Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

This is a hard day. I thank members for their contributions today, but it has been really painful listening to them. It really hurts to be having this conversation today. I know that Peta would be saying, if she were watching this, just to stop having such a sook! But it's really all that I can manage today.

I haven't been able to let go of the idea over the last few days this is just so unfair. In a fair world we would be here listening to Peta talk about her time in this place in a valedictory speech as a long-time senior cabinet minister in a long-term Labor government like the Hawke and Keating governments that she so admired. Peta was the best of us in this place. She had a sharp and incisive policy mind, and she was a savvy political strategist and a fearsome campaigner. She was a fighter for the causes that she believed in and for the people that she represented. She was fierce, she was frank and she was funny, as so many of the contributions today have recognised.

She was in this place until the day before she went to hospital for the last time. Circumstances beyond her control meant that Peta had to do it the hard way, but she got on and did it anyway. She ended her remarkable first speech with that iconic quote from Pippi Longstocking:

… I'm the strongest girl in the world, remember that.

And, boy, she was! She fought and lost a marginal seat campaign, saddling up again three years later and fighting a marginal seat campaign and winning. She was diagnosed with metastatic cancer just two weeks before her swearing-in, and then she fought and won a marginal seat campaign again, with a bumper margin—a bumper endorsement from her community that they had made the right choice in choosing her to fight for them.

She was an outstanding local member of parliament. She knew everything and everyone; she was across everything. She seemed to be everywhere at once in her community. I don't know how she did it all. The rest of us in this place complain about how exhausting sitting weeks are and how wrecked we all feel on the Friday after a sitting. Three out of four Fridays, Peta would be on an IV for cancer treatment. I thought it was so unfair, but Peta described herself as lucky because the treatment that she was able to receive had gotten so much better in the last five to 10 years, and that people with metastatic breast cancer are now able to live longer and healthier lives.

I am thankful for every day we got with Peta in this place, but I still can't reckon with the fact that we are here having this condolence motion. I was never really able to process Peta's diagnosis—as many people in the chamber recognised, she didn't like talking about it. I understood what her diagnosis meant at an intellectual level. I knew it was treatable, but incurable; I knew what that meant, but it never felt real to me. I knew it, but something in me couldn't accept it. I felt, somehow, like the rules wouldn't apply to Peta: she was too exceptional. She was too strong, just too determined. I knew it, but something in me refused to accept it. And I regret that now, because the memories that we all have with Peta are so precious to us now. A lot of people have spoken here about Peta's kindness and generosity as a friend, and she had those things in spades. But here in this place, we have to record Peta's relentlessness and her viciousness on the squash court!

The member for Macquarie had better judgement than the member for Macnamara and me. I don't think you really could have known Peta until you played against her on the squash court. One year, for World Squash Day, Peta invited myself and the member for Macnamara down to the parliamentary courts for a few games. I knew that Peta was a gun player, but I still didn't quite know what we were getting ourselves into. By the end of the morning, the member for Macnamara and I—who fancied ourselves as athletes in the way that middle-aged men sometimes do—were both drenched in sweat and covered in bruises from all the times she repeatedly and sadistically sent us slamming into the walls of the court. I don't think she took more than a dozen steps herself on those courts during those games; she certainly didn't break a sweat. And she did it with a smile—the smile of an assassin who was very pleased with her work! I look forward to watching the squash at the Olympics and remembering Peta's face on that day.

I know that Rod will read these speeches one day. I'm so sorry, mate. Everyone in this building can see what a beautiful relationship Peta and Rod had. They were a genuine partnership—agreeing, disagreeing, getting to somewhere better by collaborating. I so admired their relationship. She'd often tell me, 'Rod thinks X,' or, 'Rod thinks Y,' sometimes with rolled eyes, sometimes with reflective, narrowed eyes and always with a deep well of passion and respect. It was something to envy.

Peta was exceptional to all of us but, as Peta said herself, many times, her circumstances were not exceptional. So many extraordinary women have had to confront the challenge that she faced. So many families, so many friendship groups and so many workplaces have had to confront the loss of someone that they love through this horrible, horrible illness. Indeed, 57 women will be told that they have breast cancer in Australia today—today and every day. In this regard, I want to acknowledge the work of Breast Cancer Network Australia and Peta's advocacy for them. BCNA works that to ensure that everyone diagnosed with breast cancer receives the very best care, treatment and support. Peta was fighting for the BCNA until the very end, supporting the launch of the BCNA report just last week, calling for those with metastatic breast cancer to be counted on registries to help improve outcomes. All of us in the House are wearing the BCNA pins today, and I encourage everyone in the community to support their work in every way that they can.

But I want to leave the House the way Peta would like it—with her own words. In her own remarkable first speech that she gave just a fortnight after receiving her diagnosis, Peta made a call for all of us in this place to be better, to think of ourselves as custodians for our democracy during our time in this place, and to seek to leave it in a better condition than we found it. I know that that is a watchword for the McKinnon leaders program that Peta was a participant in and Rod is fundamental to. I reflect on this often, and, as someone regarded so highly across the entire chamber, there would be no more fitting legacy of Peta's time in this place than for all of us to heed her words. So I finish with her words:

Recently I was asked to imagine what, at the end of my parliamentary career, I would like to be able to look back on and say I was proud to have been a part of—what I would like to have achieved … above all else, I would like to be able to say that I left Australian politics—Australian democracy—in better shape than when I joined it, that I was part of a generation of Australian politicians who worked to recover the public's faith in our democratic system and who strove to reharness politics as that vehicle for enlarging opportunities and enlarging our national imagination, and that we did so by rejecting politics based on fear and division, by refusing to see societal problems as weapons with which to wedge our political opponents and by choosing robust debates about ideas and solutions over personal attacks and petty judgements. It's what my community wants me to do. It's what Australians want all of us here to do. And, be in no doubt, it's what we have to do. At a time when less than half of all Australians are satisfied with the way democracy works and only one in five say they trust politicians, surely the alarm bells are ringing. There is too often a machismo about politics which mistakes aggressiveness for advocacy, which demands certainty and rejects reflection as weakness, and which is quick to judge and slow to forgive.

This parliament is the cauldron of Australia's national conversation, and politicians are not just participants in it; we are its custodians, and we must do better.

Vale, Peta Murphy.

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