Bob McMullan (Fraser, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for International Development Assistance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to use this time to comment on, note and mourn the passing of a very distinguished but largely unremarked Australian, Keith Dowding. Keith was a voice of principle, a voice for the underprivileged and the oppressed. He died recently on 18 August at the age of 97, in Western Australia. Keith was a church minister, originally in the Presbyterian Church. After the amalgamation into the Uniting Church, he was, at one point, the moderator of the Presbyterian Church. I also knew him as an activist in the Labor Party and as a trade union activist.

But those are not the singular contributions for which I wish to commend Keith Dowding today. In the 1960s Keith Dowding did things which these days would not be so unusual but back then were extraordinary. In 1963 he went to Calcutta as Director of the Bengal Refugee Service. He spent two or three years there from 1963 to 1965, accepting responsibility for the welfare of 20,000 refugees in and around Calcutta, as it was then called. With the support of many charitable groups in Australia, he successfully resettled 6,000 refugees who, despite all other attempts to move them, had been squatting in a railway station for 16 years. That is an extraordinary contribution by an Australian. Having done that, he then went to Nigeria as the administrator of the Save the Children Fund in Nigeria in 1966 and 1967. He then went to the United Kingdom and organised the International Year of Human Rights in the UK and Northern Ireland.

It was, overall, a life well lived; a great contribution on behalf of the poor and the underprivileged in Australia and around the world. When I first met Keith Dowding he commented on his unique status as the only person who had been expelled both from the RSL and the Labor Party, and it turned out to be true. He was kicked out of the RSL for opposing the war in Vietnam and he was kicked out of the Labor Party for being opposed to the White Australia Policy. So at least he had a long and distinguished record of principle. He was later known as Peter’s father because his son Peter became the Premier of Western Australia. But Keith himself was a distinguished and notable Australian and, as I said, he died on 18 August aged 97. He made a significant contribution. Those of us who aspire to public service could only aspire to match his contribution.