George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate records its deep sorrow at the death on, 24 August 2017, of the honourable Dr Douglas Nixon Everingham, former Minister for Health and Member for Capricornia, places on record its gratitude for his service to the Parliament and the nation, and tenders its profound sympathy to his family in their bereavement.

Douglas Everingham, or Doug as he was always known, was born on 25 June 1923 at Wauchope on the North Coast of New South Wales. As a young boy, Doug showed early signs of academic promise. He won a scholarship to Fort Street High School in Sydney and later to The University of Sydney, where he studied medicine. It was during his university days that a fellow student, one Lionel Murphy, first sparked Doug's interest in left-wing politics, encouraging the young medical student to join the Labor Party. This was a marked departure from the politics of his conservative Christian upbringing, and helped to sow the earliest seeds for what would be a noteworthy career in federal politics.

Doug Everingham graduated as a doctor in 1946 and moved to Queensland to complete his internship at Rockhampton Hospital. It was there that he met Beverley Withers, a young nurse whom he married in 1948 and with whom he would have two daughters and a son. For Doug, it was the beginning of a life-long affinity for the communities of Central and North Queensland. Although his early medical career took him back to Sydney, by 1956 he had returned with Beverley to his wife's home town and had established a family medical practice.

Doug Everingham's first foray into politics came in 1963 when he ran, unsuccessfully, as the ALP candidate for the safe Country Party seat of Dawson. His opportunity arose four years later following the death of his friend George Gray, the member for the neighbouring seat Capricornia. Doug Everingham nominated for Labor Party preselection to stand as the Labor candidate at the by-election. From a field of eight preselection contenders, he emerged as the victor.

The Capricornia by-election on 30 September 1967 was a significant by-election at its time. Following the Corio by-election that had occurred three months earlier, it sealed the control over the Labor Party of the recently elected federal leader Gough Whitlam, who would become the party's 11th leader by a close ballot on 9 February of that year, following the landslide election victory of the Holt government in November 1966. The effect of the Corio and then the Capricornia by-elections was to consolidate Whitlam's control of the Labor Party and his vision of a future direction from the days when the party was led by Arthur Calwell.

The by-election itself did not pass without controversy. Doug Everingham was a keen polemicist and an outspoken advocate of left-wing causes. His letters to newspapers were as prolific as they were provocative, much to the consternation of the leadership of the Labor Party. We all know colleagues in our own political parties whose exuberant zeal sometimes causes us concern. There was, perhaps, good reason why the Labor Party were concerned at the tone of some of Dr Everingham's correspondence. During the course of the campaign it emerged that in April of 1967 he had penned an article for the Communist Party of Australia's magazine, Discussion, exploring the common ground shared by communists and humanists. In the midst of the Cold War, when public debate over Australia's involvement in Vietnam was beginning to intensify—but, as I say, only less than a year after the Holt government was re-elected with a resounding majority—this evidence of his supposed pro-communist inclinations, notwithstanding that they were concealed in the blandly named journal Discussion, was seized upon by both the Liberal Party and the DLP.

Gough Whitlam's former speechwriter, Graham Freudenberg, in his famous biography of Whitlam, A Certain Grandeur, recalled his account of the Capricornia by-election. In his recollection, Doug Everingham's choice at the preselection was against the express wishes of Mr Whitlam, who had personally intervened unsuccessfully on behalf of another contender. But in the face of sustained criticism Doug Everingham remained unrepentant: 'I write to all sorts of way-out journals,' he reflected afterwards—'or at least I did. If I had known what was going to be said about the article during the Capricornia by-election, I would have been more prudent and put a pen name, like Mr McMahon, on it.'

In spite of the controversy that this episode aroused, Doug Everingham won the by-election convincingly, with a swing of more than one per cent to the Labor Party, defeating the Liberal Party's Frank Rudd, who happened to be his brother-in-law. As Freudenberg writes, 'What the southern experts, both Liberal and Labor, did not know was that Everingham, who had treated hundreds of patients in the Rockhampton area free of charge, was widely respected for his integrity and even loved for his humanity,' so that when the federal Treasurer, William McMahon, influenced by poor advice and worse champagne, spoke at a Liberal Party in Rockhampton of the dangers of 'atheistic communism'—which was taken to be a thinly veiled swipe at Dr Everingham's atheism—both the Anglican and the Catholic bishop issued statements defending Everingham as their friend and 'a better Christian than many claiming the name'.

After his successful election in September 1967, in his maiden speech and in many speeches thereafter, Doug Everingham spoke passionately about the need for affordable health care and of the then novel policy of complete health insurance for all Australians. He also spoke extensively in condemnation of Australia's involvement in Indochina, partly in tribute to his friend and predecessor George Grey, who during his time as the member for Capricornia had been particularly outspoken on matters concerning foreign policy. Doug Everingham was re-elected as the member for Capricornia at the general elections of 1969, 1972 and 1974. With Labor's return to power at the 1972 federal election, he was appointed Minister for Health in the Whitlam government. His three years in that role saw among the most significant reforms to health policy in Australian history. As well as making a very significant contribution to the implementation of Medibank and the widespread expansion of Australia's public hospital system, Dr Everingham was particularly proud of the central role he played in the establishment of the Australian School Dental Scheme, which he described as potentially one of the most important achievements in public health in Australia. Tragically, Doug's career of significant achievement was punctuated by a personal tragedy with the death of his son Stephen in a motor accident outside Brisbane in 1972.

Although Doug Everingham's parliamentary service is understandably best remembered for his accomplishments in the health portfolio, his political interests spanned an extensive and at times eccentric array of issues. A humanist and a pacifist, he was a committed proponent of one-world governance and remained long after his retirement from parliamentary life one of Australia's highest profile critics of water fluorination. He also gained fame as an ardent campaigner for radical spelling reform, on one occasions opining in the Courier Mail that he thought there to be no good reason known to dictionary makers why the spelling norms of Dr Johnson or Will Paxton have been clamped, as if forever, on our living language.

In other policy arenas, posterity has proved kinder to Doug Everingham's lifetime of advocacy than in relation to his critique of fluorination. A vocal critic of smoking, he led the push within the Whitlam cabinet to curtail tobacco and alcohol advertising and was known during his time in parliament to affix anti-smoking stickers to the cigarette vending machines which, in those more indulgent times, populated many a corridor around Parliament House.

He lost his seat to the briefly named National Country Party at the double dissolution election of 1975, which saw the end of the Whitlam government, but he subsequently wrested back control of Capricornia two years later, at the 1977 election. He retained the seat until his retirement from elected office in 1984. During those years in opposition, Doug Everingham served as opposition spokesman on Aboriginal affairs in northern Australia from December 1977 until March 1980 and as opposition spokesman on the Australian Capital Territory and veterans' affairs from March 1980 to November 1980. He then left the front bench. In 1982, he served as parliamentary advisor to the United Nations General Assembly.

A person of immense character and commitment and a pleasing tincture of eccentricity, Doug Everingham was truly a man ahead of his time. His progressive ideals helped to build so many parts of modern Australia, most particularly its universal healthcare system, to which Australians of all political persuasions today subscribe. His achievements in public health policy, and health insurance in particular, will stand as his monuments. On behalf of the government, I offer our gratitude for his service and our condolences to his family.