Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Politics is a brutal business. If the candidate that the member for Gilmore referred to is elected, she will be tainted by politics; that is the business we are in. It is at its core and in its very nature. For the past two years, the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Industry and Resources has been working on the report Australia’s uranium—greenhouse friendly fuel for an energy hungry world. For the past two years, the former leader of the federal parliamentary Labor Party has been put to the test as a leader of his party and, indeed, as a leader of the political wing of the movement of working people in Australia.

Today is a very sad day for a great parliamentarian and a very substantial leader of the Australian Labor Party. Kim again gave a magnificent concession speech in the caucus, and in brutal circumstances, having been told when he came back to his office shortly after he lost that ballot that his brother had just died. To walk out shortly after that and give the most professional of public appearances at a press conference is a very hard thing to do. Not everybody in this House or in political life could do that. One of the reasons he could speak so tellingly after the loss, as he did after his loss to Mr Latham, was that the strains of leadership were lifted from him. I think that if it had not been for the stresses of the last two years, and if he had been unencumbered by those and able to be as free as he was in those speeches, he might still be leader.

It is the nature of political life that the normal person is tainted by politics and transformed in the process. I just want to reflect shortly on the nature of parliamentary life in Australia and pay tribute to Kim Beazley for the manner in which he has conducted himself not only in leading the party but also in this House as a parliamentarian of great note. He is someone who, despite appearances and the propaganda of the last two years or so, is well loved by the Australian community. I think the fundamental reason for that is pretty simple: they know that, whatever faults and failings Kim Beazley has, he will not do the Australian public any harm. He never intended to and never intentionally would. That, for me, in a profession tainted by politics, is a substantial thing to say about any individual parliamentarian. Kim conducted himself ably originally as a backbencher, then as a minister in the former government, then as deputy leader of the former government, and then in the very difficult first six years he had as Leader of the Opposition. You would wish on no individual the task in Australian politics of taking on the mantle of being Leader of the Opposition—let alone for six years—after a dramatic defeat of your government.

This is no easy task; it is not an easy burden to bear. Australian history demonstrates absolutely at the federal level that once a government is in it is extraordinarily difficult to shift it. With his calculated brutality, early in our time in opposition the former member for Flinders warned us that, although we might think that we would easily get rid of the government, it would come as a burdensome revelation to us—day after day, month after month, year after year—that we would have to continue on the opposition benches for many years to come and that it would become increasingly difficult to see ourselves getting back into government. That is the nature of Australian politics; it is the nature of what is imposed upon us. Yet Kim Beazley fought heroically, particularly given how we were smashed in the 1996 election result.

The most substantial, innovative postwar government Australia has seen, with prime ministers Hawke and Keating, remade Australia in a new fashion to make it a modern 20th century country with the capacity to build towards the 21st century. Its economic foundations had been utterly transformed from a very dependent one into a very outward looking and dynamic economy. That was done under the impress of a collapse of our terms of trade; after 25 to 30 years of a half a per cent to one per cent drive down, in a few months they collapsed by 25 per cent. But the response was there and we provided good government; Kim Beazley was part of that. He took on the task as a good parliamentarian. As someone who had been Leader of the House when we were in government, he had the civility to deal with people within the House according to its forms. It is a very sad day that—not once, but twice—it has come to pass that he has been rejected by his own party. He has been rejected by his own party despite the fact that the burdens he shouldered could have been shouldered by no-one else in the same way.

No-one else could have taken on the gravity of the 1996 result and pulled us back to a position in 1998 where we won 18 seats out of the 30 extra we needed. It was a herculean task to win 30, and we did not, but we did win 18. We came back from the 49 we had up to 67—a great achievement.

We all know what happened in 2001: Kim Beazley was just too honest. When the Prime Minister suckered him in relation to the Tampa, because he is a good man Kim Beazley said within 20 seconds—and this destroyed us in 2001—that he could never see that an Australian soldier should be allowed the right to murder people without being brought before the courts, which was foreshadowed in the Prime Minister’s bill. I wish he had said, ‘We’ll leave it to the people and the High Court to make a determination of this,’ because, after being suckered in that 20 seconds, we then had to mount an enormous fight-back to hold our position in 2001—and yet he achieved that.

These were no mean feats. After the three appalling years that we lived through in the last parliament, he stepped up to the plate again. This was a Labor Party that was dishevelled and, one might indeed argue, rabble-like at the time and that had been led by someone who should not have been elected to lead it in Mark Latham. The Labor Party could have been destroyed utterly as a result of the decision of my colleagues, and Kim Beazley stepped up to the plate and said that he would try to bring the whole show back together. He manfully bore the burden over the last two years with all the strains that were involved, and I salute him absolutely.

Kim Beazley is not the most perfect politician in the world. He is a normal, frail human being. He made mistakes. The Prime Minister makes them; everybody else makes them. We are fallible human beings. But what he does have strongly on his side is a good heart—maybe too good a heart. He has a whole range of other failings. Perhaps he does not interact with people in the way he could. He did not spend the last two years gathering and regathering support. He took the charge to the government, and we are in the position we are now electorally because of the fabulous work that he did.

I am proud of the fact that, when it came to the crunch for the third time, like the second and the first—and whatever the consequences for me as an individual—I voted for Kim Beazley because it was the right thing to do. For all of my colleagues who followed the same path, essentially it is about the fundamental decency of this human being and the fact that he led with all his capacity. Today’s vote demonstrates that a lot of people did not think that that capacity was great enough. But today is the right time to grieve politically on our side for the political passing of Kim Beazley. (Time expired)