Barry O'Sullivan (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today I want to make a contribution to speak about the life and time of a man named Bill Irvine. My home state of Queensland lost Bill recently, aged 74 years, on 17 June. For Queenslanders who moved in particular circles the name Bill Irvine was well known. Bill had a legendary history within the prisons department, as it was when he started, and then the corrective services department of my home state.

I first encountered Bill as a young detective when he took control as the manager, as it was then—it was formerly the superintendent—of what was then the Rockhampton Correctional Centre and previously Etna Creek Prison. I and other police, particularly those in the criminal investigation branch, obviously had a very close working relationship with him, as you might expect with the head of a prison in your region.

Bill had started out in life in the dairy industry in South-East Queensland with his family. And indeed on retirement Bill returned to the dairy industry. Bill's darling wife, Carol, and his daughter, Melissa, are with us today, and I acknowledge you here. They were his great loves along with his dairy cows—and I think sometimes in no particular order, Carol!

Bill started in the police service but then went very early into the corrective services. I can say to you, without any fear of contradiction, that he was a pioneer in that space. Bill Irvine started practices, along with others. He was not on his own. There was a generation, but there were very few men in particular—as it was in that day and age—who revolutionised the way that prisons operated and put in first-principle administrative ideas that helped many prisoners, whose circumstances in life had taken them to where they were, to avoid having recidivist behaviour and to make a proper transition back into normal life and therefore become valuable to the community.

We all know the allegations that sometimes people are treated in prisons in a way that makes their offending behaviour worse. They feel isolated and when they return to the community the community suffers further from their behaviour. But people like Bill Irvine in particular—and I witnessed it firsthand—introduced practices and more importantly introduced cultures into the system that battled against that particular principle. Bill saw that there was integration between his inmates and the communities over time. He, with them, designed programs that meant that they could make worthwhile contributions into the communities near the correctional centres where they were housed and give them a sense of worth.

I could spend all day giving you an idea on how that manifested itself, but the people of my home state, Queensland, will recognise the introduction of prisoners to help in natural disasters, and Bill was one of the pioneers in that area. In fact, when I served with him we had the horrendous floods in Rockhampton in 1991, where he took most of his prison population. For many weeks they served the community of Rockhampton and the district of Central Queensland. Their contributions—quite literally tens and tens of thousands of hours of labour and support—were very much appreciated.

I could stand here and talk all day and not exhaust my contribution on Bill's life, but I want to read a short passage from a note written by a past inmate. He spoke of losing his liberty in about 1980 and of how Bill Irvine administered his incarceration with tough love, which in turn had, he said, contributed to living an honest and productive life. This particular person—and I will change a bit of the figures here because it is not a proposition today to try and identify some individual—went on to be the CEO of an organisation that had over 1,000 staff and a budget of some $80 million. You could not, I suspect, have created a more productive return and transition back into the lives of our communities for someone who had been incarcerated, whatever their offence.

Bill Irvine the person: I can remember vividly—these are my words and not his—him saying to me that everybody has a story. Everybody's life has a story, and simply because they found their way into our custody—some for very long periods of time and some for very heinous criminal offences—Bill maintained the philosophy that every one of them had a story. He understood that people are born good and he had an enduring belief that to the extent that he could make a contribution to their lives while they were in his care, indeed his custody, he would follow his first principle that he could possibly on occasions make them feel good again. No-one should confuse this. Bill was no confused leftie who thought that he could take somebody and take their offending behaviour and convert them overnight just because of acts of kindness. Bill knew full well that what he could give them was respect, an opportunity for them to respect themselves and some of the skills that would allow them to restore their own dignity on a return into the communities. He did that unselfishly, whilst at the same time running prison institutions that had some of the worst of the worst kinds in custody. He treated them with dignity. It was a push-and-pull relationship. If you did not play your part in the relationship, Bill did not spend a whole lot more time on you until you were ready once again to contribute to the partnership that he had created with you.

He mentored so many people, and I am one. There are times when I say things, think things or do things and I just make a mental note that ties me back to the relationship with this great human being, Bill Irvine. But most importantly—and this is the reason that I have chosen to use my senators' speaking time today on Bill Irvine—it would be almost impossible to measure the contribution that he made in the area of corrective services in the decades that he was in positions of power and administration within that service.

Bill was the youngest superintendent, as they were called then, ever to take charge of a correctional facility. From that point forward, he made contributions to the changes in the way they were administrated, knowing that it was his responsibility to have a humane and fair environment for the people who had been placed in his charge by the communities. He made so many contributions that made so many changes. He administered the prison that had the first female prison officers ever to be put into service in my home state of Queensland, and one can only imagine how difficult that might have been to bring about in the early days. He did it very successfully.

To the extent that I am entitled, I say to you, Carol and Melissa, on behalf of all the young men and women that he mentored, prisoners and others alike: he will be missed but never forgotten by those of us whose lives have been touched.