Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Minister for Regional Services) Share this | Hansard source

I rise on behalf of the National Party to reflect briefly on the life of Jim McKiernan, a senator I did not have the pleasure to work with but I am sure, having read through excerpts and listened here in the chamber, that there would have been areas of strong agreement with him.

Jim served on a wide variety of parliamentary committees during his time in the Senate, but it was his engagement with the issues of migration which, over time, came to dominate his attention. Being a migrant himself, he empathised with them and advocated for expanding Australia's migration policy to attract people of good standing to Australia. He pursued this cause through the Joint Select Committee on Migration Regulations and its successors, the Joint Standing Committee on Migration Regulations and the Joint Standing Committee on Migration, which he chaired from 1993 to 1996. He was also a member of the Senate legal and constitutional references and legislation committees, which dealt with those issues.

Jim was a prominent advocate both within his party and in public of mandatory detention of unauthorised boat arrivals. He often employed combative language when referring to those who opposed mandatory detention and those acting as advocates for detainees. In December 1992, whilst debating the Migration Amendment Bill, Jim accused a Federal Court judge of bias in his determination of applications and castigated a vocal refugee advocate, who happened to be a Catholic priest from the United States, stating:

If anything grates the public of this country, it is foreigners coming here telling us how to do things and how they could do it better.

At the end of his Senate career, Jim reflected on his work in this particularly difficult area of policy, saying:

I have participated in this area by choice. I could have turned my back on it ... I could have accepted the lie that all persons in immigration detention are refugees or even asylum seekers, but to do so would have been to let the constituents of my adopted country down, and I am pleased that I did not.

Between 1993 and 1994 Jim McKiernan chaired a high-profile inquiry of the Joint Standing Committee on Migration into the length of time that asylum seekers had been spending in detention before their applications were processed. The committee ultimately recommended that the policy of mandatory detention should not be changed, but that greater consideration should be afforded to releasing detainees after six months. He continued to support mandatory detention right up to the end of his career and he saw the Howard government's hard line on unauthorised arrivals as a good deterrent, especially at a time when the number of unauthorised boat arrivals to Australia had increased significantly.

Beyond migration, Jim made contributions to Senate debates on a number of matters, particularly of relevance to Western Australia, including reform of the state electoral system, the mining industry and the corruption affecting the City of Wanneroo council. His Irish heritage, the Northern Ireland peace process and Australian-Irish relations were prominent themes in his speeches. He may have watched with amusement last year's shenanigans around section 44 of the Constitution. Senator Wong briefly touched on this issue. As a National Party senator, I found it quite amusing. Jim had retained his Irish citizenship through both the 1984 and 1987 elections. He accepted that he may have been subject to disqualification had a challenge been mounted at the time—talk about the luck of the Irish—but on the advice of the Attorney-General, Lionel Bowen, he reluctantly renounced his Irish citizenship prior to 1990.

He was also the Deputy Government Whip in the Senate from 1987 to 1991 and the returning officer for the federal parliamentary Labor Party from 1990 to 1996. The latter position saw him preside over and announce the results of both leadership ballots held between Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in June and December 1991. During these contests Jim was a vocal Hawke supporter and a critic of Keating, effectively precluding him from a ministerial post in the Keating-led government.

Senator McKiernan used his valedictory speech to reflect on his personal experience of migration. He stated that his generation of Irish were 'born for the road' and that in his case fortune had smiled upon him in both England and Australia. He described his committee work as arduous and sometimes traumatic as a result of the subject matter, but he also said that found it very rewarding. His fellow senators lauded his contribution to and expertise in the field of migration. They also noted that he had brought a great sense of humour to the chamber and had been one of its outstanding characters, with his unorthodox taste in ties drawing considerable comment.

He went on after public life to make considerable contribution to his home state of Western Australia. On behalf of the parliamentary National Party, we would like to record our condolences particularly to family and friends of former Western Australian senator for the Labor Party, Jim McKiernan.