Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate records its sadness at the death, on 10 June 2024, of Raymond Steele Hall, former senator for South Australia, former member for Boothby and former premier of South Australia, places on record its gratitude for his service to the Parliament and the nation, and tenders its sympathy to his family in their bereavement.

Some politicians are remembered for their service, others for their accomplishments in high office, major reform or big moments in history. A rare few take on a certain legendary status that encompasses all of the aforementioned. Steele Hall occupies the latter category: a premier, a senator, a member of the House of Representatives, a reformer, a disrupter, a man of principle and purpose, the only Australian to have served as a state premier, in the Senate and in the House of Representatives. It is an honour to move this motion of condolence today for someone I held in high regard, both politically and personally, and I thank the Leader of the Government in the Senate for extending the thoughtful invitation for me to be able to do so.

Like many people with a certain legendary status, Steele Hall had that aura of presence—never superiority, but presence. In fact, the disdain for pomp, circumstance or title ensured the absence of any sense of superiority. There's no doubt, as has been reflected at the state memorial service and on other occasions since Steele's death, that he probably would have hated much of this pomposity in reflecting upon his achievements. Steele's egalitarianism, though, only added to the sense of presence that he brought, because today we pay tribute not to the Hon. Raymond Steele Hall AC, as he could have been, but simply to Steele Hall, as he chose to be and as he insisted on being.

Steele Hall was born in Balaklava in 1928, growing up as part of a farming family at Owen in South Australia's mid-north. He served his nation, state and community as a member of the South Australian House of Assembly from 1959 to 1973, as Premier of South Australia from 1968 to 1970, as a senator for South Australia from 1974 to 1977 and as the federal member for Boothby from 1981 to 1996. Steele's remarkable political career spanned 37 years. Yet it is not longevity—far from it—that he is remembered for but what he did with his many opportunities to serve.

Those opportunities began with election as the Liberal and Country League member for Gouger in 1959 at age 31. In the first of his maiden speeches, the dryland farmer spoke of the importance of water management, arguing on principle, evidence and facts, as was to be the hallmark of Steele Hall. Seven years later, following the election of South Australia's first Labor government in some 27 years, Steele was selected by his colleagues to follow the legendary Sir Thomas Playford as LCL leader. His election as leader was to pitch Steele Hall against Don Dunstan. Telegenic, articulate, principled and passionate, they represented a generational change in political leadership and in politics itself. Together, they were to reform South Australia, leaving indelible changes that, although often attributed to one or the other of them, in many ways were the product of them both. The Dunstan legacy would not have been possible without the principles and actions of Steele Hall, and the same could perhaps be said in reverse.

In the March 1968 election, Steele led the LCL to within one seat of victory. He clinched the support of an Independent and was destined for government. However, Steele had won with just 48 per cent of the two-party preferred vote, and growing public angst was evident at the imbalance of the state's electoral boundaries. So Steele took both to government and to addressing the causes of this public angst with what would become recognised as his quintessential, down-to-earth, get-the-job-done approach. South Australia's youngest-ever Premier was interviewed by the Bulletin in 1968 in his then rented Adelaide home. The Bulletin observed:

… its almost defiant lack of ostentation seemed entirely appropriate for the man, for his manner is neither ostentatious, calculated, nor guarded, but rather frank, blunt and good-humoured.

His was to be a government of liberal social reform in areas of welfare, abortion, Indigenous affairs and lowering the legal drinking age to 18. His was also a government of long-term vision and planning. He developed the Metropolitan Adelaide Transport Study, which preserved land corridors to meet the state's future growth needs. Labor's subsequent abolition of MATS and the sale of this land has long been bemoaned as a missed opportunity for our state. Some of the most recognisable images of Adelaide owe thanks to the Hall government's role in the building of the Adelaide Festival Centre in its iconic location on the banks of the River Torrens. It was a very, and typically, hands-on premier who had been in London, walking along the River Thames embankment, who admired the Royal Festival Theatre overlooking the river. In Steele's words:

When I came back, cabinet and the Adelaide City Council had approved a site in North Adelaide … I walked from the weir to the zoo and decided the theatre should be on the site of the old City Baths … We overturned the decision of the cabinet and the council.

And, of course, today, that Adelaide Festival Centre stands proud as an icon of our city.

Hall did, too, tackle the reform of electoral boundaries, undertaking significant movement and change towards electorates based on one vote, one value principles. In the ultimate act of political courage or self-sacrifice—and perhaps the act he is most lauded for by many—Hall pursued electoral reform, knowing full well that it would make the task of his holding on to government even harder.

Steele also attempted, unsuccessfully, to introduce universal adult suffrage into the Legislative Council. He was stymied, though, by the self-interest and conservative views of the legislative councillors of the day—a battle that was to repeat itself in different ways in the years to come. Steele never saw those electoral reforms, though, as an end in themselves, but, instead, as important democratic principles that underpinned the means to much greater ends. He said: 'I think in South Australia we've been held up too long with worries about how we put people into parliament. I would like to see the right action taken and the issue closed as soon as possible. Then we can get on with the job of worrying about what they do when they are there.'

It wasn't electoral reform that precipitated the downfall of the Hall government, although it made its re-election next to impossible, but it was Murray-Darling water policy—an issue never too far from politics in South Australia, as Senator Wong's amusement indicates and reminds us all. It was Murray-Darling water policy that brought Steele Hall's government undone. Steele stood in support of an agreement with the Commonwealth and other River Murray states in support of the construction of the Dartmouth Dam in Victoria. The then Labor opposition, under Don Dunstan, proposed an amendment on the floor of the house that a dam also be built at Chowilla, in the South Australian seat of the Independent MP and Speaker upon whom the Hall government relied. The Speaker voted with Labor. Hall treated the loss as a loss of confidence on the floor of the house and took his government to the polls. Hall took a position—again, principled: standing by science, engineering and economics. Dartmouth Dam today provides valuable water storage for our country. In contrast, despite Hall losing the election to Labor, Chowilla was never built—and for good reason.

Steele Hall's loss of the May 1970 state election saw him return to the position of opposition leader. True to nature, he continued to argue for reform of the parliament, especially its upper house, as well as of the state and of his own Liberal and Country League. By doing so, he also continued to earn the ire of those opposed to such reform. In seeking to contain the reformist Steele Hall, his party room voted in March 1972 to remove the power of their leader to select the frontbench. Ever the parliamentarian, Hall's reaction was to take himself to the house, seat himself on the back benches and announce his resignation, by stating: 'I cannot continue to lead a party that will not follow.'

Great controversy in the LCL was to follow. The Young Liberals took a motion to the party's governing council calling for Steele's reinstatement as leader. It failed, but only just. The party was riven—but not just on personality, for Steele was seen to embody principle and stand for the modernisation the LCL needed. And so the Liberal Movement was born. Six state MPs joined Steele Hall in forming the party within a party. Others were to follow, along with candidates and members. But the internal reform movement was not long to be tolerated, and, by 1973, Steele was leading the Liberal Movement as an independent political party. As Hall wrote in A Liberal Awakening: The LM Storywhich I sadly left sitting on my desk in the office; otherwise, I'd hold the great prop up—'The aim of the Liberal Movement is to be the spearhead of liberalism in South Australia. We have the most attractive philosophy of any in Australia.' Steele wrote of young people and their call to be free—the idealism he, rightly, saw as connecting an enduring Liberal philosophy with generation after generation. He described the Legislative Council and the conservative members of the LCL within it as being too conservative for our modern way of life.

In seeking to build support for, and the impact of, the Liberal Movement, Steele announced in 1973 his intention to seek a Senate seat. With the fledgling party securing 9.8 per cent of the statewide vote in the 1974 double dissolution, Steele Hall made the first of his interparliamentary moves from the SA lower house to the Australian Senate. Upon his election, Steele was eager to ensure the LM position was not misconstrued on the national stage. He did not see himself as a radical, simply as a moderniser. He told Michelle Grattan in 1974—yes, the same Michelle Grattan in our corridors today—that, 'Only in the context of South Australia would I be considered a radical,' and 'the LM looked forward to being the Liberal Party from South Australia in the future.' The year 1974—what a time to arrive as a minor party senator in the Australian Senate! But Steele, though happy to have won, saw the irony in his victory, having spent much of his career to date fighting with an upper house. Noting that he could in no way claim to be a parliamentary 'maiden', Steele said in his first speech to the Senate:

I find it very ironical to be here in the upper House of the Australian Parliament having come out of a party which has gone through the procedure of self-destruction under the influence of its members in the upper House of the South Australian Parliament.

Though no longer a member of the LCL, Steele still clearly defined himself as an anti-Labor politician, stating:

… our inflationary worries and concerns today can be laid quite effectively at the door of Labor's … expansionary plans.

It almost sounds like today's question time. He criticised policies that destroy incentives and control, rather than encourage, amongst an environment of very high spending and very great economic difficulties.

In four telling events that were to unfold more than a year later in that infamous year of Australian politics of 1975, Michelle Grattan wisely assessed that, 'Hall's own battles with the South Australian upper house reflect his attitude of what is and is not the proper role for the second chamber.' So, despite his opposition to so much of what the Whitlam government did and stood for, Steele was again to stick to his principles and his view on the proper role of the upper houses. As controversy raged in the Senate and opposition parties and forces combined to block supply, Steele Hall refused to vote with the then Fraser opposition in that blocking of supply.

Unsurprisingly, many of the Liberal senators of the day were unimpressed. The late Senator Reg Withers later recalled: 'Hall was very cranky, and the 1975 double dissolution made him even crankier. He was a man with a mission, a crusader.' But even there, the respect was equally evident. Withers also said that there weren't many like Steele Hall left and rated him among the best two debaters in the Senate, alongside an ideological opponent, in some ways, the conservative warrior Ivor Greenwood.

Steele, true to his word, though, would come through those years and chart the course of return to the Liberal Party. Working with most of his Liberal Movement colleagues and negotiating a pathway back, Steele was to oversee reform of the party that he had championed to have reformed and to find a pathway back to merge those non-Labor forces within South Australia. With that, he also saw the time in the Senate coming to a close. He said that he thought the Senate would go to sleep for about six to nine years, and he said, 'I just don't enjoy sleeping politically'. I think he was reflecting on the changed numerical balances with the landslide win of the Fraser government.

So Steele did leave the Australian Senate, in 1977, after just 3½ very tumultuous years. He did so having rejoined the now Liberal Party in South Australia. He did so to contest the Labor-held seat of Hawke, showing Steele's customary self-belief that, even after the Liberal landslide of 1975, he still believed he could win the seat that Labor had held onto. It was not to be but it was in this campaign that a young Liberal called Lynton Crosby first met Steele. As the now Sir Lynton Crosby said at the state memorial service, 'It was the beginning of a lifelong association, starting with politics and ending in friendship.'

Though unsuccessful in Hawke and also in a preselection bid for Wakefield in 1979, Steele Hall remained customarily undeterred. In 1981 he was preselected as the Liberal candidate for a by-election in the seat of Boothby. Again his selection was anything but simple, with Lynton recalling that after seven ballots the selection meeting was so intense and the contest so tight that the chairman, who was no fan of Steele's, initially announced the wrong winner. But Steele endured by one vote and the runner-up, Alexander Downer, had to wait. Steele won the by-election. Peter Bowers wrote in the SMH that when it came to politics Steele Hall just cannot stay away, describing him as an instinctive politician, motivated in the final crunch by a simple instinct that many have recalled and repeated in the weeks following Steele's death: 'When in doubt, do it.'

With his election as the member for Boothby, Steele was set to give a third maiden speech. It was typically down to business. Drawing on his firsthand experience as premier, Steele argued, as he had done since failed negotiations back in 1969, for a fairer distribution of federal road grants. It was quintessential Steele, saying, 'South Australian motorists are subsidising motorists in other states. We want to be treated as Australian citizens, not as citizens of a colonial outpost not yet admitted to the Federation.' I am sure, as a fellow former finance minister Senator Wong would well know, those formulas for road grants and local government funding continue to dog each and every federal government.

In a topic also prescient to modern debate, Steele weighed in on the early debates about allowing uranium mining in Australia. In the context of a three per cent drop in the Labor vote, Steele spoke of the divisions within Labor over uranium mining, including what he saw as their shameful misrepresentation of health and safety advice in a reckless scare campaign that had been waged during their unsuccessful campaign against his election.

Steele was to go on and serve in the House of Representatives as the member for Boothby for 15 years. For a while he was to be in Andrew Peacock's shadow cabinet, but alleged enmity between Hall and John Howard saw Steele Hall return to the backbench. Indeed, during those days on the backbench, Steele took a strong stance against the comments reported of John Howard in relation to Asian immigration. Those stances, those views and his strong stance led to reports of potential expulsion or disendorsement as the member for Boothby. But Steele, of course, fought on, fought the battle and went on to contest more elections. In the years that were to follow he also reconciled with John Howard and became one of the strongest supporters of the Howard government.

Did trouble follow Steele Hall? Sometimes it is tempting to think so when you look back at all of the turmoil in the state parliament during the split of the SA Liberal Party, in the Senate during the dismissal of the Whitlam government, and in the House of Representatives during the tumult of Howard v Peacock and its associated ideological battles. Steele did not just sit in the front row for many of the big moments in political history; he was on stage as a key actor.

Consistent with Steele's view about the appeal of liberalism to younger generations, he was always a strong supporter of, and made a life member of, the Young Liberals. This is how I first met Steele. My first-ever work experience in a political office as a teenager was in Steele's Boothby electorate office. It was old school. Steele may have been a moderniser, but technology wasn't really his forte. I would go on to work with Steele's wife, Joan, in her own successful ministerial career, to enjoy many political discussions in their home and to even house-sit it on more than a few occasions.

I can recall the national Liberal student's conference being held in Adelaide, at one time, when I held the keys to the Hall house. I awoke the next morning to find rising bodies of hungover Liberal students scattered throughout the lounge room with an accompanying array of empty wine bottles and pizza boxes. Somehow, I was invited to house-sit again. Perhaps the fact that we'd won the key votes on the conference floor was all the forgiveness I really needed from the ever-political Hall household.

Although Steele was soon to leave the parliament for the final time, he swapped their historic roles in the years to come to play advisor in support of Joan's career, but he would still step up in the big internal debates of the Liberal Party when required. To see Steele speak to a state council or other major meeting was a display of persuasive force, of deep insight and of wisdom that came from so many years—from so many decades—of political discourse.

That passion and drive for politics can be juxtaposed against the Steele Hall who, in other ways, would happily have opted out. Former premier John Olsen recalled Steele choosing to go fishing on election day. He had a sort of calmness that he could bring to the political battle when required. In those years post politics, Steele would dabble in many different things, including, I fondly recall, the effort to start a seedless watermelon business. With all that science, all that evidence and all that understanding of water, somehow, he embarked upon seedless watermelons in South Australia. It was not to be, that one, but, of course, there were many other great successes.

It is impossible, for me at least, to dive into a political career like Steele's without it prompting some deep questions for yourself. When to fight within, when to dissent publicly, how to lead those of competing philosophies, what price unity and what price victory—the compromises of party politics are not easy. In the main, Steele did fight within. He believed in the value of strong parties of government. But, when the very principles of democracy were on the line, he was willing to take the fight all the way, and he was proven right.

The times have changed, but some of the problems continue to re-emerge in strikingly similar ways. Successful parties need to be ever true to their philosophies, yet modernise the application and presentation of those values to voters. With the share of major party votes declining for both sides of this chamber, we are, arguably, all failing no matter who gets to sit on the government benches. The first of us to find a way to reverse this trend and rebuild a broader base, as Steele Hall always championed, will undoubtedly enjoy a great advantage.

Steele left the parliament still savaging the financial mismanagement of Labor governments—at that stage, in Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria and federally—but also holding the parliament in the highest of regard. He believed that members of the parliament from both sides of the house were always there with high motivations to serve Australians. He disagreed with many and argued intensely, but he always respected the differences. John Olsen said that his principles were always unimpeachable. Fellow former premier Steven Marshall called him a wise, generous and courageous man, who embodied the term 'principled'. Current Labor Premier, Peter Malinauskas, describes Steele's electoral reforms as the bravest political move in the state's history.

Steele was to have one son, Michael, and three daughters, Kathy, Mary and Elinor, with his first wife, Anne, a school teacher. Son, Ben, and daughter, Alexia, were to follow with his second wife, former reporter, adviser and partner in the Liberal movement venture, Joan, who, as you acknowledged, Deputy President, is with us in the Senate today—perhaps appropriately having found her way into the adviser's box rather than the public galleries.

Steele and Joan were to enjoy a 45-year-long marriage. It got off to such a romantic start, with the Australian reporting in 1978 that for their honeymoon they were going to Canberra for the budget session. Despite their common love of politics, Joan described their relationship as a classic case of opposites attract. Joan is crazy for sports, the ballet and loves a big occasion. Steele not so much. Every year he would agree to join her at one Crows game and one soccer match. Infamously, the ballet was only to happen once. Steele's snoring during the performance was too much for Joan to ever risk again.

His has been and was an extraordinary life. Indeed, it is the likes of which we are unlikely to see again in this day and age of politics as it is undertaken, but it is one that leaves many lessons for all of us to reflect upon. He was called and described by some as a 'provocateur extraordinaire'. But again, he was simply Steele Hall who fought to get done what he believed was right. Vale.