Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's an honour to follow my colleagues, the members for Dobell, Robertson and Melbourne Ports, in paying tribute to Barry Cohen. Unfortunately, other commitments prevented me from attending the memorial service that was presided over by Rabbi Feldman on Monday, but I want to take the opportunity in this debate to make some reflections on the life of the Hon. Barry Cohen AM. I had the privilege of meeting Barry on only one occasion, and therefore I didn't know him as well as did my friend the member for Melbourne Ports, who worked for him in 1983 and 1984 and became a lifelong friend. But I have got to know Barry's son Adam, who's here in the chamber, a little over my time in the parliament, as we've worked together on issues of mutual interest for the Jewish community.

Barry Cohen came to this parliament as the member for Robertson in the 1969 election. A redistribution took place in 1968 that took 14,000 electors from the electorate of Robertson, comprising electors from suburbs around Hornsby, and put them in a new electorate called Berowra. The sitting member for Robertson, Bill Bridges-Maxwell, a vet, was not very happy with this—he was the Liberal member—and sought to stand for the newly created seat. Bridges-Maxwell, like my illustrious predecessor Tom Hughes QC, was a member of a group called the Mushroom Club that centred themselves around John Gorton. They were great Gorton supporters. Gorton wanted Hughes to move to Berowra, as his own seat of Parkes had been abolished, while he thought Bridges-Maxwell had the best chance of retaining Robertson, but it wasn't to be. At the Don's Party election in 1969, when there was a swing of 7.1 per cent against the Gorton government, Barry achieved a bigger swing against the Liberal Party, of 9.7 per cent, winning the seat on first preferences. He went on to hold the seat and improve his margin until retirement at the 1990 election with, as I saw, his best results in the years when the member for Melbourne Ports worked for him.

Relatives who knew I was interested in politics would invariably buy me Barry Cohen's books for birthday presents. My shelves contained books like From Whitlam to Winston, Life with Gough and Bringing the House Down. Barry had his own anecdotes, and one of the best of those was told by the Prime Minister in the House yesterday, but he was a great chronicler of Gough. One of my favourite stories of Barry's appears in Bringing Down the House. With the indulgence of the chamber, I might read it to you now:

The late Senator Ron McAuliffe, a lovable Runyonesque character, represented Labor in the Senate from 1971 to 1981 but he was better known as President of the Queensland Rugby League. He was often referred to as the 'Senator for Rugby League.'

In September 1974, at the peak of Labor's popularity—

and I think Barry probably used the word 'peak' ironically there—

he invited the Prime Minister to 'kick off' the Grand Final of the Brisbane Rugby League competition. Although not an ardent sports enthusiast he accepted.

Gough arrived at Lang Park, where a crowd of 23,000 less-than-enthusiastic football fans greeted him with boos, jeers, beer cans, meat pies and anything they could lay their hands on. It took nearly ten minutes for them to exhaust their viciousness and spleen. Finally they quietened down to the point where Gough could launch the 1974 Rugby League Grand Final. The mission accomplished, Gough walked off the ground with his senatorial host. 'McAuliffe,' Gough sniffed, 'Don't you ever invite me to a place where you are so unpopular.'

Like me, Barry Cohen was Jewish. Over the summer I read Simon Schama's second volume of The Story of the Jews 1492 to 1900. While there are moments of sunlight, in the main it doesn't tell a happy story of long-term acceptance and welcoming of the Jewish people into full citizenship. Schama, in that book, doesn't deal with Australia, but had he done so he would have observed that Australia has been one of the great exceptions to that story, even in the 19th century. From the earliest days of colonial administration, Jews have been fully accepted and taken their place in leadership positions in the nation. Behind me is the portrait of Sir Isaac Isaacs, who was one of three Jewish MPs to serve in the first Commonwealth parliament. And in this parliament there are a record six members of the House and Senate who are Jewish.

Barry Cohen was one of a significant number of Jewish MPs who've served here since Federation. As he wrote, he never suffered any anti-Semitism in politics and his religion was never an issue during his service in this place. But, as it has on all of us, the experience of being Jewish had a profound effect on him. Although some of his family had been here since the 1890s, he also had family who perished in the Holocaust. He wrote:

Australia is probably the least anti-Semitic country in the world, but what happened to my family made a deep impression on me. I became obsessive about discrimination; be it fighting for civil rights in the US, or against apartheid or the appalling treatment of our indigenous people.

Having experienced no racism growing up in Griffith until he had his bar mitzvah, when he was suddenly regarded as different, and having experienced further anti-Semitic attacks as a schoolboy and as a golfer, Cohen was determined to fight against racism and to improve the conditions of Indigenous people when he came here. Like other Jewish MPs, he had a deep and abiding interest in Aboriginal affairs. Like Jews, Aborigines have a culture which is hundreds of thousands of years old, handed down from generation to generation, with a deep and abiding sense of connection to traditional lands. The crowning glory of Barry's involvement in this particular space was handing back Uluru to its traditional owners when he was Minister for the Environment.

In his retirement, the culture of his party had shifted left and Barry Cohen found himself sometimes at odds with his own people. Barry became concerned about the direction that the Labor Party had taken on anti-Semitism in Israel, and in the wake of the 2004 election he courageously went to print to criticise what he saw as anti-Semitism creeping into his party. He wrote:

I'm sick of the calumny heaped on Israel - most of which is a pack of lies. I'm sick of Labor leaders making all the right noises to Jewish audiences while an increasing number of backbenchers launch diatribes at Israel.

How long is it since any Labor leader gave the sort of passionate and accurate defence of Israel we used to hear from Hawke or Kim Beazley?

I don't want even-handedness when it ought to be obvious to all but the blind that there is no moral equivalence between a country that seeks to defend its citizens from thousands of terrorist attacks, and the terrorists themselves. I want to hear Labor MPs stand up and be counted. I want to see an end to well-known Labor identities marching behind banners equating Israel with Nazism.

Before the Iraq war one of the most senior NSW right-wing MPs told me: "I understand and support Israel's position, but in my group, I'm the only one."

Soon after I told a Labor legend: "Anti-Semitism is now rampant in the Labor Party." I expected a vigorous denial. His response confirmed my worst fear: "I know," he said.

This was a courageous thing for Barry to have pointed out in relation to the Labor Party at the time and it became an abiding issue for him, as it was in his time in this place the defence of the state of Israel.

The second example concerns the one occasion I had the privilege of meeting Barry, which was when he launched perhaps an unlikely collection of essays, edited by two figures of the right, Gregory Melleuish and Imre Salusinszky, called Blaming Ourselves: September 11 and the Agony of the Left. The launch took place in the now defunct American Club and was followed by a good dinner and plenty of Cohen anecdotes. Some extracts from the foreword bear repeating. Barry wrote:

I imagine my emotions were no different to most people's. Disbelief preceded shock before seething rage. The nausea commenced when I started reading the anti-American diatribe in the columns and letters to the editor section of the Sydney Morning Herald. How much the world changed on 11 September is yet to be determined but for me it ended some friendships. There are many quoted in this book whom I have no wish to speak to again.

Have only one problem with this book and that is in the title, Blaming Ourselves: September 11 and the Agony of the Left. Having always regarded myself as being 'of the Left', I resent being lumped in with those who write such vile rubbish.

As he concludes:

It was long overdue for conservatives and genuine liberals to take on the intellectual thugs of the 'progressive' Left and to stop feeling guilty about supporting the United States. Never has the line between good and evil been so clearly drawn.

For too long the Left have been able to enjoy the affluence created by American capitalism and take shelter behind the American defense umbrella while at the same time reserving the right to pour out their hatred of all things American. They take the best the Americans have to offer and spit in their face.

Unlike Australians, Americans aren't perfect. They've made mistakes, but they are a decent people who believe passionately in the things the majority of Australians hold dear—freedom and democracy. Thank God that when the Cold War ended it was America who was left standing. Imagine for one minute the awful alternative.

In those extracts you get a sense of Barry's passion and his enormous gift with words and language.

Barry Cohen made an enormous contribution to his party, his community and his country, as a parliamentarian, a writer and an activist. We 're all poorer for his loss. I wish long life to his wife, Rae, and his sons, Stuart, Adam and Martin, and his broader family and to the member for Melbourne Ports, who is practically mishpocha. May his memory be a blessing.

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