Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

'Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently. I prefer to live as an optimist.' That was the byword, the life choice, of Shimon Peres, zichrono livracha, who died at 93. His lifelong work is summarised by something else that he said:

Find a cause that's larger than yourself and then give your life to it.

He certainly did that. His political career saw him hold all major offices of state and rebound from remarkable defeats. He was a protege, as was just said, of Israel's founding father, David Ben-Gurion, and was first elected to parliament in 1949. He held every major cabinet post—defence, finance and foreign affairs. Remarkably, despite having no military experience, he was made Minister of Defense in his 20s. During the second of his three terms as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Peres shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for their work on the Oslo accords. A year later Peres, in one of the great tragedies of history, had to take over from Prime Minister Rabin after Rabin was assassinated.

However, in domestic political life in Israel he was not always successful. He suffered a number of electoral defeats. When competing for election as Prime Minister he lost four and tied one. In 2007, however—and this is what I really want to focus on—he was chosen for the ceremonial position of president. He was, in fact, the world's oldest head of state when he retired in July 2014 at the age of 90.

He was an early advocate of a Palestinian state parallel to Israel. That has always been Australia's policy—a two-state solution, which is what we voted for in 1948. He could not solve the problem of where such a state would be located or Palestinian leaderships' inability to accept so many of the offers that had been made to them. He said in a rare bit of pessimism—maybe realism:

If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact—not to be solved, but to be coped with over time.

He also had a profound sense of his own people's place in history. Shimon Peres said:

Look, we have existed for 4,000 years—2,000 years in diaspora, in exile. Nobody in the Middle East speaks their original language but Israel. When we started 64 years ago, we were 650,000 people. So, you know, we are maybe swimming a little bit against the stream, but we continue to swim.

I return to his trademark optimism and his profound and incredible futuristic imagination—that was my experience of meeting him, as the members for Isaacs and Sturt have said. His profound knowledge of technological advances was almost guru like coming from a man who was in his 80s or 90s. He said once:

In Israel, a land lacking in natural resources, we learned to appreciate our greatest national advantage: our minds. Through creativity and innovation, we transformed barren deserts into flourishing fields and pioneered new frontiers in science and technology.

He had an incredible interview once with McKinsey. Just a few years ago, when he was in his 90s, he said:

The last two decades we have witnessed the greatest revolution since Genesis. States have lost their importance and strength. The old theories—from Adam Smith to Karl Marx—have lost their value because they are based on things like land, labour, and wealth. All of that has been replaced by science. Ideas are now more important than materials. And ideas are unpredictable. Science knows no customs, no borders. It’s immeasurable, unpredictable, unprecedented. It doesn’t depend on distances or stop at a given point.

Science creates a world where individuals can play the role of the collective. Two boys create Google. One boy creates Facebook. Another individual creates Apple. These gentlemen changed the world without political parties or armies or fortunes. No one anticipated this. And they themselves did not know what would happen as a result of their thoughts. So we are all surprised.

It is a new world. You may have the strongest army—but it cannot conquer ideas, it cannot conquer knowledge. Now when you try to anticipate what is possible, you must go to books or laboratories, not simply to the stock exchange. You must exercise your brain. And you can keep your brain fresh if you use it.

I believe profoundly that that was a message for Australia about how we ought to approach our economic future and our technological future. I believe Australia's engagement with Israel is actually prompted by many of the people here having encounters, including with Peres. Peres astonished many of the Australian politicians I have met. You would turn up at the President's house and you would get this futuristic look at the world by someone in their 80s and 90s who outlined to you what could be and not what is.

I would like to conclude my tribute to him and his family and the incredible role he played in the maintenance of the Jewish state with a personal life lesson that I think is very important for all people who are in public life to remember. Shimon Peres said:

The most important thing in life is to dare. The most complicated thing in life is to be afraid. The smartest thing in the world is to try to be a moral person.

May his memory be a blessing.

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