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

It's an honour to participate in this condolence motion for the former Age journalist Michael Gordon and to follow the contributions made by the member for Holt and my friend the minister, the member for Kooyong. It's also an honour to participate in a debate that has already been contributed to by my friend the member for McMillan, who knew Michael Gordon so well, and will be contributed to later by the member for Scullin and the member for Hotham, who I know was a family friend of many years standing of Michael Gordon.

Shakespeare wrote, 'The breaking of so great a thing should make a greater crack.' That was how I felt when I heard that Michael Gordon had died at the weekend. I didn't know Michael Gordon very well and I certainly didn't know him as well as the member for McMillan or the member for Hotham, but, in the short time I knew Michael, I had an enormous respect for him and for his writing. At a time when so many members of the fourth estate are interested only in the horserace—who's up and who's down—and not really interested in the fundamental work that we as parliamentarians do here in making policy and scrutinising that policy, Michael Gordon carved out a very different space in the press gallery of this nation. Michael's particular interests were migration policy, particularly issues to do with offshore detention and refugees, and Indigenous policy.

It was in the space of Indigenous policy that I first got to know Michael. Before I became a member of parliament in 2014, with my friend Damien Freeman I published a pamphlet called The Australian Declaration of Recognition. The declaration was launched by Noel Pearson in the Dixson Room of the State Library of New South Wales. For anyone who's been involved in publishing and trying to contribute ideas to the public debate, it can sometimes seem like a glamorous thing, but when you're a one- or two-man band, or two-person band, you end up having to do all the administrative tasks yourself. So I was setting up stands, putting up banners and the like, and I suddenly received a call on my phone about 10 minutes before we were due to start from Michael, saying that he'd heard about the publication that we had done and that he wanted to have a chat with me about it. Being perhaps too overly Sydney-centric in my views, I had failed to properly reach out to Michael and discuss the proposal with him, but, unlike a lot of journalists, he wasn't fazed that he'd been left out in some way. In fact, he wanted to follow the story. He was interested in the issue, he was interested in our take on this particular aspect of the Indigenous recognition debate and he wrote up the launch and the publication and what we were trying to do very fairly.

Later, when I came here to the parliament, he sat down with me after my maiden speech and talked about some of the issues around mental health, about which I have a very deep interest, and around suicide prevention. He was interested in those issues, as he was in Indigenous recognition. He was interested in looking for people in this place who were interested in making a contribution in the areas which aren't perhaps always the central focus of the daily argy-bargy of politics. I found him a person that one could talk to, a person that you could get a fair hearing from and a person who was genuinely interested in the details. That really marked him out as a very different sort of journalist.

Michael had a long career in journalism. In fact, he was from a distinguished family of journalists. Thirty-seven years at The Age was an incredible devotion to that newspaper. The member for Holt talked about the book that Michael Gordon wrote about Paul Keating. I remember being shocked sitting in the chamber and hearing that Michael was due to leave the parliament when the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition made speeches about him last year. I think it was at about the same time as the press gallery annual midwinter dinner. That night I had the privilege of sitting with the member for Hotham and she said to me, 'Michael speaks very well of you.' I said: 'I had no idea he was going. Do you think he's here tonight?' She said, 'He's absolutely here.' So I went over to Michael and I said: 'I'm so sorry that you're leaving. I'm so sorry the country will be the poorer for you not being here.' Michael teared up. It was very clear to me that he didn't want to necessarily leave this place and that he loved being a journalist in the Australian parliamentary press gallery. I was interested, as the member for Holt said, in catching up with Michael in Melbourne. I was interested in seeing what he would do in the next phase of his career. The events of last weekend cut that so short.

I want to finish my remarks today with a quote from the Walkley award citation for his outstanding contribution to journalism, which he won in 2017, because I think it sums up very much the legacy of this very fine Australian. The citation says:

The overwhelming impression Gordon left—with both his byline and his presence—was of decency, integrity, fairness and balance. Even when he was working at the epicentre of influence, he held himself outside the media pack. And his compassion shone through as he fought to give voice to the underdogs. He was the first Australian journalist to gain access to the detention centre on Nauru; he spent time in remote communities listening to our first peoples, and won a Walkley for his coverage of Indigenous affairs in 2003.

To his family—his wife, Robyn, his children, Scott and Sarah, his son-in-law, James, and his grandson, Harry—I offer my sincere condolences on the passing of a great Australian.

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