Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I rise on behalf of the opposition to express our sadness and our condolences at the passing of Mr Harry Evans earlier this month. At the outset I want to extend our sympathy to the family of Mr Evans and to those closest to him as they mourn his loss. As we know, Mr Evans was a private man but a public figure—indeed, an extraordinary parliamentary officer over a career that began in a parliamentary library in 1967 and continued in the Department of the Senate from 1969.

As Senator Abetz has said, his length of service as Clerk of the Senate over 21 years, commencing in the Old Parliament House and concluding here in 2009, is extraordinary. No individual has served the Senate longer, not even those such as John Ernest Edwards or James Rowland Odgers, who are recognised in our most significant publications—and, presumably, with changes to legislation in the late nineties to limit the tenure of the Clerk to one single 10-year turn, this record is unlikely to be surpassed.

In 1946, journalist Warren Denning wrote:

Without its permanent administrative officials, Parliament would be a rudderless ship, a ship of state with many captains, lots of passengers, but no crew.

Mr Evans was a peerless administrative leader in his time, a man of great integrity who guided senators in the Senate as he navigated many challenges throughout his career. He was well known as a champion of the rights and legislative powers of our chamber and our parliamentary democracy. He recognised the role that the Senate can play as a crucial check in a system where the executive has enormous power, against which the Senate is sometimes the only constitutional safeguard; and he helped the Senate discover ways in which to assert its rightful legislative authority against executive overreach. He had a strong appreciation of the intent of the framers of the Constitution for the role and function of the Senate. In his parliamentary paper in 2009 on The role of the Senate, he said:

Governments are supposed to be accountable to parliament, and through parliament to the electorate …

Under the cabinet system, however, governments normally control lower houses through disciplined party majorities. Lower houses are not able to hold governments accountable, because governments simply use their majority to limit debate and inquiry in relation to their activities. Indeed, governments use their lower house majorities to suppress and limit accountability. They thereby seek to conceal their mistakes and misdeeds and prevent the electorate passing an informed judgement.

In this situation, upper houses not controlled by the government of the day are the only avenue for accountability to parliament.

He went on to say:

A reviewing house without power over legislation would be ineffective. This is why the framers gave the Senate full legislative powers.

In the face of strong views occasionally expressed about the Senate and its role by leaders of my own party and by others which are well known, Mr Evans was always stoic in his defence of this chamber, its rights and its responsibilities.

As Senator Abetz has said, one of Mr Evans's most substantial contributions was through the editing of seven editions of Odgers' Australian Senate Practice, beginning in 1995 with a substantial revision of this work. The fact that it continues to be the authoritative publication not just on Senate procedures but on foundation principles of the Australian Constitution—of particular relevance to this chamber—and federalism, bicameralism and the separation of powers is a tribute not just to the efforts of Harry Evans but to his knowledge and interest in the ongoing exposition of the place of the Senate in our country's system of government.

In a debate in the other place during budget deliberations in 1932, there was some discussion about the salaries of high-level public servants. In the context of that debate, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Sir Littleton Groom, recognised the high degree of scholarship required of the Clerk, saying:

Even persons eminent in the legal profession would not attempt to pose as experts in parliamentary practice and procedure.

Fortunately, Harry Evans was not only a man of a high degree of scholarship and an expert in parliamentary practice and procedure but also a gentleman.

I count myself as extraordinarily privileged to have had the opportunity to know Harry Evans professionally over his last seven years in the Senate, after I took my seat in this place in 2002, and I, like many others, sought his advice on many occasions. Any person who served as a senator during his period as Clerk—and there were over 300 of us; 304, I think, in his 40 years of parliamentary service—would recognise that as a parliamentary officer Mr Evans was without peer. So too would the staff of senators and of the Department of the Senate who worked with and alongside him. Those who have arrived here since 2009 would recognise the legacy of his own work as Clerk that lives on not just in his writings but in the standards of competence and professionalism he instilled in those who continue to serve us today.

We mourn today and honour the passing of one of this country's greatest servants of democracy. Harry Evans exemplified the high standards and ideals of this Senate. We honour his service to this chamber and, through it, to the nation and the Australian people. We reiterate our sympathies to his family.