Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

JONES (—) (): It is my great delight in what is otherwise a sad moment in this parliament to follow the wonderful words of my friend and comrade the member for Cunningham in her very personal and beautiful contribution to this debate.

Stewie West was a comrade, a leader, a trade unionist and a friend. I actually knew of Stewart West before I knew him personally. Like any of us who grew up in the Illawarra, of a morning I'd tune into what was then Radio 2WL—it was AM, Mr Deputy Speaker. You'd turn the radio on in the morning and invariably hear the voices of Labor luminaries, whether it was Nando Lelli, Merv Nixon, Rex Connor or Stewart West. They were the names you heard issuing statements on behalf of the Labor movement—the Labor Party or the trade union movement. It was a daily occurrence, and you grew up with it in the same way that you grew up with Weet-Bix and milk—it was just a part of the culture of growing up in the region. As I entered my teen years, instead of knowing of Stewart I enjoyed the benefit of knowing him, and I campaigned for him and other Labor Party people as I grew up in the Illawarra. He was a giant of the region and a giant of the Labor movement.

Stewart, as the member for Cunningham said, spent most of his life in the service of the working people, in particular the people of the Illawarra. I'm delighted that his wife, Mary, and his daughter, Glenda, could be here in parliament today, and earlier this week as the Prime Minister moved a very moving personal tribute to him. Through the battles of the sixties and seventies he was there as the president of the Waterside Workers Union at Port Kembla. He was president of the Labor Party's Cunningham FEC and the campaign manager for the very good Rex Connor. When Rex died of a heart attack in August 1977, Stewart was the obvious successor. He'd been his campaign manager and he had strong support inside the branches. It was both a unique and an agonising way to end up in parliament—the honour of his election cut across by the very personal grief he felt at his good friend passing away in such shocking circumstances.

Reading Stewart's first speech, all the way back then in October 1977, it is clear that he went to Canberra to do things, not just to fill a seat. He went there to fight—fight for his principles, fight for his people, fight for his beliefs. His language was colourful and combative, which surprised nobody who knew him. It was all straight talk, delivered with a punch. His sentiments, even all these years later, rise off the page. We can all hear him speaking as we read those words. He set out the challenges facing his electorate and the broader Illawarra region of the time: the value of the steel industry—in particular, the importance of the Port Kembla steelworks to the region and to the Australian economy. I can hear myself nearly 30 years later delivering similar speeches on similar subject matter. Within a few paragraphs he was already on the attack, going after the Fraser government for 'promoting industrial troubles as an issue on which to hang an early election' and urging them 'to get down to the job of resuscitating the Australian economy'. In the 16 years that he served in this place, he kept up that fight.

What also jumps out from those days is that many of the fights that he had on behalf of the Illawarra region are fights which the member for Cunningham and I continue to this day. He said back in 1977 that the Illawarra 'should be a great centre for training our youth in the skilled trades we will require in the future'—true then; true today. It's one of the biggest tasks that the member for Cunningham and I face every day in this place. We do so on the shoulders of giants, the people who came before us.

You're a member, Deputy Speaker Wilkie, who represents the great island state of Tasmania. I know you're from down south, and I know you're passionate about everything in the island state of Tasmania. Whether you're a visitor to Tasmania, as many hundreds of thousands of mainlanders and overseas tourists are, or whether you're a native of that state, you know about the famous Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park. Visitors to that state today go walking through the national park and they stare up at those majestic trees, the Huon pines that predate European and, often, human settlement in the area. It's hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, and thousands of thousands of years in some of the trees. Some of them predate the birth of Christ. They're absolutely magnificent. If the thylacine truly does still exist today, it'll be somewhere there. What most people don't know is that we can still do that because of the work of Stewart West.

It was in the lead-up to the 1983 election. Stewart West was the shadow minister for the environment. He was passionate about the Gordon-below-Franklin region, he was passionate about Kakadu and he was passionate about Daintree. It was Stewart who wrote into the platform of the Labor Party as we approached that election that a Hawke government, if elected, would prevent the Gordon-below-Franklin dam. We succeeded in government, and that policy was enacted when the Hawke Labor government was elected. Stewart wasn't the minister when we came into parliament, but he was the bloke who made certain that that occurred. As it is so often with us in this place, there's not a name plaque that exists for some of our greatest achievements, but those who know know, and I hope those who read these tributes afterwards will remember the tremendous service that Stewie had and the things that he leaves behind.

He served as the Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs. Then, as now, these matters were often very contentious. He served as the Minister for Housing and Construction. Then, as now, he just wanted to build more stuff. He thought the Commonwealth had a role in building stuff, and he did that as the minister. As I said earlier today in my condolence speech for the late John Kerin, another great man from my area who served in that magnificent government, the source of the strength of that government was the strength of its caucus and the principle, intelligence and drive of its ministers, and Stewart was one of them. It was a mark of his character that he was willing to resign from cabinet on a matter of principle within the first year of the new government. Despite the risks to his career and the personal pain that it caused him, he put principle before position. With the same sense of principle that took him into cabinet, out of it and back in again, he continued his push for good things, through his beliefs and his principles, in parliament and when he left.

As the member for Cunningham mentioned in her contribution, in Stewart's later years dementia got hold of him. It was one of the great honours of my life—I don't know how conscious he was of what was going on at the time; I suspect he was very lucid at the time—to present to Stewart when his was awarded life membership of the Labor Party. The then Labor Party leader, Luke Foley, came down to Wollongong for the event, and we were able to present him with his life membership. He was a good mate, a good comrade and a wonderful human being. Vale, Stewart West.

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