Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this condolence motion for the honourable Dr Moses Henry Cass, better known as Moss. Moss Cass served in this House from 1969 to 1983. He left parliament four years before I was born. I never had the privilege of meeting him, but when I was elected to this place in 2019 I was the 22nd Jewish Australian elected to our federal parliament. Moss was the eighth. He was elected in 1969 with a new generation of Jewish MPs together with Barry Cohen, Joe Berinson and Dick Klugman. The three of them would go on to be ministers in Labor governments. Moss Cass was buried in the Batalum Cemetery in Springvale, near where my grandmother is buried. So we do have a shared history, and I'm proud to have this with Moss Cass.

He was one of the generation of new, young Labor MPs who came to this House in 1969 as part of the wave of enthusiasm for the new Labor leader Gough Whitlam. One of his fellow new MPs in the class of '69 was a young man named Paul Keating. As a doctor and director of the Trade Union Clinic and Research Centre, Moss Cass was enthused by Whitlam's determination to reform Australia's ramshackle health insurance system. As a son of Jewish refugees, he was a champion of human rights and for a more liberal immigration policy. He was an early campaigner for environmental activism, for abortion law reform and for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. He used his first speech to argue for the decriminalisation of abortion. With the late Sir John Gorton, he co-sponsored a motion in this House supporting decriminalisation of homosexuality well before this cause was adopted by the political mainstream. He was fiercely progressive and he was a trailblazer.

As the Leader of the Opposition said yesterday, his campaign manager at the time when he first came in suggested a good line: 'I don't mind who you vote for, as long as you think about it'. As the voters of Maribyrnong have never elected a Liberal MP since, no doubt Moss Cass helped turn that seat red.

Moss Cass went on to be a very fine and visionary minister for the environment and conservation, Australia's first ever Minister for Environment in the visionary Whitlam government. He passed the environmental protection act in 1974, despite some opposition both internally and externality. It was a bold idea well ahead of it time but it got through. Moss cared for our environment.

Moss Cass had a turbulent time in politics. He fell out with Gough Whitlam and was shunted out of the environment portfolio. He was the shadow health minister under Bill Hayden but was dropped from the front bench after the 1980 election. His views on many subjects were too leftist even for the Left of that time, though, mostly, they would be pretty uncontroversial now.

He chose to retire in 1983 when he was only 56. He went on to have a second career at the Melbourne university's Melbourne School of Land Environment and chaired the Australian National Biocentre. In many ways, he was a man ahead of his time, and he paid a price for that. But he deserves to be remembered as a pioneer of many good causes and a champion of progressive Labor policies and values.

To Shirley, Naomi and Dan, and the entire Cass family, we wish you long life and we celebrate a man and a life worth lived.

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