Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak in memory of former senator Bruce Childs. Bruce was a senator, a mentor, a dear friend and a personal hero of mine. Bruce was a great Labor man who lived a great Labor life, rising from the shop floor to the upper house of this parliament.

Bruce was born in Mascot in working-class Sydney in the middle years of the great depression. He was a bright kid with a curious mind but, like his hero Ben Chifley, he left school pretty early as a teenager to earn his living. He was apprenticed as a printer at the age of 17, and he also spent two years doing national service. He wasn't a privileged boy. He wasn't gifted opportunities in life. But he was gifted with intelligence, with kindness and with decency, and his talent was obvious. The printers union spotted it immediately and put him on a path to leadership. Bruce became a union delegate. He joined the Australian Labor Party. He led his first strike at the age of 19. It's a remarkable thing to do, to lead a group of men as a teenager. Those traits that so many of us admired about Bruce were clearly there from the start: that fierce loyalty to working people, mixed with a curious combination of firebrand and conciliator.

It was those qualities that helped Bruce become the first left-wing assistant secretary of the New South Wales Labor Party. If there is a tougher place for a left-winger than Sussex Street, I'd like to know what it is! But he persisted. He was a gentle person with immense inner strength. After nine years in that job, he was elected as a senator in 1980. Bruce always said that he was a parliamentarian, not a politician, and he left an enduring mark in the Senate, where he spent 16 years. Bruce was happy to work across factional lines, across party lines, if people shared his values and his objectives. He was an expert committee chair. He literally wrote the book on the topic: 'The Truth About Parliamentary Committees'.

He was able to do these things because his word was his bond. When he retired from the Senate, Bruce was honoured across the parliament. I still have the old VHS tape at home. You can see Liberals, Nationals and Democrats—in those days—all speaking in his honour about his dedication, his patience and his skill. Bruce was a conciliator. He was profoundly decent and occasionally quite fierce as well, always in the service of the causes that he believed in. From his earliest days listening to Ben Chifley on the radio, he was for working-class people and their interests. At the height of the Cold War he was for peace and disarmament, and well before it was common he was for feminism and the rights of women. Bruce was a unifying force in Left politics inside and outside the parliament. He was particularly good in his role organising a decade of Palm Sunday peace rallies. You might remember the really enormous ones, with 170,000 people marching through the streets of Sydney for a nuclear-free world.

On a personal note, Bruce was a pivotal figure in my own life. I know that everyone who worked with Bruce over the years would feel the same way, and I'm pleased to acknowledge Christine Hawkins, who also worked with Bruce for a number of years, in the gallery tonight. Bruce gave me and many others our start in Labor politics, and for that I owe him a great deal. People often say, 'If you can't see it, you can't be it.' Well, what we saw with Bruce is that you can be a decent human being and work in this sometimes crazy environment without losing your principles and without losing your honour.

In my experience, Bruce was defined by his thoughtfulness, his kindness, his strategic brain and his inexhaustible patience. I only heard him raise his voice a couple of times, and it was always for a very good cause. He'd then put the phone down and tell me straight afterwards, 'Sorry—I had to show them I was a bit cross because they wouldn't have taken me seriously otherwise.' That was Bruce Childs: a hero of the peace movement, a unionist, a feminist and the most decent person I've ever known in politics. I'll miss him deeply.

See this speech in context