Nick Minchin (SA, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

It is both with pleasure and pain that I rise tonight to honour the service of Senator Chris Ellison. It is with great pleasure that I take this opportunity to pay tribute to his contribution to Australia, to the Senate and to the Liberal Party of Australia. But it is also with pain, because I am losing from this place a good friend, an ideological soul mate and an invaluable member of the coalition Senate team.

Chris and I have had parallel careers in this place. We came into the Senate together as members of the very distinguished class of 1993, including as it does Senator Chris Evans and Senator Judith Troeth. Indeed, of the nine senators who first took their places on 1 July 1993, we are the only four still here—soon, regrettably, to be three. Chris and I were both appointed parliamentary secretaries and then junior ministers in the first term of the Howard government. Indeed, given John Howard’s remarkable obsession with his ministerial code of conduct in our first term, a number of ministerial opportunities opened up, of which Chris and I were happy beneficiaries. That is probably the only reason we got there.