Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Bill Hayden was the best Labor Prime Minister Australia did not have. He was a decent, honourable, wise and compassionate man. He was my first federal MP. He served as member of Oxley for 27 years, and during that time he was a great example for me. He was my federal MP and my constituent later in life.

Bill Hayden was born in Brisbane on 23 January 1933. He was raised in a tough environment in South Brisbane. A child of the depression, he called himself. He told me that on numerous occasions. He grew up in poverty in difficult family straits. He grew up 'getting angry', as he said in his 1996 autobiography. World War II deeply affected Bill, as did the death of his beloved wartime leader, Labor Prime Minister John Curtin, in 1945.

Bill started his working life in the Queensland public service, but it didn't really excite him very much. He was conscripted into the Navy as part of the national service training, an experience of compulsion which nearly influenced him into joining the Communist Party. He joined the Queensland police as a constable and was posted at Redbank police station in Ipswich. His earlier life experiences made Bill set about attending to the 'great register of social injustices', as he would describe it. He accumulated these from childhood, through his police years and into parliament.

He married Dallas, a coalminer's daughter. 'Love at first sight', he said, and that without her he would've been a lesser person. His beloved children gave him purpose and made him a better person. That was Bill's humble way of saying how people influenced his life.

He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1961. It was a remarkable feat to get elected to the federal seat of Oxley. He was 28 years of age and up against long-sitting member Dr Donald Cameron, the health minister in the Menzies government. He needed a huge swing. Dr Cameron's grandfather was the principal at Ipswich Grammar School, Dr Cameron's wife, Rhoda, started Meals on Wheels in Ipswich, and Dr Cameron had been Dallas's family doctor and had delivered Dallas as a baby.

Oxley was 18,000 square kilometres, a combination of Blair, Oxley, Wright, Longman and Maranoa in our terms. It was a regional and rural electorate. Bill won a preselection of intensity and drama against a favoured AWU candidate, a win that would rival Paul Keating's preselection nearly a decade later. It was full of vim and vigour, but Bill would win that preselection comfortably, so it didn't become a national issue as Paul's preselection became. He won Oxley in the general election. He campaigned in country towns up and down the rural parts outside of Ipswich. I met many people, when I first started campaigning in 2004 and 2007, who said that they'd not met a Labor candidate since Bill Hayden. He was a wonderful local representative.

That young man proved how good he could be as an MP, and if I could be even a quarter as good an MP as Bill Hayden I would achieve a lot. He was devoted to country and city. He turned up at rural shows dutifully. As he told me, when he was driving behind wagons, tractors and horse carts, driving up those country roads, he was thinking about the fact that he had to go up to those areas on a Saturday for a country show. He used to say to me: 'Just keep doing it, Shayne. You've just got to keep doing it.'

He established Labor Party branches in country areas. He helped his constituents faithfully. He did mobile offices to ensure they could access him. On the day Bill passed away, someone at the dinner celebrating 100 years of the Country Women's Association in Esk—an area that he represented initially and I represent now—gave me a copy of a now-defunct newspaper, the Brisbane Valley Star. I'd never heard of it. On 12 February 1965, here was Bill Hayden advertising a mobile office at the Club Hotel in Toogoolawah and Martin's shop in Esk. I don't know Martin's shop in Esk—it's not there anymore, and I don't know what it sold. I would call that a country mobile office run.

Bill and Dallas were constituents of mine, and they lived on their rural property up on the hill at Bryden, overlooking Somerset Dam. Bill told me many times to keep doing those mobile offices in the Somerset region, but he used to say, 'Don't forget Ipswich.' If my vote was too low in Ipswich, he used to tell me to keep campaigning there. Bill said when he got preselected the idea was that the Ipswich vote would look after itself, but it was never high enough federally. He traced the difference between the state vote in Ipswich and the federal vote and said that, back into the 1920s, the state vote in Ipswich was always higher than the federal vote. He had to get that vote up in Ipswich, he said.

The Ipswich Civic Centre exists because of Bill Hayden and the Prime Minister Bill would call 'the great man', Gough Whitlam. Buildings and streets are named after Bill in Ipswich: the WG Hayden Humanities Centre and WG Hayden Drive in Collingwood Park. He left his imprint everywhere. By the end of his days in parliament, his seat of Oxley looked like Oxley now plus the urban parts of Blair, after numerous redistributions—some of which he was really happy about, let me tell you. He told me so after he and I both spoke at the funeral of Herb Olm, who was one of his campaign workers in the Lockyer Valley.

Without Bill Hayden, we wouldn't have universal health care. As the member for McMahon said before, it was a tough gig. Bill and Dallas lost friends. People would walk on the other side of the street because they hated what Bill was doing, and Dallas copped so much opprobrium. But Medibank, hard fought, paved the way for Medicare. And that controversial single mothers pension—I met people who told me they would never vote for Bill Hayden again because of that, because somehow it would ruin morality. But Bill's experience as a child, and his experience as a police officer, meant that he knew that bringing in a single mothers pension was the decent and honourable thing to do. That paved the way for what we call family tax benefits today. He did that as social security minister.

He became Treasurer much too late; Whitlam should have appointed him and not Jim Cairns. But, interestingly, Malcolm Fraser's coalition passed Bill's budget unamended. In the dying days before the dismissal, Bill gave Labor economic credibility. He gave Whitlam his sage advice—his copper's instinct. He told me this, too, and it's been recorded in history: be wary of John Kerr as Governor-General.

As a teenager, I asked Bill about the dismissal at a St Paul's Anglican Church dinner dance one night. I hadn't voted in a federal election. I was there with a girl—who would later become my wife, can I tell you—and I asked him, 'Was that a conspiracy?' Now, Bill was too clever for me. He was opposition leader at the time. He was my local MP, and Bill said to me, clearly and cleverly, 'Kerr did not act alone.' Subsequent events and documents have proved Bill's copper's instincts were correct: Kerr did not act alone.

In 1975, Bill nearly lost. He was the only serving Labor MP in federal parliament after 1975. He didn't stand for the front bench and only became leader in '77. He told me that, for years after the 1975 election, he couldn't bring himself to drive a certain way into Brisbane, because those suburbs had voted against him in droves. So he didn't forgive or forget too easily.

He was shrewd. He was smart. His life experiences meant he had great insight—a certain perspicacity, I think—and was a shrewd judge of character. People have said he was humble. I've spoken to people like Rachel Nolan, a former member for Ipswich, and David Hamill, a former member for Ipswich, both ministers in the Queensland Labor government. David was a Treasurer in the Queensland Labor government. He knew Bill very well and had the benefit of Bill launching their campaigns, as he did mine at times. Dallas was always there with him. She would always come. David always called him 'William George' with great affection, because David worked for him.

Rachel has always said about Bill that he was so wise and so clever he could pick people out really well. Even in his retirement, before ill health incapacitated him, he'd ring me up and say: 'It's Bill Hayden here, Shayne. It's Bill Hayden.' I'd say: 'I know who you are, Bill. I recognise your voice. You're my federal MP.' And he would talk to me about fishing in Italy and about how climate change was affecting Spain. He'd watched some program or read some book. He was really worried that NRL players wouldn't get a proper workers compensation scheme. So he had great knowledge.

I remember in the last meeting I had with Bill, just months before he died in his home at Bryden, he asked me, 'What's Penny doing about Vietnam?' He said, 'I think Albo's doing alright. Just let him know about this.' And I mentioned to Albo—to the Prime Minister—about Bill's ill health.

I was honoured, and so was David and Rachel, to have Bill write to me about the fact that he was going to be baptised in the Catholic Church after a lifetime of spiritual scepticism. Now, Bill's letter to his friends—and I was just one of many—was reasoned, cogent and profound as ever, and it reminded me of CS Lewis's apologetic treatise Mere Christianity. It was so well thought-through. This idea that it was somehow just instinctive or intuitive—it's not true. Bill had thought about this for a long time.

I saw, as I said, Bill and Dallas, with Madonna Stott from my office—we'd left the Esk Show—some months before he died. I was doing a mobile office up there. Bill was poorly, and we talked about things. One of the things that Bill talked about that day was Vietnam. He was really keen to know what Penny Wong, as foreign minister, was doing about that. I remember a meeting at the Silkstone-Booval branch of the Labor Party in the eighties. Bill was foreign minister at the time, and he talked about his long-standing opposition to the war in Vietnam and how as foreign minister we needed to help Vietnam and bring it back. For him to talk to me just months before he died about his concerns about what we needed to do to engage with Vietnam showed to me his international perspective. For that boy from South Brisbane, that young man from Ipswich, it was still there at the end of his life.

Bill rebuilt the party and made us electable. If only Queensland had swung in 1980, as it needed to, Bill would have been Prime Minister in 1980. It swung, but not enough.

I remember having lunch with former Labor Deputy Prime Minister Brian Howe. I was the shadow minister for ageing, and Brian was on the panel for positive ageing. For nearly two hours Brian hardly touched his food at this Melbourne university; he hardly touched it at all. For nearly two hours he talked about what a great healer and leader Bill was in the Labor Party. He lauded Bill for his policy development and his promotion of talent, and how Bill never got the credit that he thoroughly deserved.

I remember the late great Susan Ryan, who I got to know really well towards the end of her life, who told me many times—even as she said in the Hayden oration in Ipswich one night—that Bill was way ahead of society in promoting women and women's rights, and LGBTQI+ rights as well. I remember the day Bill died. I was with Rainbow Labor at the Mardi Gras-Burg at Marburg, a celebration of gay and lesbian rights. I was with those people there—and how propitious it was—and saw how much they respected and admired Bill for his foresight and for being ahead of society and everyone in that area.

Bill was sadly not given the opportunity to become prime minister in 1983, and people, locally, were really concerned about that. I remember he told me a story about a lady who told him, during the 1983 election, that, because of what Bob Hawke had done to him, she would never vote Labor again. She lived in Oxley, and he said: 'No, for heaven's sake, vote for me. I need your vote. I'll need every vote I can get.'

He served with distinction as foreign minister, and as Governor-General, of course, from 1989 to 1996. He and Dallas rejoined the Labor Party and joined the Ipswich North branch. They'd come to the front row—Bill's hearing was starting to go a bit by then—at branch meetings. This was the former Labor leader at the front row at a branch meeting of the Labor Party. Then they joined the Somerset branch and became life members of the party, and they were deeply respected figures locally in my area. I'm so pleased that Sister Angela Mary Doyle, the respected hospital administrator whose example actually led Bill to God, was there with him in the last years of his life. Bill found her to be an example and confidant.

Bill was generous and thoughtful, learned and always learning. His house was full of souvenirs and mementos of a lifetime in politics, but it was also full of books and papers. His study of economics as a mature student led his views to the political centre on economics, while he retained his independent thinking to the left on social issues. I recall—and Barry Jones talks about this, and I've spoken to Bill about this—how, after 1983, he and some of the caucus members formed the now defunct Centre Left faction. It was mainly uncommitted moderates from states other than New South Wales and Victoria. In his autobiography, Bill explained that:

The Centre Left was formed as an act of self-preservation for a gaggle of mild Fabian reformers. As Barry Jones once explained to us at a meeting when we were anxiously exploring an identify crisis: 'We are a political lonely hearts club. What draws us together is that no-one else loves us.' A few seconds for the message to sink in, a few more of grave head-nodding agreement, and with that high crisis resolved, we moved on to other lesser business.

How appropriate—typical Bill, quirky as ever.

He called Paul Keating, can I say, a big hitter. He saw in Paul the man most likely to succeed him as Labor leader and possibly become prime minister. Bill, it has been said, created the greatest cabinet in Australia's history, only for Bob Hawke to inherit it. 'Standing down on the eve of the 1983 election hurt like hell,' Bill said. But Bill was totally crucial to Keating and Hawke in helping the Centre Left support the much-needed economic reforms of the 1980s. As Keating said, about Bill Hayden's time as foreign minister, Bill supported ANZUS, the American alliance, but he was no sycophant or supplicant to Washington. He championed a peace settlement with Cambodia and he delivered that idea and the whole process to Gareth Evans, his successor, to deliver it and eventually bring it to fruition and implement it.

When Bob Hawke died, in 2019, I reached out to Bill and asked him what he'd like to say of Hawke. He had a nuanced and unusual relationship with Hawke, as you can imagine. Bill told me to say this, 'While Hawke had his human weaknesses, he had no peer.' Bill was saddened by Bob's passing and said that Bob was 'the Don Bradman of Australian politics'. That's typical, because Hawke loved cricket, and Bill knew he did. It was a typical, generous, insightful and discerning Hayden comment.

I'll save the last word in my speech for Gareth Evans, who's given me permission to say this of Bill, and I couldn't put it any better—he succeeded Bill as foreign minister. I caught up with Gareth here in parliament, and I actually caught up with him in Kuala Lumpur just last week. Gareth says this about Bill: 'Bill had a lifetime of incredible achievement, for which he deserves the utmost respect and recognition. He was the sanest voice in the Whitlam government, with heroic achievements in health and Treasury, and did a terrific job in managing the huge task of making Labor electable again. He had a really creative period as foreign minister, which certainly helped me. And his time as Governor-General was an appropriate capstone to a brilliant career as a great Australian. I owe Bill a lot, as do all of us in the movement, and his legacy will be with us a very long-lasting time.'

My deepest condolence to Dallas, his 'constant companion', as he says in his foreword to his autobiography, and beloved and adoring wife of more than 60 years; his children Georgina, Ingrid and Kirk; his extended family; and his many, many friends.

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