Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of the opposition, I would like to join with Senator Minchin and support the motion of condolence following the death of the Hon. Sir Allen Fairhall. Sir Allen served for 20 years in the House of Representatives in various ministerial posts, including that of Minister for Defence. He was clearly a very distinguished parliamentarian. I extend our sincere condolences to his family and friends at this time.

He was born in New South Wales in 1909 and was educated at East Maitland High School. By 1929, at the start of the Great Depression, he had completed his apprenticeship as an electrical fitter and engineer. He was a lifelong radio enthusiast. In the same year he began making Sunday morning radio broadcasts from the family home using a gramophone and borrowed records. In 1931 he founded radio station 2KO in Newcastle, the second commercial broadcasting station in that city.

From 1942 until the end of the Second World War he was the supervising engineer of the Radio and Signals Section of the Ministry of Munitions, a role he played in a voluntary capacity. Sir Allen also served as an alderman of the City of Newcastle from 1941 to 1944. He entered parliament in 1949 as the member for Paterson and was re-elected on seven occasions, holding the seat for 20 years until his retirement from parliament. For a conservative member to have such a long run from what is pretty good Labor heartland means he was obviously a very able politician.

In 1954 Sir Allen was a member of the Australian delegation to the General Assembly of the United Nations. His ministerial career began in 1956 with his appointment as Minister for the Interior and Minister for Works. He served as Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works from 1959 until 1961. He was then appointed the Minister for Supply and held that post for a little over four years. In January 1966 he was appointed to the senior role of Minister for Defence in the Holt government and remained in that position until his retirement some 3½ years later. An editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald described him as:

... a hard liner, a firm anti-communist, an advocate of forward defence and rearmament.

As Minister for Defence, Sir Allen spent considerable time and energy responding to controversy over cost overruns, testing and delivery time frames of the F111 aircraft, ordered by the Menzies government in 1963. He would no doubt have enjoyed the current debate on the Joint Strike Fighter—the more things change, the more they stay the same. In 1968, along with Paul Hasluck, he successfully fomented backbench revolt against Prime Minister Gorton’s 1968 ‘Strategic basis of Australian defence policy’. During his parliamentary career he was also spoken of as a potential future Liberal leader. However, he retired from politics in 1969, saying that he found it:

... increasingly difficult to take the long hours and constant travelling inseparable from parliamentary office.

In the valedictory debate in September 1969, deputy opposition leader and shadow minister for defence, Lance Barnard, with whom he had done battle over the F111 contract, said that he had made:

... a tremendous contribution as a member and as a responsible Minister in this Parliament.

Sir Allen was also the author of a book, Towards a New Society, published in 1997, when I think he must have been about 88. In that work he argued for the abolition of the current taxation regime and for its replacement with a uniform tax on the unimproved capital value of land. The preface of the book said:

... society has struggled, with little success, to deal with the miseries which have overwhelmed untold millions of people throughout the world—miseries directly attributable to the private monopoly of land.

I am not sure that that is in total accord with current Liberal Party policy. Clearly Sir Allen was a man of independent thought and he retained a keen interest in important issues in our society well into his retirement. He was also the writer of Newcastle: Symphony of a City, published in 2001. Sir Allen was a person who made a significant contribution to public life and to government in Australia. Once again, on behalf of the opposition, I pass on our sincere condolences to his family and friends at this time.

Question agreed to, honourable senators standing in their places.