Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise on behalf of the Australian Greens to pay tribute to the life of Bob Hawke. Bob Hawke was a hero in our household. My grandfather idolised Bob Hawke. The names Whitlam and Hawke were etched into my consciousness as a young kid learning about this thing called politics. Here was my grandfather fresh off the boat with a young family, from postwar Italy, trying to start a life here—he came here with nothing but a suitcase—and here was this bloke, Bob Hawke, who spoke to him and so many families like him, and migrants from many different countries. They knew that this was a man who loved them, who cared for them and who respected them. He was a man who valued them and wanted them to be part of Australia's future.

In some ways, Bob Hawke was part of the reason I am here. I remember, as a young kid, that my uncle—the youngest of the children and the bloke who introduced me to bushwalking and to loving the Australian environment—decided to pack up his bags in Brunswick and head off to Tassie, because he wanted to go and save this wild river called the Franklin. He was a hero to me. I remember arriving at the house in Brunswick. The Northern Leader was open on the table and there was a picture of my uncle, who had just been arrested in the campaign to save the Franklin. There was no-one cooler than my uncle for doing what he believed in. My grandmother wore black—I reckon that was the day she started wearing black—and I have a memory of seeing her with her rosary beads, praying to God to rescue my uncle's soul for doing what he had done and bringing shame to the family.

It was Bob Hawke's leadership on so many issues, particularly on the environment, that was so inspiring to many of us. He was arguably the Prime Minister who had done more to protect our natural environment than any Prime Minister before or since. Just think about his legacy: Kakadu and the Daintree tropics in the north; the moratorium on mining in Antarctica; Shark Bay in the west; the Gondwana rainforests in the east; Uluru and Kata Tjuta in the Centre; and, of course, Tasmania's wilderness and World Heritage listings. They were all part of what Bob Hawke did to leave this country a better place.

I was looking at Bob Hawke's Our country our future: statement on the environment. I'd recommend it to anybody who cares about the future of our planet. The way he talked about the environment is interesting. This could come straight out of a Greens' policy statement: 'The environment ultimately sustains all life on earth. Plants and animals provide us with food, clothing, shelter et cetera.' He talks about the world's resources as 'finite' and 'ecosystems around us with a limited capacity to regenerate after damage'. He talks about the social and economic benefit of preserving the environment. And he goes on to say:

While plants and animals are useful we, as their custodians, have a responsibility towards their preservation. Plants and animals have intrinsic value in and of themselves and many people believe that, as such, they have a right to survive and that we have a moral obligation to preserve them.

That's leadership; that's tremendous leadership. He talks about the threats to the environment: 'We've got little time to spare. The cumulative effects of past mistakes in our care for the environment are still to fully emerge, and to proceed with ignorant and unthinking ways risks future irreparable damage. We can't continue to squander the earth's assets.' He was prescient on climate change as well. He talked about what needs to be done to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in his statement from 1989; the scope to enhance energy efficiency and energy conservation; the role of carbon dioxide emissions in Australia and what we can do to reduce them in the transport sector, from motor vehicles; the objective to reduce transport energy consumption per capita through public transport and land use planning—all things that we're talking about today. He was a champion for the environment.

Some people have highlighted the parallels between the campaigns on the Franklin and, of course, the campaign that we're fighting today to stop the Adani coalmine from going ahead. If you look back on the Franklin River, it's true that there were divided views within all parties, voracious and greedy corporations desperate to see that project go ahead and a lot of local conservative politicians telling those out-of-towners to bugger off, but you had a growing grassroots environment movement committed to the preservation of Australia's precious places. What separates those issues is 35 years and the courage and leadership of Bob Hawke.

The 1983 election that brought him to power saw all seats lost by Labor in Tassie, yet on the night of the election, after acknowledging his win and the hard work of his colleagues, the next people he acknowledged were Tasmanians. This is what he said to them: 'I want to give you, the people of Tasmania, the confidence that my government will be particularly concerned with the issues that were close to your mind when you cast your vote. My government will go ahead and honour the promises that we've made, but the dam will not go ahead—you are concerned, legitimately, with issues of power and employment—and I've made it clear that we'll meet your concerns. So, from this moment, I commit myself to an undertaking, a task, of national reconciliation. I ask that you give us your trust and cooperation and, if we work together, there will be no bounds as to what we can do together.' He showed leadership, he sought to unite, he didn't equivocate, he worked hard to provide people with alternatives and he succeeded. It was Barry Jones, Bob Hawke's science minister, who told Fairfax that he'd 'brooded a lot' about the likelihood of such interventions now. He said: 'If there's a comparable situation to the Tasmanian dam dispute in 2019, would we act the same way that we did? I’m not sure that we would.'

Bob Hawke was a leader. It's important to note that he was a leader but also that he was surrounded by giants. He showed leadership at a time when leadership was necessary. He worked with his colleagues, a talented group of individuals—one of the most talented cabinets in Australia's history—and he was able to bring out those talents. He was able to work with people; he was a consensus builder. He made sure that each and every one of those individuals shined.

It's important to note too that his legacy is not one that has been universally embraced. He made some very important economic reforms, and they were tough reforms. He introduced capital gains tax, he tightened up fringe benefits and he introduced the shock absorber of a floating exchange rate—all important for Australia's future economic prosperity. But I suppose some of the gloss for many people started to wear off in successive governments with the privatisation of public assets and the deregulation of the finance sector and so on. Ultimately, it was many of those reforms that led many people against some of them—my family, my friends, the people involved in the textile industry and manufacturing—when we saw the unleashing of Reaganomics and Thatcherite policies, here what we called economic rationalism. We know that they tilled the ground for some of the reforms that we've now seen—the privatisation of our health system through private health insurance, the inordinate amount of funding that goes to private schools at the expense of public schools. Having said all of those things, his legacy nonetheless is an overwhelmingly positive one.

In today's political environment, it's hard to see how someone like Bob Hawke would be able to rise to the heights that he was able to when you consider his life before politics, when you consider that right now everybody's deeds and every personal misstep is captured with digital fingerprints forever and dug up by political dirt units once candidates are nominated. You wonder whether Bob Hawke would have been Prime Minister today, and that would have been a great loss to our country.

He left an important legacy for Australia. He warned us of the threat of global warming years before coal, oil and gas companies marshalled their resources to fight the science and to create fear within our community. Let me close by putting the question he put to all Australians on World Environment Day in 1989. He said: 'Are we looking after it? We don't inherit our planet; we borrow it, not simply for ourselves but for our kids and our grandkids. The greenhouse effect has the potential to change, in a single lifetime, the way all nations and people live and work. Care for our planet as you would care for our children. Their tomorrow depends on our actions today.' He was impassioned, heartfelt, and he spoke with meaning.

Who can forget the leadership he showed when it came to fighting apartheid in South Africa or the tears that rolled down his face and the snot that poured out of his nose when he stood up with that impassioned and heartfelt speech in response to the massacre in Tiananmen Square, where he said to the country, without talking to a focus group, without seeking to consult with the bureaucracy, 'We will give you refuge in our country.' He showed leadership. He showed the country what it was to be somebody who cared, who felt deeply. He would argue his case regardless of the consequences because he believed in the power of people, he believed in uniting this nation, he believed in caring for those Australians who chose to make this place their home, and he believed that we are custodians of this precious, small, blue speck floating in space and that it is our moral duty to preserve it and to leave it in better shape for future generations.

Vale Bob Hawke. We give our sympathies to all of his family and friends. We are a better place because Bob Hawke was Prime Minister of this country.