Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Very gladly on behalf of the Greens and senators generally I wish to acknowledge a remarkable servant of the Senate, servant of the parliament and servant of the people of Australia in Harry Evans. I draw to the attention of the Senate the origins of the position of Clerk, which goes back to 1315 in the UK. The description of the requirement of the position of Clerk was someone who could read and write to inform the largely illiterate membership, fulfil the need to keep a minute record of decisions and proceedings and inform members of what was going on. We may be a little bit more generally educated these days but I think everybody in this place who has had contact with our Clerk or his wondrous staff would acknowledge that that repository of information is crucial to the functioning of this great Senate of Australia.

The Senate is mentioned in the Constitution before the House of Representatives. It is the backstop of the people and repeated polls show that it is very popular as a people’s house and a check on the executive. The House of Representatives was the people’s house but in these days of majority government it is the executive that reigns in the other place and the people’s representation that reigns in this place. The keeping of the Senate, that honoured role which goes right back to Federation, has been in admirable hands through this Clerk through these last 21 years.

It has seen the Senate grow in its ability to be a check on an ever-stronger executive and it has seen the Senate able to use a committee system in the service of the people of Australia in a way that has never been witnessed in the previous history of the constitutional process of this great and long-living democracy. The Clerk, Harry Evans, if I may quote him, in a recent Senate occasional lecture in this parliament, finished with:

We are now told that we live in an age of crises, economic and environmental. In crises the greatest danger comes from those who claim to know all the solutions and who demand immediate implementation of them. Such people are likely to be found holding executive office. The greater the crisis, the more likely it is that mistakes will be made in attempting to deal with it, and the greater the need for scrutiny of proposals based on sound information. The legislature should provide that scrutiny. The Australian Parliament cannot be well equipped to provide that scrutiny when one House is not permitted to make its own inquiries into significant issues and proposals, and the other struggles to make up the deficiency against executive resistance. Parliamentary reform is never more necessary than in this age of crisis, and further subordination of Parliament never more perilous. The proponents of openness and scrutiny should be more militant than ever before.

That from a great Clerk of a great house of parliament in a great nation. I laud this Clerk, Harry Evans, as ‘not a public servant but a servant of the Senate’, as he would say himself. He has a passion for constitutional history and probity. A string of prime ministers, at least two previous to the one now incumbent, might like to have sacked him, but he was and is the champion of the Senate as that extraordinarily important balance to the executive that this nation requires.

I go to only one instance of many in which I am indebted to the Clerk, his advice and his defence not of myself but of the Senate. That was after I spoke up in a joint house sitting. The Clerk had warned about joint house sittings; they were constitutional no-person’s-land. I was ostensibly expelled with fellow Senator Nettle after speaking to the visiting President of the United States. The next day an order went around that staff were to prevent us two senators from entering the next joint house sitting, when President Hu arrived. This Clerk, in defence of the Senate, made it clear that that may have constituted an assault on a senator and that no senatorial staff should be involved in such a process. It happens to be that—quite illegally, I believe—we were prevented from entering that joint house sitting, but in the heat of that very contentious moment it was this Clerk who defended this Senate and its senators, and I will always be one to recognise not just a judicious mind and a great defender of the Senate but a Clerk who had the courage to make decisions which would hold this Senate in good stead against decisions executive or otherwise in the parliament or elsewhere in the country according to the constitutional basis upon which the Senate was created for the people of Australia.

The Clerk should be chairman of the Senate, say our standing orders in the prologue to the appointment of the President. On a number of brief occasions this Clerk has been chairman, but in fact we have here not a chairman but a champion of the Senate second to none. I note that in his CV it says his interests are history and bushwalking. I say to Harry Evans: you are part of this nation’s history, and a very great pride may you take in your role in this nation’s history and, in particular, the history of this Senate. I wish you, on behalf of my colleagues all, a great deal of bushwalking at your property out near Braidwood and a great deal of communing with nature—I find that a very powerful and potent elixir for life. We wish you many, many happy post-Senate years, but I am sure you will be contributing to this Senate through both your past activities and your future wisdom in commenting or writing about matters until the last day you draw breath. For that, we wholeheartedly thank you.