Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate records its deep sorrow at the death, on 11 November 2020, of the Honourable Dame Margaret Georgina Constance Guilfoyle AC DBE, former Senator for Victoria and former Minister for Finance and Minister for Social Security, places on record its gratitude for her dedicated service to the Parliament and the nation, and tenders its profound sympathy to her family in their bereavement.

Earlier this month, we lost a Liberal Party and an Australian icon. We lost another woman who, in Australia, had made an extraordinary and leading contribution to shape the modern Australia that we live in today. Dame Margaret Guilfoyle was the first woman in cabinet with a ministerial portfolio in an Australian government, the first woman from this place—the Senate—to serve in cabinet and the first woman to hold a major economic portfolio within the Australian government. She was a trailblazer, a pioneer, and her legacy has helped to encourage future generations to follow in her footsteps.

Dame Margaret was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1926, one of three children, to Elizabeth and William McCartney. Two years later, her family packed up their belongings and migrated to Australia, settling in Melbourne. At age 10, Dame Margaret's father passed away, leaving her mother to raise three young children alone. She would later reflect in life that this experience helped shape her views that a woman must be capable of independence, seek education, and that they should have the same political, economic and social rights as men.

Dame Margaret was educated at Fairfield state school and Westgarth Central Business College. By age 15, she was working as a secretary while studying accountancy at night at Taylors Institute of Advanced Studies and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. By age 20, in 1946, Dame Margaret was a qualified accountant and chartered secretary working at the Overseas Corporation Australia, a firm that specialised in promoting Australian exports.

A few years later, on 20 November 1952, Dame Margaret married Stanley Guilfoyle, a fellow accountant, with whom she had three children. The Guilfoyles were active members of the Liberal Party, joining the South Camberwell branch in the 1950s. Dame Margaret undertook various roles within the women's section of the party, where she formed close relationships with Dame Ivy Wedgwood, her mentor, Dame Elizabeth Couchman and Edith Haynes.

Upon her retirement in 1970, Dame Ivy, Victoria's first female senator, encouraged Dame Margaret to stand for preselection to replace her. Dame Margaret followed that advice and went on to defeat 20 candidates and secured the second spot on the Liberal Senate ticket. Nearly all of those opponents in that preselection race were men. Her Senate election bid was successful and, on 1 July 1971, Dame Margaret entered the Australian parliament as a Victorian Liberal senator. In her first speech to the parliament, during a budget debate, quite fittingly, Dame Margaret displayed her financial and economic skills, analysing infrastructure costs and touching on mining industry matters, as well as expressing opinions across matters of the environment, pollution, population and funding for the arts.

Dame Margaret was especially passionate about the arts and a strong advocate for the development of an Australian children's film foundation which would create content that would enrich the lives of Australian children for many years to come. The foundation was established a number of years later in 1982, and Dame Margaret would go on to serve as a director of the foundation for over a decade, from 1989 to 2003.

In opposition, Dame Margaret served in a number of roles, including as opposition spokesperson on the media and on education. A few short years later, in 1975, with the dismissal of the Whitlam government and the appointment of Malcolm Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister, Dame Margaret was made Minister for Education. Through that 1975 election campaign, Dame Margaret handed down the coalition's education policies and, of note, Joan Kirner, the then head of the Australian Council of State School Organisations, would later praise Dame Margaret's policies and the role which they played in supporting sound education policy in Australia.

After the coalition victory in December 1975, Dame Margaret moved to the position of Minister for Social Security, a portfolio she would hold for five years. A reshuffle in 1976 saw Dame Margaret promoted to cabinet and, in so doing, becoming Australia's first female cabinet minister to serve with portfolio. During her time in social security, Dame Margaret is well recorded in history books as having worked hard to shield her portfolio from various spending cuts, engaging in fierce battles with then Treasurer Philip Lynch. Indeed, as she herself described:

I think perhaps the nicest headline I ever had during my time was the one in a Sydney paper that said, 'Minister unhelpful'—unhelpful in cutting the programs that coherently gave income security to millions of people … and maybe unhelpful in trying to persuade other ministers that there were essential matters that needed to be built upon and not destroyed from time to time.

The welfare of women was central to her, and she reminded colleagues often that 83 per cent of the payments made through her then department were made to women. Dame Margaret also oversaw major reform of the National Child Endowment Scheme. Renamed 'family allowance', it was paid directly to mothers and provided greater benefits to lower income families. She also ran the Office of Child Care and presided over a major expansion of government support for preschool, child care and after-school care.

In 1980, Dame Margaret was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Later that year, following the election, she was moved into the Finance portfolio. Having spent the last years defending her portfolio from cuts, she was tasked with the responsibility of looking for savings. As Minister for Finance, Dame Margaret was known for her strong financial expertise and sound understanding of economic matters. She was appointed to the razor gang, as it was known colloquially, and, indeed, was given by the then Prime Minister an expanded role as finance minister in the scrutiny of budgets. Then adviser to Prime Minister Fraser and later cabinet minister in the Howard government David Kemp, a fellow Victorian, noted of Dame Margaret in her role as finance minister in a budget setting and as a cabinet minister:

She had a tremendous gift of making a strong political point very simply. She would be able to convince the Cabinet what would fly and what wouldn't, what they could get away with and what they couldn't, and what debate would be really tough to them if they wanted to take it on.

Dame Margaret was a strong believer in the importance of independence for women, a tenet strongly related to her own childhood experiences. Of note, Dame Margaret made clear that she had no desire to hold the status of women portfolio. She saw from the example that she set for the women who would follow her and the difference that she could make in critical portfolios that those actions would have the greatest impact on future generations of Australian women.

Three years after being appointed Minister for Finance, the Fraser government was defeated at the 1983 election. While Dame Margaret stayed on to serve as shadow minister for taxation, when the coalition failed to win the 1984 election she requested not to be included in the new shadow cabinet and moved to the backbench. In June 1987, Dame Margaret retired from the Senate. In her final speech to the parliament, she noted that when she first entered the chamber there were only two female senators, herself and Dame Nancy Butterfield, who represented my great home state of South Australia. Dame Margaret and the groundbreaking women who served before and with her championed the equal participation of women in this parliament. In her own words:

Equal participation of women in the Parliament, in the whole of community life, can only lead us to a better understanding of humanity and to the fulfilment of the aspirations that we would have for a civilised society.

In 2019, the Senate reached gender equality in terms of representation. In part, this was achieved because of trailblazing women like Dame Margaret, who noted that it was important not that she was the first woman to hold a number of roles but that she was not to be the last to have the opportunity. It would be 30 years after Dame Margaret left the finance ministry before another would step into that portfolio—the Leader of the Opposition in this place, Senator Wong.

After her retirement from politics, Dame Margaret served in a number of roles, including chair of the Judicial Remuneration Tribunal, deputy chair of the Mental Health Research Institute and the Infertility Treatment Authority, president of the Royal Melbourne Hospital board of management and a member of the National Inquiry into the Human Rights of People with Mental Illness. In 2005, Dame Margaret was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia for significant contributions to public life in Australia in support of hospital and health administration, social justice and education, to young people as a role model and to the Australian parliament. Dame Margaret holds a special place in the history of our nation. She was known as a formidable and capable cabinet minister who was dedicated to improving the lives of everyday Australians. In the words of the late Susan Ryan, another pioneer and advocate for equality who we also lost this year:

If anyone's performance should have established that a woman's place was in the Cabinet, it was Margaret Guilfoyle's.

To Dame Margaret's husband, Stan; her children, Georgina, Anne and Jeffrey; and her grandchildren, Hugo, Jennifer, Oliver and Elizabeth: on behalf of the Australian government and the Australian Senate, we offer our deepest condolences.