Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to pay tribute to Peter Alexander Walsh. The Financial Review described Peter Walsh as a Labor authentic. Many people who had felt the sting of Walsh's acerbic tongue might have other views. But Peter Walsh was a rare character in the Senate, berating all opponents but particularly picking on the Nationals at every chance.

The reality of his parliamentary service was left to the coalition's Nick Minchin, who described Walsh as the best finance minister Australia has ever had. We would like to think, of course, that that is up to today. We now have a new finance minister in Mathias Cormann. I can imagine Peter sitting back in the clouds of heaven with a drink in hand and shoes off, ready for tonight's budget and, no doubt, preparing to launch the shoes at the screen. He was credited with getting the budget under control in the Hawke government, a very difficult feat for any government and certainly a feat utterly impossible for the Rudd-Gillard governments. He wrote:

There are, of course, people in parliament, the media and some academics—not to mention the compassion industry—who believe that spending should be higher and deficits don't really matter.

As we listen to the budget tonight, we will be listening to one of Walsh's reforms: the establishing of budgeting over the forward estimates. Walsh was also known for detesting government waste and for his opposition to what he described as 'unscientific Greens'. The carbon tax would, he felt, eventually 'turn farmers into curiosities like the Amish'. TheAustralian editorial described Walsh as 'one of the steady hands and fine minds during Labor's golden years of reform from 1983 to 1996'. And all this from a Western Australian wheat farming background.

Right from the start, as has been indicated before, he declared war on the Country Party in his first speech and absolutely never let up. In his later years, I think he came to some understanding and formed a bit of a truce with Nationals' senator Ron Boswell over their united views on what they saw as a common enemy: the carbon tax. We heard an anecdote from Senator Wong. There is a little segue to that. I think it was Boswell's grandmother giving him a thump in the ear for such an indiscretion that ensured that Peter Walsh's vendetta against the National Party was welded forever.

Peter Walsh entered parliament as a senator for Western Australia in the May 1974 double dissolution and was re-elected for four terms until retiring in 1993. During that time he was Minster for Resources and Energy from 1983 to 84, implementing the petroleum resource rent tax; he was Minster for Finance from 1984 to 1990; as well as being the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Public Service Matters from 1984 to 1987. In his last speech, always the fierce anti-coalitionist, he admitted that he had surprisingly made some friends on the coalition side. He chose his own time to leave parliament, which few of us can hope for. He described the pinnacle of his personal political ambition as the five years he was Minister for Finance, claiming that 'the most satisfying and significant period of my life was the period I spent working with that excellent department'. Peter said that he came into the Senate with the belief that he could make an important contribution to agricultural policy, an area in which, he confessed, the Labor Party had long been ignorant and confused. He found the adjustment of wheat farmer to politician was not easy, to the extent that he nearly gave it away. That was sharply turned around by the events of 1975.

Walsh's valedictory speech was interspersed with heckling as he went out the same way he came in: fighting to the end. He did not just pick on the Liberals or, always his target, the National Party; he also went for his own side, saying:

I feel that Ben Chifley's Labor Party, to which I made a personal commitment more than 40 years ago, has lost its way … Does anyone believe that Ben Chifley would have closed down mines and banned exploration in a sequence of highly prospective mineral provinces, not for any serious environmental reason but to appease the secular religious sanctimony of Balmain basket weavers? Would Chifley have allowed the long-footed poteroo, or whatever fad was in vogue with the chattering classes, to take priority over a million unemployed.

He certainly had a great use of the vernacular. Peter Walsh was a great contributor to the parliament and his country. I extend the condolences of my National Party colleagues to his family.