Rod Kemp (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I was on the staff of Dame Margaret Guilfoyle from 1977 to 1982. Alan Cumming Thom was a senior member of the Clerk’s office during this time and I came into contact with him from time to time. The President of the Senate has outlined the very distinguished career of Alan Cumming Thom, who spent the last five years of his 33 years in the Senate in the very significant and substantial position of Clerk of the Senate.

The creation of the Senate committees is certainly one of the high points of the Australian parliamentary story. As the officer in charge of the Senate committee secretariat, Alan Cumming Thom is regarded as being largely responsible for the shaping, as I understand it, of the modern Senate committee system, after the establishment of the new standing committees in 1970. He was rightly very proud of his work. He believed that the Senate committee system was ‘the best constructed committee system in any legislative chamber in the world’.

If he was associated with some of the high points of our parliamentary story, it is also true that he was associated with rectifying one of our low points. I refer to the very unhappy story regarding the publication of the 6th edition of Odgers. In essence, in 1982 some members on the Senate Standing Committee on Procedure objected strongly to the publication of the 6th edition of Odgers on the grounds that Odgers’ views on the constitutional background to the events of 1975 were unacceptable to them. By this time, Alan Cumming Thom was Clerk of the Senate. Not to be defeated by what was obviously very partisan behaviour, he arranged for the 6th edition of Odgers to be published by the Royal Australian Institute of Public Administration. This volume finally appeared in 1991, about a year after I entered the Senate. Peter Durack then tabled the 6th edition of Odgers in the Senate and copies were distributed to all senators, and I proudly retain my copy. Fortunately, this attempt at ‘book burning’ by some members of the Senate failed, and we can be thankful for the assistance of Alan Cumming Thom on this very important issue.

The issue of Odgers which so clearly transfixed a limited number of senators in the 1980s has not caused any concern, I might say, to those who came after. I am pleased to report that the subsequent five editions of the Odgers guide—we are now up to the 11th edition—were published by the Senate and edited very well by the current Clerk. Alan Cumming Thom’s successor as Clerk of the Senate, Harry Evans, recently gave what I believe was a most interesting eulogy at the service of Alan Cumming Thom at St Andrews Church in Canberra. I will quote a couple of lines from this eulogy which I think give an excellent picture of Alan Cumming Thom as a man and as Clerk of the Senate:

More than procedure, he influenced the culture of the Senate Department. It was, first of all, a culture of the work ethic. Whenever I see committee staff, particularly, beavering away in their offices late on a non-sitting day, I think of the pattern Alan set. It was also a culture of integrity. Alan gained a reputation as something of a puritan because of his constant concern with questions of probity and propriety. I well recall an occasion when committee members were proposing to do something which was only slightly dubious, but they were anxious that Alan should not get to hear of it and raise those questions of propriety which he always raised and which they were not too keen to have raised on the occasion.

Above all, he instilled in us a belief that we were there to serve the institution, as well as those temporarily in charge of the institution. He always reminded us that our duty was to the institution, and that the Senate was more than merely the sum of the people in it and the people serving it. We were made aware that devotion to the institution could sometimes cause conflict with those in charge, and Alan never shrank from such conflict if he thought that some proposal was contrary to the best interests of the institution.

Harry Evans concluded his eulogy by saying:

We who worked with Alan for so long feel a great sense of loss, but we cannot know the loss sustained by his family. I hope that they will draw some consolation from the fact that we have a better Senate and a better Commonwealth than we would have had without him.

As you can tell from these remarks by the current Clerk of the Senate, Alan Cumming Thom was certainly a Senate partisan and proud of it. He was quoted in the press when he retired on 15 February 1988 as saying:

The biggest mistake you can make working here is to have the impression that you’re here to get something out of it, whereas you’re not, you’re here to give something to the institution.

Alan Cumming Thom lived his life by these precepts. The Senate is a better place as a result of his tireless work.