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

by leave—I move:

That the Senate records its deep regret at the death, on 14 March 2008, of the Honourable Clyde Robert Cameron AO, former federal minister and member for Hindmarsh, and places on record its appreciation of his long and meritorious public service and tenders its profound sympathy to his family in their bereavement.

It was said on the occasion of his retirement from federal politics that Clyde Cameron was not only a giant of the Labor Party and the labour movement but also a giant of the Commonwealth parliament. Today we pay tribute to the life of one of this nation’s great political figures: a shearer who worked his way up to the front bench of the Whitlam government. The ALP and the labour movement were a major part of Clyde Cameron’s life, and over the past 70 years he played an important role in their history and controversies and, in turn, he played a significant role in the history of the nation.

The eldest of four boys, Clyde Robert Cameron was born into a poor family in South Australia in 1913. His father was a shearer, and one of the foundation members of the original Australian Shearers Union, while his mother was the daughter of a wealthy land-owning family.  Clyde left school at 15 to work as a rouseabout and a shearer. He travelled with shearing teams around Australia and New Zealand. However, it was the time of the Great Depression, and Clyde spent much of this period unemployed. When he was working he faced low pay and very tough conditions.

The experience of that struggle affected Clyde Cameron deeply and instilled in him a real class-consciousness and a deep commitment to the labour movement and the ALP as a vehicle for change. He was a true Fabian socialist and, while Australian society and politics changed dramatically over his long lifetime, he always remained committed and resolute in his political philosophy.

Unsurprisingly, Clyde quickly became active in his own union, the AWU, and was a regular stump speaker in Adelaide’s Botanical Park. He got his first full-time union job at the age of 25 when he was elected to the position of an AWU organiser. He was a successful organiser, and only two years later he found himself serving as secretary of the South Australian branch and as federal vice-president of the AWU. In 1946, at the age of 33, he became president of the South Australian branch—then the youngest president in its history.

Under Clyde Cameron, the AWU began a huge recruitment and organising drive that saw its membership more than double, and working conditions in its industry improved considerably by the time he was elected to parliament. A man of very committed democratic values, Clyde was well known for his fight for proper process in the AWU.

At the same time, Clyde was working his way up through the ranks of the Labor Party. From 1946 he served in three separate periods as president of the South Australian branch of the ALP. He was its representative on the ALP federal executive from 1970 to 1972 and was a South Australian delegate to the ALP federal conference from 1948 to 1977. In 1949 Clyde was elected to the House of Representatives as the member for Hindmarsh, in the same election that the Chifley Labor government lost power. He served the people of Hindmarsh for the next 31 years, the vast majority in opposition.

Clyde once recalled how, when he was a young rousteabout, he would dream about making speeches in parliament denouncing man’s inhumanity to man. ‘I was so disappointed when I woke up,’ he said, ‘I wished I could go back to sleep again to carry on the dream.’ But when he finally made it into parliament he soon developed a reputation as one of the finest and funniest orators there, as well as being an aggressive political opponent. Clyde Cameron, with all due respect, hated the conservatives and made no attempt to hide it. As I said, unfortunately he spent 28 of his 31 years in parliament in opposition. But he was a leading figure in the federal ALP caucus, he played a major role in many of the political events that shaped the party’s history and he was regarded by many as a controversial figure but certainly one who made a contribution in every way.

Along with being an excellent parliamentarian, Clyde Cameron was a pragmatist. While he never swerved from his political beliefs, he also understood that in order for the ALP to win government it needed to modernise and to broaden its appeal. Clyde’s support for organisational reform was critical in paving the way to Labor’s 1972 election win and he was thereafter known in the party as one of the principal architects of victory.

At the age of 58, Clyde Cameron was appointed minister for labour in the new Whitlam government, a role he had spent his lifetime preparing for. He later, for a period, was also minister for immigration—one of my predecessors. The legacy from his 2½ years as minister for labour is impressive. He was responsible for pushing through the equal pay cases that brought an end to discrimination against women in terms of their pay. Significantly, it was Clyde who appointed Mary Gaudron to prosecute the cases before the arbitration commission. As senators would be aware, Mary Gaudron later went on to become Australia’s first female High Court justice.

Clyde also oversaw the improvement of pay and conditions for the Public Service, which, given some of his stances on the role of public servants, might be surprising. But he did do an awful lot to improve Public Service conditions, including increasing annual leave from three weeks to four, as well as the introduction of paid maternity leave and of flexitime, although he later claimed to have regretted that particular initiative. His other achievements as labour minister included wage indexation and, of course, trade union training. The Trade Union Training College at Albury-Wodonga was named after him, and he made an enormous contribution to the labour cause in that role.

His time as minister, like that of the Whitlam government he served, was marked by controversy. In 1975 he was transferred—I think that is the polite word—to the portfolio of Science and Consumer Affairs, after strongly resisting Whitlam’s attempts to move him out of the Labour and Immigration portfolio. Following the loss of the Whitlam government, he retired to the backbench. He stayed there until he left federal politics in 1980.

In 1982 he was awarded the Order of Australia and in 2006 he was awarded life membership of the Australian Labor Party. Unsurprisingly, Clyde Cameron remained active and outspoken well into his later years. He became an important political historian. He was particularly passionate about the history of the ALP and the period around the 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government. He wrote several books on Australian political history but he also, importantly, recorded more than 600 hours of conversations with his contemporaries from both sides of politics that are currently stored in the National Library. Clyde Cameron once said, ‘I feel confident that the things that I write will be more important to history than anything that I said in the 31 years I was in parliament.’ Perhaps that is a lesson for us all.

I think history will show that Australian politics lost a rare character the day that Clyde Cameron retired from parliament—the sort of character we do not tend to see in Australian politics these days. He was from the old school of Labor politicians who had worked themselves up from the—in his case, shearing—floors. He became involved in politics at a time when there was a fierce and palpable class divide in this country. He had a very deep passion and empathy for working people. Throughout his work as a shearer, a unionist, a politician and, finally, as a federal minister, Clyde Cameron was always a committed fighter for workers’ rights. Australia’s working class has indeed lost one of its true champions.

Clyde Cameron passed away on 14 March 2008. Aged 95, he was Australia’s oldest former parliamentarian. On behalf of the government, I offer my sincerest condolences to his wife, Doris, his children, Warren, Tania and Noel, and all the grandchildren. Clyde Cameron had a remarkable life. He made an enormous contribution to Australian politics. He will be sorely missed by his family and friends.