Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House record its deep regret at the death on 17 October 2010, of The Honourable Kenneth Shaw Wriedt, former Senator for Tasmania and Minister for Primary Industry, Minister for Agriculture and Minister for Minerals and Energy, and place on record its appreciation of his long and meritorious public service, and tender its profound sympathy to his family in their bereavement.

Ken Wriedt was a member of the greatest generation, the generation that was born into hardship, served the cause of freedom in war and came home to build a better peace. Ken Wriedt was born in Melbourne’s Fitzroy on 11 July 1927, sharing a birthday with a gangly 11-year-old then growing up in Canberra named Gough Whitlam, who came to figure so greatly in Ken’s life in the decades to come. Ken grew up in the tough years of the Depression and saw wartime service as a sailor in the merchant marine, sparking a lifelong love of the ocean.

The searing experiences of the Depression and the poverty seen on his foreign travels guided Ken towards the Labor cause. He joined the party in 1959, the same year he married Helga, who shared his life’s journey for five decades. After three attempts at preselection he was elected to the Senate as part of the new Whitlam team in 1967 and five years later became Minister for Primary Industry. Ken was an outstanding minister regarded by John Button as ‘a most distinguished member of the Whitlam government’. He was a reformist who understood the competitive realities that Australia’s agriculture sector and industry more generally had to face. In fact, there is a great Alan Moir cartoon from 1974 showing Ken cresting a huge wave with his sailor’s hat all askew desperately fighting against the tide, trying to drag Australia from reliance on the sheep’s back towards a stronger future based on mining. I am sure that the current minerals boom must have given Ken the satisfaction of knowing that his thinking had been far in front of its time.

Ken’s Commonwealth ministerial tenure ended on 11 November 1975, as did so many other great careers. But Ken felt he had more to offer and reinvented himself in state politics, winning a Tasmania House of Assembly seat in 1982 and going on to become Leader of the Opposition and a minister in the Field Labor government, where he came to have a high regard for the Greens and their emerging leader, Bob Brown, of whom he predicted great things.

Through 83 years Ken had many loves: the ocean and the magnificent Tasmanian landscape, classical music and poetry, and a fierce appreciation of the ABC’s role as a force for culture and learning. He was an internationalist who decried the enormity of injustice and sought fairness for the people of East Timor. He cultivated the virtues of calmness and tranquillity based on a lifelong interest in Buddhism and the practice of meditation.

Foremost in his affections, of course, were his wife, Helga, his daughters, Paula and Sonia, and his four grandchildren, who this week mourned the end of Ken’s long and purposeful life just a month after their beloved Helga also passed away.

Ken will be long remembered in this place and beyond as one of the true gentlemen of Australian politics, an excellent minister and a fine human being praised on all sides of politics for his decency and his integrity. With his family we say goodbye to a great servant of his party, the parliament and our nation. Our country is a better place because Ken devoted his life to public service.

Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise briefly to support the remarks of the Prime Minister in support of the condolence motion for the late Ken Wriedt, a former minister in the Whitlam government and a former Leader of the Government in the Senate. He was obviously a highly talented man and a highly talented politician who became a minister after just four years in the parliament and became the leader of his party in the Senate after just seven years in the parliament. He was by all accounts an extremely effective Minister for Agriculture who was widely well regarded by the agricultural sector, notwithstanding his government’s removal of the superphosphate bounty and of the reserve price for wool, two initiatives which caused great consternation at the time, and notwithstanding his rueful comment on appointment that in fact he did not know a merino from a Corriedale.

It is my understanding that, along with John Wheeldon, he would have preferred the Whitlam government to have gone to a double-dissolution election when supply was blocked, as members would recollect, in this parliament back in 1975. I understand that it was in fact Ken Wriedt as government leader in the Senate who ultimately secured supply for the then Fraser caretaker government because he had not been warned by the recently dismissed Prime Minister of the events at Yarralumla. So I suppose we on this side can rejoice in his role securing supply for the Fraser caretaker government.

He was, as I understand it, a man of great principle and high integrity. I am indebted to press gallery journalist Don Walford, who is in the gallery today, for the reminder that he was deeply disillusioned with his party, in part because of the then party leader’s desire to obtain campaign funding from the Iraqi Baathist Party in the aftermath of the 1975 election. Nevertheless, any unhappiness with his party could not have lasted, because when he left this parliament he served with distinction for many years as a Labor MP in the Tasmanian parliament and was in fact the leader of the Labor Party in the Tasmanian parliament for some years.

He was a fine man. He served his country, his state and his party with distinction. We honour his memory, we respect his work and we send our condolences to his family and friends.

Harry Jenkins (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

For reasons of family association I would like to endorse and associate myself with the remarks of the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. I ask all members to rise in their places as a mark of respect to the late Ken Wriedt.

Honourable members having stood in their places—

Debate (on motion by Mr Albanese) adjourned.