Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

Today we mourn a man who was universally regarded as one of nature's gentlemen—softly spoken, somewhat diffident in manner and completely decent. I speak of the Hon. Ian Bonython Cameron Wilson AM. He was part of the unique group of Oxbridge educated small 'l' South Australian liberals who were highly thought of across the political spectrum.

Ian Wilson grew up in a family which believed in service to the community and the nation. Their service over several generations is such that their family history is interwoven with South Australia's history. Ian was born in Adelaide in 1932. He was the son of Sir Keith Wilson, a prominent UAP and Liberal parliamentarian and close friend of Sir Robert Menzies, who actually proposed the toast for the then young Ian's 21st birthday and was part of the inspiration for Ian's career in politics. It is worth remembering that Ian's father, Keith, served for 20 years in the federal parliament—six of them in the Senate—during which time he also served in the Western Desert during War II. One trusts that pairs were not an issue!

Ian's mother, Lady Betty Wilson CBE, was a granddaughter of Sir John Langdon Bonython, owner of the Advertiser and a member of the federal House of Representatives; she was also a great-granddaughter of Sir John Cox Bray, South Australia's first native-born Premier. She was heavily involved in the Women's Council of the Liberal and Country League. Ian's great-grandfather was a delegate to the pre-Federation constitutional conventions of the 1890s. So Ian certainly had politics in his blood from both sides of his family.

He went to St Peter's College in Adelaide—where an ancestor, the Reverend Theodore Percival Wilson, had been the first headmaster—and afterwards went on to Adelaide university, where he graduated in law. While at university in the early 1950s, Ian became very involved with reorganising the Young Liberals. He was the first South Australian president of the Young Liberals, which had waned during the war years, when so many young men were absent. He read for his Bachelor of Civil Law at Magdalen College, Oxford, as a 1955 Rhodes scholar from South Australia before being called to the bar at Gray's Inn. Back in Australia he worked in the family law firm, Genders Wilson and Bray, as a solicitor and was also on the board of the ALMA shoe company, later Clarks shoes.

In 1958, at the time of the split of the DLP from the Labor Party, Ian stood for the seat of Adelaide but lost as a result of the leakage of DLP preferences. On his father's retirement, in 1966, after winning a plebiscite—and here is a number—of the 10,000 party members in the Sturt electorate, Ian Wilson retained the then enormous seat for the Liberal Country League. Following a disadvantageous redistribution, he lost it by about 500 votes to Labor in 1969—to a colourful waterside worker, 'Stormy Normy' Foster. Not to be outdone, he ran for Sturt again in 1972 and beat Norm Foster by 2½ thousand votes, at a time when Gough Whitlam was winning everywhere else. He held the seat as a marginal seat thereafter.

As a backbencher at the old Parliament House, he shared offices with one John Winston Howard for a period of 18 months. According to Ian, they got to know each other quite well and respected each other, as they both strongly supported the Liberal cause. Ian respected that Mr Howard was more on the conservative side, and Howard respected that Wilson was more on the small 'l' liberal side of the broad church known as the Liberal Party.

Ian became a minister in the final years of the Fraser government. From March 1981 to May 1982, he was the minister for Home Affairs and the Environment. During his ministry he oversaw the World Heritage listing of the Great Barrier Reef over the initial opposition of the then Queensland Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen. During this time, in his ministerial capacity, he also went to Cocos (Keeling) Islands to tell John Clunies-Ross that his rule of the islands was at an end. He protected the red crab on Christmas Island. One wonders how all these things occurred without the Greens, but a lot of things did occur, and Mr Wilson has a great record. He also oversaw the National Gallery's transition from collecting towards exhibiting. Given the intense effort he had put into the home affairs portfolio, Ian was disappointed to be so quickly elevated to Minister for Aboriginal Affairs and Minister Assisting the Minister for Social Security, which occurred as a result of a reshuffle. Like his father, Ian had an abiding interest in social security. In his maiden speech in 1967, Ian made the following remarks, which are relevant today:

For the last eighteen years a Liberal-Country Party Government has implemented policies which have permitted the economic growth of the nation. The growth rate has outstripped the rate at which the population has increased, with the result that the standard of living has improved significantly. The real value—the purchasing power—of wages increased and there have been improvements in ancillary benefits such as long service leave and annual leave.

… The steady yet dramatic economic progress which has been made has enabled the Government to embark upon the development of a comprehensive social security programme.

Ian then went on to detail that program before stating:

Members on this side of the House believe in adequate provision not only for the aged, the invalid, the widowed, the sick and the unemployed, but also for the children.

Ian was particularly interested in the impact of taxation on families and throughout his career was an advocate of income splitting, which was eventually included in the coalition's 1984 tax policy. It would be good if that could be revisited, but I doubt it will be.

During the Hawke-Keating years, Ian played an active role in the Martin banking inquiry. Ian Wilson was a classic 'small l' or moderate liberal, who played a prominent role in the formation of the South Australian Liberal Movement. Indeed, for some years he used his influence to contain the Liberal Movement within the confines of the South Australian Liberal Party, before it eventually separated. He described his political philosophy as follows:

I was a Liberal rather than a Conservative. But I believed that the Liberal Party of that period, as of even earlier periods, had to be a broad based party in circumstances where its members had the opportunity within the party to express their views and they would win some arguments and they would lose some arguments. But the give and take then was a strength that the party had.

In 1993 Ian Wilson retired from parliament, having lost the preselection for the seat of Sturt to one Christopher Pyne. The circumstances by which Ian lost the preselection for Sturt have become the stuff of folklore, and I will leave that issue to others. The then South Australian state director of the Liberal Party, Nick Minchin, noted that Ian had:

… served the party with great distinction for 23 years, including two years as a minister in the Fraser Government and has a great and distinguished record of service to the party and the country.

After parliament, Ian returned to his career as solicitor. He was a highly respected solicitor and became involved in a number of charities. He also chaired the company managing the heritage listed Adelaide Arcade. Continuing his interest in the arts from when he was minister, Ian became national chairman of the May Gibbs Children's Literature Trust. The North Sydney Council wanted to use May Gibbs's harbourside home, Nutcote, at Neutral Bay, as a museum rather than as a facility that encouraged today's writers for children. Ian took over the corporate structure to help run the May Gibbs Children's Literature Trust, which has given children's writers the opportunity to have a quiet creative time in studio apartments around Australian capitals, despite funding being cut by the Australia Council.

In 2002 Ian Wilson was made a Member of the Order of Australia. Significantly, the citation on his award read 'for service to the community through a range of literature, health, social welfare and cultural organisations.' In other words, his AM was not for his role as a parliamentarian but for his service to the community in the areas that were mentioned in the citation. Indeed, over his life Ian was involved in many charitable organisations, including as Vice President of the South Australian Good Neighbour Council, Vice President of the British and Foreign Bible Society, Chairman of St Matthew's Home for the Aged and President of the Australian Birthright Movement, now the Lone Parent Family Support Service. In 2001 Ian was awarded a Centenary Medal for his 'service to public life as a federal member of parliament and minister'. Ian was a committed Anglican.

I am told that Ian Wilson deliberately elected not to have a state funeral, believing that those who wished to honour his life would attend regardless. And, at his funeral on 10 April in Adelaide, St Peter's Cathedral was packed. It was attended by many of his former colleagues from the Labor Party as well as the Liberal Party, including his contemporary Chris Hurford. Ian's life was, and is, an inspiration to others. He was a man to whom service to others came naturally.

I could not end this condolence speech without paying a special tribute to Ian's wife of 52 years, Mary. Mary helped Ian doorknock his electorate. She looked after the family while Ian was at parliament, taking the whole family to Canberra when parliament sat during school holidays. By all accounts, she is a truly exceptional woman. Our condolences extend to Ian's remarkable wife, Mary, to his four children, Keith, Richard, James and Nigel, and to their families. The coalition mourns a truly great Australian whom we are proud to call one of our own.

Question agreed to, honourable senators standing in their places.