Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to make some quick comments about Malcolm Fraser and to get on record my sincere gratitude for the work he did to prevent whaling. I thought I would start with my earliest memory of politics, which was in grade 1 when I lived in Karratha—walking down the street in the tail edge of a cyclone to collect something for my mum and dad and looking at a car with my head down and seeing a sign on the back of a car saying: 'Shame, Fraser, shame.' When I got home about 20 minutes later I asked my mum and dad about it and, although my memory is not very clear on exactly what they said, they did try to explain to me what was going on in politics at the time. I enjoyed meeting Malcolm Fraser here in the Senate chamber last year when he was here for the migration debate. I went over and shook his hand and said how grateful I was for everything he was doing.

The real reason I would like to very quickly get on record is the magnificent work that Mr Fraser did and the courage and the leadership and the conviction he showed to not just pass a law in this country that banned whaling, which was a very controversial thing to do at the time; but he also set up Australia's role in the International Whaling Commission as a nation that showed leadership on this issue thereafter. I wanted to quote from an interview he did a long time ago on this with The Age, with Melissa Fyfe, the environment reporter, back in 2004. She said he was being very modest in his interview. When she asked him about the decision to ban whaling 25 years ago, he said: 'Well, it barely raised a sweat.' And the reason he said it barely raised a sweat—and I want to put this in perspective—is that in 1979 conservation issues themselves were not high on the government's 'to-do' list.

A ban on whaling was opposed very, very strongly by the Western Australian government, particularly by Sir Charles Court, who is a man I grew up around the corner from in Perth, Western Australia. I certainly remember the very powerful figure that he was, but the Western Australian government lobbied very hard to prevent whaling from being banned. But Mr Fraser said it did not raise a sweat. It was not an issue for him. He said the key reason was that if a decision is right, you do not worry about it and you do not really feel the pressure. I think that is something that we would all understand being in here in this place with the decisions that we make sometimes. If a decision is right, you do not have to worry about it. So he said it really did not raise a sweat.

I think it is really important to point out that it was his daughter that actually raised the issue for him. She was only 11 at the time, she had just come back from boarding school—her name is Phoebe. He says in his 2010 book, Political Memoirs, that he recalled the day in 1977 when she came home from boarding school deploring whaling's barbarity and demanding to know his opinion. Didn't he think whaling was cruel and should be stopped? A little later in 1977, with that year's election looming, the evangelically pro-whale organisation, Project Jonah, presented him with a petition signed by 100,000 Australians asking for an end of whaling. But he said that, thanks to Phoebe, they were already preaching to the converted because he already found whaling abhorrent. In a 20 March 1978 speech, he announced a government inquiry into whaling:

I abhor any activity that might threaten the extinction of any animal species, particularly when it is directed against a species as special and intelligent as the whale.

Later on, legislation was passed in 1980: submission 3759 had a draft bill for the Whale Protection Act, which became law in June 1980, and that act contained a provision for the repeal of the Whaling Act 1960. It is fascinating to compare the legislation from 1960 which, to quote Malcolm Fraser, 'essentially treated whales as an unfeeling commodity like coal' to what he put in place in 1980, talking about the majesty of this animal and our close connection with this animal in nature.

As I said earlier, this really set the agenda for Australia in the International Whaling Commission and for later people such as Labor's Peter Garrett, who took action on this in the international whaling court. If Sea Shepherd's founder, Paul Watson, does not mind me perhaps pinching some of his prose—I understand there is going to be a state funeral on Friday for Malcolm Fraser—on Friday for Malcolm Fraser, ex-Prime Minister, the church bell rings while out to sea 'the great whale sings'. I say that because, just recently off the coast of Tasmania, for the first time ever, we have had a pod of blue whales there for nearly three weeks. I think that is fantastic—and good on you, Malcolm, for all the work you did.