David Fawcett (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'll be brief. Sterlo, I'm glad you mentioned golf. The word 'golf' comes to mind when I think of Alex and the number of times on a plane from South Australia, the number of times during divisions and the number of times on committee trips that he would talk about golf, his favourite clubs, the things he'd played at et cetera. But it is the word 'gulf'—g-u-l-f—that I want to mention, in three contexts. The first is my first impression of Alex—the gulf between my impression and who he was. We were both elected in South Australia at the 2010 election. We were in the office of the Electoral Commission when they read out the various scripts that announced that we were going to be elected, and I couldn't help but wonder what a dreadful time I was going to have with this grumpy old bloke who seemed so unimpressed by this young Liberal that was in the same room with him. I couldn't have been further from the truth: he ended up being one of my closer colleagues in this place.

The Gulf of St Vincent and Spencer Gulf speak to me of Alex's love for South Australia, the remote and western regions of South Australia, where he spent a lot of time. Some of the most constructive work that I did with Alex was on the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee. We had a significant breakthrough at Port Augusta, at the top of the gulf, looking at how defence interacted with regional communities in terms of training areas and how they actually invested. It was a fantastic committee. As I said before, Alex was not political; Alex was concerned about outcomes. It was really useful to be able to work collaboratively and to actually extract from defence the fact that, when they said local, they meant anything in Australia as opposed to what came from overseas; whereas we thought local was Port Augusta and Port Pirie—the local towns and people who actually drove past the training ground. As a result of that committee, which Alex was the chair of, and the report of that committee, we have seen some significant reforms come about in how defence engages with local communities through its procurement. So there will be people around this nation—architects, builders, fencers, signwriters and all kinds of people—who will get work on defence projects because of that committee which Alex chaired.

The final gulf, I guess, goes to the perception that the Australian people have—the perception that parliament is a place which is all about antagonistic interaction between people just point-scoring, and the perception that you only ever have colleagues here; you don't have friends. Alex was a great example of the fact that, across the political divide, people often do work closer together and build good friendships for good outcomes for Australia. Rest in peace, Alex Gallacher.