Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr President. I rise to concur with the remarks given by Senator Evans, you, Senator Minchin and Senator Brown. If everybody conducted the Senate the way Sir Richard Baker from South Australia, who was a free trader and fought a duel with Kingston, did, the role of the Clerk of the Senate would be far easier. Unfortunately, as it has devolved more into a party political house it has lost the capacity for that proper ventilation of ideas. Maybe that will change and maybe that will be a good thing, but in the interim period it has been very good to have people such as Harry Evans there to reinforce the culture of what a Senate is actually supposed to be and what it is actually supposed to do.

I know I have a dubious honour of having crossed the floor a few times in the coalition government. At those times where there is a lot of emotional weight on you, where there is strong belief that colleagues will rightly put towards you that you might be doing something that is wrong, if you needed to bounce an idea off someone it was the staff in the Senate who could reinforce the proper role. That culture was not just through Harry Evans himself; he has endowed on the other people who work in the Senate that culture to properly display what your rights were and what you had the capacity to do, spelling out the constitutional bases of what you were allowed to do—in fact what there was an expectation of you to do and why you should not feel guilty about it.

Harry has been a great source of unbiased advice and information. I do not know how many people in this chamber have at times snuck into Harry’s office to find out exactly where they stood on a certain issue and what was liable to happen next. We come here and we pass through this place. We have all had a glance through Odgers. At times, if we cannot get to sleep, we might pick it up and read a couple of pages and that seems to do the trick! Apart from that, you need people who are proficient in it and Harry was certainly that.

The National Party has at times had a very delicate position to play because of the intricacies of coalition arrangements and governments and also in trying to deal with the constituent requirements that were made loud and clear to us. Our reliance—sometimes, in a funny way, like the Independents and the Greens—on the role of Harry Evans and those whom he has instructed was extremely important. I hope that the endowment of Harry Evans to the parliamentary process of this nation is continued and that the strident independence that is required of advice is maintained.

I must say I am not going to take as a great loss the removal of the Eureka flag from the Clerk’s office, but that is all a part of the things that made Harry unique, competent and a marvellous asset to this chamber. No doubt Senator Boswell, as father of the Senate, has had the greatest experience of engagement with Harry as Clerk in this chamber. No doubt Senator Williams and Senator Nash have all had those periods of actually going through the intricacies of legislation.

Harry, I note you are a historian and a bushwalker, as Senator Brown said. I hope you have a chance now to spend more time with your family enjoying the more restful and leisurely times that are ahead of you but without completely absconding from your responsibility to at times comment on the way that the process of parliamentary democracy is working in Australia. You know more than most and I am sure there is still a wealth of information in front of us to come from you. Thank you, Harry, and God bless.