Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party, Minister for Resources and Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to make a few brief comments this evening about the passing of Lady Flo Bjelke-Petersen. I apologise to the Senate that I was unable to speak on the condolence motion yesterday, but I would like to take this opportunity to put some remarks on the record. As a more recent addition to politics, I did not know Flo all that well but I did campaign with her in my first election campaign in 2013. Lady Flo was at the ripe and vibrant age of 93 and was still a rock star in the brief campaigning events that I did with her. We had a morning tea, which was very well attended, with of course her famous pumpkin scones, and then went down to the Gympie shops, where she was absolutely mobbed. Even that long since she had retired, more than 20 years after she left the Senate, she was still a star in her local community.

I got thinking at her funeral service that I attended a month or so ago about what made Flo like that and what inspired that reaction among people in the brief time I spent with her. During the funeral it became very obvious that, at the heart of Lady Flo's attitude—perhaps more than her love of her husband, her commitment to the state of Queensland and her obvious caring and nurturing of her four children—and at the centre of her life was her Christian faith. Time and time again speakers spoke about the many used Bibles that Flo had destroyed by earmarking and underlining in her constant reading of them, and her particularly kind nature and respect for each and every individual flowed from that strong Christian faith that she lived her whole life. Given the reaction of many at that service and others, as I say, who I have spoken to, she did live up to the challenge of Jesus Christ and did treat everybody in her life with respect, and many returned that to her as well. She also, I think, from that strong faith had a great commitment to serving others in every capacity she could in life, be that as a mother, a homemaker, a senator or a public servant, which she was when she met Joh before their marriage. She seemed to throw herself into everything in life and do it for more than just the pay or the return. Indeed, in her final speech in this place, she mentioned that she'd been a paid servant for the people of Queensland for the past 12 years and that she would now return to doing it for free. And I think she definitely did live up to that throughout the next quarter of a century.

She also had a great commitment to her family and the importance of family in public life. I went back and read her first speech, where she raised an issue, as I did in my first speech, which was the tax treatment of single-income families. She campaigned long and hard for a better tax system for those people. It is regrettable that the situation for single-income families has deteriorated over the years, not gotten better, particularly with the increase in the tax-free thresholds, which means a single-income family on $75,000 a year pays the same tax as a double-income family that earns $175,000 a year. It is not an outcome that I think is, and certainly Flo thought was, particularly fair. In that first speech, Flo was also quite prescient. She heavily supported the development of Queensland as a state increasingly reliant on the resources sector for its economy. She and her husband particularly championed the development of the Bowen Basin, which delivered Queensland a huge economic boon—indeed, a boon for the whole nation that we are still benefiting from today.

She was part of an era of Queensland politics which did deliver significant economic growth and took Queensland from being a state that was thought of as being behind the major states to one of the premier states in this country—indeed, an economic driver for this country. Her passing ends a real era for our state, the Bjelke-Petersen era. Ron Boswell made the point in his contribution after her valedictory speech in this place that, with Flo leaving the Senate in 1992, it ended a period of 47 years in Queensland politics where there was a Bjelke-Petersen in either the state or the federal parliament. It was an amazing era in our state's development, and Flo played an enormous part in that. She will be long remembered by the people of Queensland as a kind, serving and successful representative of our state.