George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is not very often that I rise in this place to express my very strong agreement with the views of the Australian Labor Party. Tonight, however, in a spirit of bipartisanship, I want to express a view I know is shared by not only the Labor Party but also the Liberal and National parties. It concerns the naming of the new electoral division proposed for Queensland. The creation of the new electorate follows a determination by the Commonwealth Electoral Commissioner last year that the representation of the state of Queensland in the House of Representatives should be increased to 29 seats.

In a report published on 23 June 2006, a redistribution committee established in accordance with section 68 of the Commonwealth Electoral Act proposed that the new electorate be located in Central Queensland, bordered in the east by the coast between Gladstone and Bundaberg and stretching west as far as Winton. The largest population centre of the proposed new electorate is Gladstone, a thriving city whose prosperity is built principally on mineral processing. To the north and west, the electorate is to include many of the coalfields of the Bowen Basin, including Blackwater, Curragh and Ensham.

The decision to locate the new electorate in Central Queensland has been criticised by many commentators who believe that the more obvious place for the new seat would be in the south-east. An objection on those grounds has been lodged by the Liberal Party, among others. Whilst not disagreeing with that point of view, it is not the location of the new seat which I rise to object to tonight but its proposed name. The AEC proposes to call the new seat ‘Wright’, in honour of the poet Judith Wright. However, the name ‘Wright’ has very unfortunate political associations in Central Queensland, and this has caused a great many of my constituents from that region to contact me to express their outrage and distress at this recommendation.

The reason for their distress is that the proposed name evokes not the honoured memory of Judith Wright but the despised memory of Keith Wright, the member for Capricornia between 1984 and 1993. In fact, very many people in Central Queensland—everyday citizens who do not read the reports of redistribution committees or even follow politics particularly closely—have assumed that the new seat is to be named after Keith Wright. It is not difficult to understand their error. Federal electorates are commonly named after leading politicians, and Keith Wright was one of the best-known politicians from Central Queensland of recent times, having represented Rockhampton in the state parliament for 15 years before representing Capricornia in the House of Representatives for a further nine years, and having served as leader of the state opposition.

The proposed seat will include some 17,000 electors from Wright’s old seat of Capricornia. I know that the current member for Capricornia, Ms Kirsten Livermore, strongly shares my views on the inappropriateness of naming the new seat ‘Wright’. Keith Wright ended his public life in disgrace. In 1993, he was convicted on six charges of child sexual abuse, including one count of rape, and he was sentenced to eight years imprisonment. The following year, he was convicted on a further three counts of indecent dealing with a girl under the age of 14 years and sentenced to a further 12 months imprisonment. He is a person whom those from both sides of politics would prefer to forget. Yet the Australian Electoral Commission, displaying a quite spectacular lack of judgement and tact, has suggested that the new electorate in Central Queensland be given the name ‘Wright’. The fact that it is intended to honour a different person is not the point; the very use of the same name, in a political context, in that part of Queensland, will inevitably evoke the memory of Keith Wright. It is a ghastly mistake and one which the AEC should correct at once, without a second’s hesitation.

I have no objection to a Queensland electorate being named in honour of Judith Wright—but not in the former stamping ground of Keith Wright. Judith Wright had no special association with Central Queensland. She never lived or worked there. The place with which she is most closely associated is Mount Tamborine, behind the Gold Coast and to the south of Brisbane, where she lived for 20 years and composed much of her best-loved verse. Given the very rapid growth of population in that part of Queensland, no doubt it will not be long before yet another new federal electorate is created in that vicinity, where she could be more appropriately commemorated and where her surname is not the subject of any unpleasant local associations. Be that as it may, the idea of using that surname for an electorate in Central Queensland is inappropriate—indeed repugnant.

Other names were suggested for the new seat. I know that the Liberal Party suggested that it be named in honour of Sir Gordon Chalk, the distinguished Liberal Deputy Premier of Queensland in the 1960s and 1970s who served briefly as Premier in 1968. But it is not common for federal electorates to be named after state politicians, and Sir Gordon did not have strong local associations with that part of Queensland either. I wish to propose an alternative name for the new electorate which would recognise the long and significant association with that area of Queensland of Sir Leslie Thiess. Sir Leslie Thiess, who died in 1992, was, I believe, the greatest industrialist Queensland ever produced. He, more than anyone else, was the person responsible for opening up the coalfields of the Bowen Basin and, in the years after the Second World War, developing the Queensland coal industry from a relatively modest condition to one of Australia’s greatest exporting industries. He was the state’s greatest mining magnate and entrepreneur—the Queensland equivalent of Lang Hancock. He also founded the great construction company which still bears his name, which built many of our nation’s great highways, dams and bridges.

I know Sir Leslie Thiess had a long and on occasion controversial association with the late Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen—a politician I have never admired. He was a great champion of the National Party and, just as I am not in the habit of giving speeches expressing agreement with the Australian Labor Party, nor am I particularly in the habit of immortalising Queensland National Party icons. But, taking political considerations out of the question, there is just no doubt at all that Thiess was the man who, beyond anyone else, built the Queensland coal industry. He was the uncrowned king of that part of my state in which the proposed new electorate will be located, and he was a great Queenslander and a great Australian.

I also propose Sir Leslie Thiess’s name to make a broader point. We in Australia have never, I believe, sufficiently appreciated our great industrialists. Only very few writers—CD Kemp was one of them; Geoffrey Blainey is another—have told their stories. We tell the tales of our explorers, we celebrate our sportsmen, we honour our soldiers, we respect our scientists and we take pride in our performing artists. And yet we barely notice our businessmen. Perhaps this is a hangover from the once powerful prejudice of Australian historians which romanticised trade unionism and was content to treat industrialists as if they were all robber barons. No doubt a few of them were. But the great business leaders, industrialists, pastoralists and miners have never, in my view, been given their proper place in our nation’s story.

Of the 150 federal electorates, only two, Macarthur and Farrer—named after the pioneers of the pastoral and wheat industries—bear the names of those who built the economy upon which our prosperity is founded. Not a single industrial leader of the last century has been so honoured. We must redress that deficiency. To that end, it would be a seemly gesture for the new federal electorate in Central Queensland to be named in honour of the man who built there one of our greatest industries and, more than anyone else, made that part of Australia what it is today.