of the greats of Israel's existence, from 1948, and one of the greats in the world in my lifetime. I had the great honour of meeting him many times over the course of my now seven trips to Israel—probably the member for Melbourne Ports is the only person in the House who has been to Israel more times than I have. In the very early time after I came into the parliament, in January 1994, I met Shimon Peres when he was the foreign minister, and then I met him again over several times that I visited Israel. He was in different guises, as either a foreign minister, a leader or, more recently, President of Israel.

Shimon Peres's contribution to Israel and to the world should never be underestimated. We use great hyperbole in this House to describe many things. It certainly is not hyperbole to describe Shimon Peres as one of the shapers of the world and obviously the state of Israel in the last 60 or 70 years—besides the fact that he served in the Knesset for 47 years.

He was a parliamentarian and a minister in many different guises—finance, immigration, foreign affairs. He served as Prime Minister twice. He was the leader of the Labor Party. He was the President of Israel. And he changed over that period of time from a leader of the resistance—if you like—to rule by others, to one of the main builders of the early state of Israel under David Ben-Gurion. He was a builder of the defence industry, particularly in Israel. Much of what Israel boasts today in terms of technology—its aerospace industry, its naval industry, its defence industry in general—can be put down to the early roots that were started by Shimon Peres.

And then, later in life, he was a great advocate for peace. Shimon Peres always used to say that when you are strong you do not feel the need to negotiate, and when you are weak you do not feel you can afford to negotiate, but in fact it is when you are strong that you have to negotiate. And he did that and lived it as the foreign minister, having been disappointingly let down earlier in his career over a peace agreement with Jordan. When he returned in 1992 to be the foreign minister in Israel, his two great achievements over that period were, firstly, the Oslo accords with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, for which of course, as the member for Isaacs has said, he won the Nobel Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat; and secondly, very well-known in the Middle East but perhaps less well known in the world, the peace agreement with the Kingdom of Jordan—two very significant achievements, and at a time when Israel was very strong. It is still strong, but, at a time when Israel was stronger than it had perhaps been for decades, he chose that time to make peace with Israel's enemies.

At that time in 1994 when I visited—and he was quite surprised to discover that I was a member of parliament, because I was only 25 years old; he found that very hard to believe; in fact, most people did at the time—there was a sense of great optimism in Israel about the Oslo peace accords and the opportunity that they presented for the Palestinians and the Jewish Israelis to live peacefully together and to expand together. I think it is a disappointment, 30 years later, that those great opportunities have not been realised. Perhaps lesser politicians than Shimon Peres have been the hurdle for that ongoing Oslo peace accord process to reach its full potential.

It is a pity, a great pity, that Shimon Peres's great dreams for Israel were not entirely realised in his lifetime. But he can certainly pass on into a better place knowing that he left Israel a much stronger and better country than he found it and left the world a better place than he found it. For those of us who serve in public life and seek a career in public life, if you can say that and it can be a genuine claim, it is a great success. I also know his son, and I pass on my condolences to him and the rest of the Peres family. As the member for Isaacs said, may he rest in peace.

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