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

I rise to support this motion of condolence and to pay tribute to the Hon. Peter Alexander Walsh AO. The wheat belt in Western Australia may seem an unlikely place from which to send a Labor senator to Canberra, but the life and career of the late Peter Walsh was not one that was made to fit any established mould. Born in 1935 in Kellerberrin, Peter Walsh was elected to the Senate in 1974. With the election of the Hawke Labor government in 1983, he served as Minister for Resources and Energy and then as Minister for Finance. He relinquished that position in 1990 before leaving the Senate in 1993. In his post-ministerial career, he wrote regularly for publications such as The Australian Financial Review. He died on 10 April 2015 at the age of 80.

Peter Walsh came to Labor from a farm, with a much-detested stint of national service and a loathing of the economic policies advocated by the Country Party defining his politics. Walsh's experience with national service was characterised by what he described as 'its functional uselessness, especially in peacetime; its—admittedly moderate—dehumanising ethos; and its denial of civil liberty'. He went on to say: 'Such beliefs helped to take me into the Labor Party.' In relation to the Menzies government's policy of conscription that was in place in the early 1950s, he also saw it in an economic light, viewing it as 'a serious waste of manpower' at a time of labour shortage. Whilst not opposed to conscription on any grounds, his hostility intensified when conscripts were sent to fight in Vietnam, which he described as 'the most criminally insane war in history'.

In his first speech, he observed:

Perverted logic also enables conservatives to pose as champions of civil liberty and individual freedom while simultaneously voting for conscription, sometimes with enthusiasm and apparently without embarrassment.

On the farming side, he spoke of the positive influence of his father, whose views on taxation in particular were an encouragement in the Labor direction, although neither his mother nor his father were lifelong Labor voters. It was during many hours spent on the tractor at Doodlakine, and following some exposure to agricultural economics through the University of Western Australia in the 1960s, that he came to particularly recognise the detrimental effect the policies of the Country Party had 'not just on the Australian economy and agriculture but on farmers themselves'. Walsh saw that protectionism, through a myriad of policies including bounties, tariffs, import prohibition, quotas and subsidies, was not strengthening Australian industry but causing it to decline, with the costs passed on to those who could least afford them.

Peter Walsh saw the Country Party's policies as being not about farmers and regional communities but about keeping 'bums on Country Party seats'. He described its members as 'frauds and drongos'. Walsh's views were formed well before he entered the Senate. His election to this place gave him an opportunity to advance his case in closer quarters to the enemy. Much of his first speech is dedicated to a repudiation of Country Party policies and attitudes, possibly demonstrating the importance of beginning as one means to continue. He lamented the Country Party's:

… passion for treating symptoms instead of causes and consistently ignoring economic realities, thereby aggravating long term problems.

He said:

… the agricultural policies which [the coalition] implemented when in government, woven as they were from a mixture of romanticism, economic illiteracy and Country Party pork-barrelling, would at best be ineffective and at worst counter-productive.

Perhaps he always had an intuitive reaction against the Country Party. Former Queensland Nationals senator Ron Boswell told the story that his grandmother shared a fence with the Walsh family farm and that, as a child, Walsh wired Boswell up to the spark plug lead on his father's tractor.

Walsh stood as a candidate for the House of Representatives in 1969 and again in 1972, before his eventual election to this place in '74. He was not expecting to come into the Senate then, but the double dissolution election accelerated the timetable and enabled him to be elected. As with all Labor members and supporters, the dismissal of the Whitlam government on 11 November 1975 had a searing impact on Walsh. More than most, he dedicated a significant portion of his energy to pursuing those whom he saw as the architects of this travesty: Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, Governor-General Sir John Kerr, Chief Justice Sir Garfield Barwick and future National Party leader Ian Sinclair. He did nothing to hide his contempt for these figures, and in 1980 he refused to stand when Barwick left the Senate chamber at the opening of the parliament.

Walsh came to the Senate with no ministerial ambition. When he arrived here, he believed that the then ministers and opposition shadows were more experienced and competent than he could ever hope to be. He later said:

It took the simple country boy I was then more than a year to realise that that was not so.

He played a pivotal role on Labor's front bench—first in opposition and then in government. Before the election of the Hawke government, he served in the primary industries portfolio, doing the hard policy yards to build Labor's credibility in this area. This role was followed by finance, trade and national development. After Labor's election in 1983, he served as Minister for Resources and Energy from 1983 to 1984. Although only minister in this portfolio for a brief time, he had a substantial influence on policy, with the legacy of some of his decisions enduring today. The introduction of a resource rent tax on oil production was one of his proudest achievements. Another significant contribution was his announcement of the royal commission into British atomic tests conducted in South Australia and Western Australia between 1952 and 1963. In government, Walsh continued to be a formidable parliamentary contributor, a reputation he had established in the 1970s. Paul Lyneham described Walsh as 'acidic'—and that was on a good day.

But, as Senator Abetz has noted, it really was as Minister for Finance from 1984 to 1990 that Peter Walsh made his mark. He was determined to repair Labor's fiscal credentials and to escape the economic malaise that had enveloped Australia under Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and Treasurer John Howard. He was a central member of an economic team that was not afraid of taking on sacred cows as it wrote a new manual for the Australian economy. Their achievements, and his achievements, yielded an unprecedented period of economic growth for our nation. Walsh was a particularly dogged contributor to cabinet's Expenditure Review Committee. As finance minister he regarded himself as the government's chief 'prosecutor' for savings. It has been said that for every hour that Treasurer Paul Keating spent in the ERC Peter Walsh spent two—others would say even more.

Labor's fiscal record in the 1980s was remarkable. It presided over unprecedented change in the Australian economy whilst turning around the deficit of $5.57 billion bequeathed to it by the Fraser government in 1983-84 to a surplus of $2 billion in 1987-88. Walsh highlighted Labor's 1987 election victory, after the party had pursued vigorous fiscal consolidation, as a particular success. He said:

The 1987 victory confounded the pre-existing conventional wisdom that a government which actually practised fiscal responsibility, closed tax loopholes, desisted—mostly—from pork barrelling and cut perks to the affluent could not survive an election

Walsh entitled his memoir Confessions of a Failed Finance Minister but nothing could be further from the truth. His obituary in The Australian noted:

… Walsh excelled as finance minister in a government that relentlessly and mercilessly cut budget spending to a degree never repeated by any subsequent government and unleashed a reform agenda that gifted 25 years of economic growth and prosperity.

As my colleague Senator Abetz has noted, Nick Minchin when he left parliament in 2011 had been Australia's longest-serving finance minister but Peter Walsh had been its best. In his press release announcing his decision to not stand again for the ministry on 2 April 1990, Walsh stated:

I have been particularly proud of a number of the Government's achievements over the last three terms. Most prominent amongst these are the correction of the Commonwealth's budgetary imbalance, significant improvements in income support for people on low incomes, the recent decision to extend fee relief to parents of children using private childcare, and the introduction of a resource rent tax on oil production.

There have been many opinions published on the contribution of Peter Walsh, following his passing. Some of these have sought to extrapolate policy positions he held onto contemporary political debate. For example, one editorial lauded him as a 'common-sense reformer', one of the 'steady hands and fine minds during Labor's golden era of reform from 1983 to 1996'. These are all sentiments I endorse.

The same editorial went on to talk about the necessity of broadening the consumption tax base. Yet Walsh opposed a consumption tax when it was proposed in the lead-up to the tax summit of 1985. He argued that such a tax was inequitable and that compensating those on low incomes would be all but impossible. Peter Walsh's approach to fiscal policy was not based on rigorous discipline for abstract, philosophical ends. He said he 'came into the Senate with strong and long-held beliefs about a fair society, and the importance of economic efficiency in achieving one'. His approach was always grounded in Labor values.

It is this that distinguished him from those with similar views about government spending and intervention in the economy, such as his friend from the other side of politics John Hyde, and the Secretary to the Treasury, who later became a National Party senator, John Stone. I note all three of these men came from the same part of Western Australia.

On this budget day, let us recall that Peter Walsh was always driven by fairness. He saw the twin policy 'goals of human welfare and economic efficiency were often in conflict and that a final policy is most likely to incorporate a sensible compromise between the two'. He saw the principal role of a Labor government as addressing income redistribution. As Paul Malone said in The Canberra Times in 1988:

Social justice and equity have always been at the centre of his thinking but some found it convenient to drop this reference.

Early in life he recognised there was no fairness for the small farmer who received little assistance from measures that only served to make wealthy farmers richer. The goal of fairness was evident even from experiences in his youth, when he witnessed the way what he described as the 'natural' social order treated some members of society, including the Aboriginal children with whom he grew up. He saw: 'Labor was more likely to correct life's unfair deals than the other side.'

In preparation for Walsh's retirement from the Senate in 1993, The Australian ran the headline, 'Last great hater ready to call in old debts'. This was an accurate statement. There are some—maybe from the other side of politics—who may seek to lay claim to the Walsh legacy now. But the fact remains that he really got under the skin of his political opponents, even to the extent that his valedictory speech was peppered with points of order from those on the opposite side objecting to Walsh's use of his parliamentary farewell to have the final say on some of those whom he had spent so many years pursuing; in this case, Sir Garfield Barwick. Walsh also made clear in his valedictory that fairness could not be achieved without creating the economic conditions that would allow a society to prosper. He drew on the Chifley legacy, stating:

… mouthing Chifley rhetoric is a poor substitute for sharing his beliefs, especially his belief that economic growth, or development as he would have called it, has a paramount role in improving the life of ordinary Australians.

One theme that continued to repeat itself throughout Walsh's life was his contempt for 'rent-seekers'. This began, of course, with the Country Party and continued throughout his parliamentary, ministerial and post-parliamentary career. In The Canberra Times, he was described as 'a scourge of special pleading, bad arguments, intellectual humbug, and assertions associated with apple-pie ideas that were not supported by evidence or experience.' Walsh stored up a special dislike for particular groups of people, including environmentalists, campaigners against uranium mining and what he described as the compassion industry. He used his aptly-named 'Cassandra' column in The Australian Financial Review to provide Australian decision-makers with the benefit of his views on the parliament, economics, immigration, infrastructure, the environment, tertiary education and the Labor Party.

I will conclude by drawing on the words of former prime minister Bob Hawke, in whose cabinet Peter Walsh served from 1983 to 1990. Hawke described Walsh's role in cabinet as being fundamental to every decision his government made. Hawke said:

… it was as Minister for Finance that Peter really made his mark. His highly principled, no-nonsense, and at times, acerbic style made him ideal for this position. In agricultural terms, of which he was well versed, he was able to sort the wheat from the chaff in a very efficient manner.'

As we farewell Peter Walsh—one of the architects of the Hawke government and modern Labor, who never forgot where he came from or his values—we express our condolences to his family and friends, including our colleague the member for Brand, his son-in-law, who I know feels this loss especially keenly.