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

Maybe not my friend to the right here! Thirdly, John was really generous in talking and sharing his wisdom with a complete political neophyte like me.

That February it seemed as if John Fahey couldn't lose the election. He was incredibly popular. He had won the Olympics, he had saved Prince Charles' life, he had managed the hung parliament well and he seemed to have the common touch. So it surprised me on election day, having spent the whole day handing out how-to-vote cards and scrutineering at Goulburn East, to come back to the party with the results in to find that John had retained his seat but lost the election. After the election, John wrote me a generous thankyou note and we kept in touch from time to time at party functions over the years.

But I really got to know John well when he became Chancellor of the Australian Catholic University, which is where I spent four years prior to being here. I joined ACU in 2012, and John became chancellor in 2014. He had huge shoes to fill. The previous chancellor had been Sir Peter Cosgrove, who was well loved by everyone at the university as well as a national hero and who went on to be Governor-General. But John did a fantastic job, with his humility and his common touch. Being the chancellor of a multicampus university is a difficult task, but I think the chancellor of a catholic university has additional issues. You have to manage the highly important church politics as well as dealing with educational and health stakeholders. John having been a former premier of New South Wales was particularly useful because anybody who's had interactions with the New South Wales education ministry and its very large bureaucracy will know what a difficult beast that can be.

John presided over the university's 25th anniversary celebrations, and he saw campuses open in as diverse places as Rome and Blacktown. While John didn't get to host the Sydney Olympics because Bob Carr was the Premier at that time, he did get to host the International Federation of Catholic Universities conference, which is like the Olympics for Catholic universities. This was a great event and it was a defining event of John's chancellorship. It really put the university on the map.

The story of ACU under John's leadership and under the leadership of Greg Craven is of a university that was at the margins of the Australian education system and at the margins of the global Catholic education system moving to be the largest Catholic university in the English-speaking world, the largest producer of nurses and teachers in this country and a global success story for a church that was facing an extensional crisis the likes of which it had never seen. John's role in leading and stewarding the university and providing that good news to people in the Catholic Church not only here but around the world—and to Australians—was a terrific thing.

I was honoured by the support John gave me in my own role and was delighted and touched that he came to my farewell in 2016. At a mass offered for John's life at ACU last week, Greg Craven provided the vice-chancellor's insight into John's approach to his role. He said: 'We, his university family, knew and loved John as chancellor. He was a wonderful chancellor, as only a vice-chancellor can fully know. He was wise, loyal and supportive. If I did something he thought was right, he would ferociously defend me. If I did something he thought was stupid, he would tell me I was an idiot in private and then ferociously defend me in public. If I did something he thought was dumb and which he later decided was right his defensive plays were of a type that would have got him sent off when he was playing for his beloved Bulldogs.'

Vice-President of the university, Father Anthony Casamento, reflected on John's deep sense of purpose. I think this quote from Father Anthony Casamento is really fundamental to who John was and why he was such a centred person. He said: 'When John began his term as chancellor, he shared with me an idea that he picked up in a copy of John Henry Newman's work The Idea of a University. I think that Newman is eminently insightful as well as quotable in a manner that can lead to reflection and prayer. One of the most significant quotes is this:

God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission. I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons.

I know John believed that and I believe that he saw his work, his extraordinary work, as a means of being that link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons, a preacher of truth.' Those are the words of Father Anthony Casamento.

John Fahey was one of the most decent and honourable men ever to go into Australian public life. If any of us have half the career that John Fahey had, we can count ourselves lucky. But if we can both come here and leave our parliamentary careers here with reputations for integrity as high as John Fahey, we will have done a good thing. To Colleen and John's family, we send our condolences. May John's memory be a blessing.

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