Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I join in this condolence motion with the Acting Leader of the Government, the Leader of the Opposition and the Leader of the National Party. Ron died at age 88. I knew him very well. When I became a member of the party he was already a senator and after the Senate ticket was dissolved and the party split—which necessitated the National Party running a separate ticket—there was a huge commotion as to whether to put up Florence Bjelke-Peterson or follow the traditional ticket. It was a matter of life and death for the National Party at the time. We had to make a decision and the party decided that they wished Florence Bjelke-Peterson to lead the ticket, which was the reason that Ron Maunsell fell off the bottom of the ticket. But he was well liked and he was well known. He was a dairy farmer, a pilot, a flight lieutenant, a grazier and a senator, and all those roles he fulfilled very well.

The Leader of the Liberal Party has mentioned his mother’s story, Suppose I Die. It was a message that she gave to an Aboriginal woman. She told this Aboriginal woman—and they were alone at the station—that she had malaria and she was giving instructions on ‘how to bury me, supposing I should die’. The Maunsells were the absolute pioneers of the North. They were managers of Mulgrave Station, after which they went to another station, the name of which escapes me at the moment. Just before the war, because Ron’s father never had the money to establish his own station, they established a dairy farm at Milanda. From there he went away to war and the book reflects how every time someone went to war the farmers of that age would have a meeting or a party for them in the town hall. He went away and came back and then, as other people did, took an interest in politics. Before I was involved in the party, he was promoted to the Senate where he served for a good 15 or 16 years and served particularly well.

We could not go past this condolence motion without mentioning the night of the long prawns. People have gone into it in a great deal of detail—far more detail than I want to go into. There will always be speculation about whether he knew what he was doing or it was just one of those coincidental meetings where you had a few prawns and a few scotches. Maybe we will just leave that to speculation, but there are many people who thought that it was a well-planned and well-executed campaign to control the Senate, and that is what happened. The repercussions from it were that there was an election, Senator Bjelke-Petersen got a very good vote and the government changed, and maybe you could put it down in some ways to Ron Maunsell.

But he was a good man, a man who absolutely, to the bootstraps, stood for rural Australia, primary industry and all those people who lived in the non-metropolitan areas of Australia. I wish to pass on my condolences to his wife, Joan. I know this will be a very sad time for her, her children and her grandchildren.