Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

It's my honour to contribute to this condolence motion and to share some reflections, just briefly, on some of the qualities that I admired most about Peta Murphy: her clarity, her intelligence, her kindness and her creativity. I want to start with the first, which is clarity.

I first met Peta when I was a new senator and was undertaking work on the gender pay gap and the underlying things that would need to change about our workplaces to address it. Of course, Peta, as a staffer to Brendan O'Connor, was immensely skilled and able to assist enormously with the policy tasks. She understood the industrial situation and she understood the law, but, most importantly, she understood deeply the needs of the people we were trying to assist, and it characterises everything Peta did. She had great clarity about who she was trying to help, why we were here, the purpose of government and her task in representing those who had little power and who most needed those of us with access to power to assist them and support them to reach the potential that their lives offered.

She was, as others have commented, incredibly intelligent. She was widely read. She was witty. She had an incisive capacity for analysis and the courage to speak up when she saw something that she thought required further interrogation or questioning. But she never used that intelligence to seek to dominate or embarrass other people. Her purpose in utilising her huge brain was to understand better, to find better solutions and to engage with the problems that we were here to fix. That kindness was evident in the way she engaged with her electorate. She respected them. She respected every person that she sought to represent, and they offered her respect in return. I had some wonderful meetings in her community with the wide range of community groups that she regularly brought together to be in dialogue with one another about the challenges that they collectively sought to meet in their community and the ways that they could work together to do that.

It really just leads me to my final observation, which was her immense political creativity. Peta entered the parliament wanting to make politics better. She wanted to restore faith in the way that politics worked, and Senator Wong spoke about that in her contribution. In practical ways, she thought very, very carefully about what that would mean on a day-to-day basis in her electorate, and she engaged regularly in very interesting ways with her community, bringing people together, trialling new ways of connecting with people and looking for ways to reinvent the practice of politics so that her community would truly know that they were represented and they could access their representative whenever they needed to and in ways that suited them.

She was an incredible talent. She formed deep relationships with her peers in the class of 2019, and the people who have spoken from that class have spoken so movingly. I offer my condolences to all of you in particular. But, more generally, this is a terribly sad loss for the country, it's a terribly sad loss for Labor and it's terribly, terribly sad for her beautiful husband, Rod; her parents; her sisters; her staff; and all of the people who loved her. I offer my condolences to them also.