Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Dearie dearie me, if we have not just heard 20 minutes of the old class warfare back from the 1950s and, indeed, the 1890s. We revert back to the days of the squattocracy and the early days of the AWU. I do not think there is a person in this chamber who would not agree that workers in those days had something to collect about and to take on the squattocracy and others.

Indeed, this is a little bit off the track of the debate that I was intending to have but, as Senator Fifield knows, my uncle, Mr Viv Daddow, was the General Secretary of the Australian Railways Union in Queensland. A lovely fellow! He was a communist but a lovely fellow. I have to say that in my own family history I have had another member of my family, my extended family, actually mentioned in the Hansards of this august parliament. That was when Mr Menzies referred to my dear uncle, Viv Daddow, as a fellow traveller when he visited Russia in 1949 at the request of the Communist Russian government at the height of the Cold War. I can understand why Mr Menzies and others at those times thought that my uncle was nothing short of a traitor. But I was not around in those days—well, not around in a way that I took notice of parliamentary debates—