Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I won't take up much of the chamber's time tonight. Rachel, I know you've got colleagues who are still waiting to speak, and I know that many people in this place have spent a lot more time here with you than I have, so I certainly want to give them the chance to speak tonight. However, I do rise to speak, because you have made such a contribution to this place, and I think it is really important that we acknowledge that.

I go back to 2006 or 2007, when I first started travelling to this place. I don't really believe you remember me, but I first met you, Senator Siewert, in my role as policy director for the Pastoralists and Graziers Association. I came to this place as a pretty green individual, in terms of the political process and politics, and I guess I had a rosy-eyed view that everyone sitting on this side—I'm not sure that it was this side; yes, it was the government side then—would be in favour of what I was advocating for and what the Pastoralists and Graziers Association was advocating for and that everybody on the other side would be opposed.

Senator Siewert, yours is one of my very clear memories of that period. You were someone who, because of your background—as a Western Australian, someone with experience in agricultural science, someone with experience out in the bush in Jerramungup in Western Australia and many other places—actually understood the issue. Not very many people in this place actually did. So my first experience of you was of completely turning on their head those green, inexperienced preconceptions about what people in this place would believe. Then I came to the point where I realised that some of the Nationals actually vigorously opposed what I was there to represent, and even many in the Liberal Party were pretty wishy-washy about it all, and that, of course, was the ending of the export monopoly of wheat—the single desk as it was called. But you had a very clear eyed view of the economics of that, and I recognised that maybe we shouldn't always come to this place with preconceptions about what people are going to think.

Then, on entering this place as a senator, on my first day on duty I was given the chair of the Community Affairs Legislation Committee and deputy chair of the Community Affairs References Committee. That says more about the lack of backbenchers in the coalition than it says about my talents and skills! But it was wonderful working with you for the year that I was on that committee. It wasn't a space I was particularly comfortable in. It wasn't a policy area where I had a great deal of knowledge. We dealt with things in the references committee such as the inquiry into transvaginal mesh and the inquiry into mitochondrial donation. Neither of those has been brought up here tonight; clearly, you've worked on a number of inquiries that had a great deal of import. But they were both inquiries where we managed, and you managed as chair of the references committee, to work through a process where we could highlight the issues, come to a unified position on a report and advance the interests of the two groups, in those two situations—and we've heard of many more tonight—who hadn't been heard, two groups whose issues needed to be much more widely ventilated. And, as a result of those two inquiries—two small things for us; two very big things for those people involved—those issues were ventilated, those people were heard and actions were taken.

So I honour you, Senator Siewert. I think you have done an amazing job in this place. I wish you, and your family, all the best for the future.